The Now for the whole run of this program we've danced around the question of whether the Cold War was a war.

Was it? It wasn't, I guess.

But for me at least growing up in its midst, there aren't many comparables by which to describe it to people who weren't there.

It wasn't peace time exactly.

Not when there were no fewer than 57 card-carrying communists in the State Department.

Was it an uneasy piece?

I'm not sure.

Un uneasy is quite the right adjective to describe the effect of being told throughout your childhood

that you might, on any given afternoon, have 20 minutes to live.

Now the Cold War was something different, and as it fades into the shadows of some implausible

prehistory I find myself clutching it its pant cuffs, begging it to show itself.

Did I dream the whole thing? Is this the snuffelupagus we were warned

again and again would seem real to us but would leave no trunk prints on the tablecloth? Is the Cold War just a melody from a dream that you

wake up to record on your nightstand tape recorder only to find in the morning sounds

like the baseline from the theme from Kojak.

The Cold War is our three feet of snow that we waited through every day to school and back,

yet despite it being in a handful of books on the four pages covering everything from Hitler to

Obama that you cover in the last week of school before summer, I'm horrified to find it already

sounds not quite true. It's not like the Cold War was the only time

in history that an apocalypse was pending. It's been on tomorrow's weather

forecast for Jerusalem for 2,500 years.

It's a big part of the enticing sales pitch of certain religions that the end of the world

...