the USSR acquired intercontinental nuclear missiles only in the late 1950s, and the new possibility of instant global apocalypse surely helped predispose a critical mass of American kids to become hedonists, renegades, utopians, and/or nihilists, at least temporarily. But that was only a hypothetical war. When the actual war came in 1964 and 1965, just as the oldest boomers turned eighteen and nineteen, it triggered the full-scale countercultural reaction—then kept fueling it as the U.S. deployment in Vietnam increased from a few thousand advisers to 445,000 troops in less than two years, and
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