In early May, all 160 million Americans participated in a national air-raid alert, the seventh since U.S. officials had acknowledged that the Russians might be capable of raining nuclear warheads down on the Western Hemisphere. As before, schoolchildren crawled under their desks, Wall Street closed, television screens went blank, and American leaders set examples by scurrying into underground bomb shelters. The consumption of electricity in New York dropped 90 percent for half an hour.
