My childhood in the 1980s Czechoslovakia was literally nuclear. One of my earliest memories from the kindergarten was a gas mask drill. Please don’t laugh, it’s a serious business — us in the Eastern Block lived in constant fear that the big bad western capitalists start dropping bombs on our heads. The least you could do was to train your children in the art of putting on a gas mask in under ten seconds. I can still feel how horrified I was when I couldn’t make my gas mask fit — the teachers explained that if the mask doesn’t fit, I’m dead. A dubious victory was mine years later, when I discovered how “helpful” a gas mask actually is in nuclear war, and concluded that the teachers with their gas masks properly fitted were dead too.

When the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster happened, I was apparently poking around in an improvised sandbox — an old tyre lying flat on the ground and filled with some sand — in the back yard. The authorities naturally informed the public that it was perfectly safe to let your children play outdoors, that nothing was the matter and that the socialist society was as awesome as ever. My parents were understandably upset years later when they discovered that the least they could’ve done — but didn’t know that they could — was to keep the kids indoors and feed them some iodine tablets.

Iodine tablets were always the staple of our first-aid kit. There was another sound reason besides the fear of nuclear war — we happened to inhabit the high-risk zone in the proximity of a working nuclear plant. When I climbed a small hill behind our house, I could watch the eight cooling towers of the plant steaming on the horizon. Having been born in the shadow of the cooling towers, I never feared them. I thought the regular distribution of iodine tablets to replace expired ones was unnecessary humbug — unless a dose of iodine will raise you from the dead after you’re swept from the face of the earth by a nuclear plant exploding practically in your back garden.

There were many advantages to my nuclear childhood. No, I don’t glow by night — and if I do, that’s not what I mean. Have you ever been inside of a nuclear plant? Schools in the area went there for excursions each year. The plant was by far the most advanced feat of technology in the country — there was even a 3D cinema for visitors, showing films about nuclear physics. The first time I watched a 3D film was in a nuclear plant, long before 3D cinemas became commonplace. If the aim of the nuclear plant tours was to make people lose their fear of atomic energy, it worked. I don’t think I would’ve wanted a non-nuclear childhood — that would kill me by boredom sooner than the nuclear plant would.