People were much more paranoid in the U.S. than now in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

Why?
Because millions had died in the U.S. already mostly from starvation and malnutrition and drinking wood alcohol and going blind and dying because of Prohibition when that happened because most people couldn't afford regular drinking alcohol at the time. Then starvation from the Great Depression, Deaths from World War II, The Korean war, so people were really paranoid and everyone had some form of PTSD after surviving The stock market Crash, The Great Depression and World War II and the Korean war. So, as a child in the 1950s I really had to be careful of veterans from World War II and their flashbacks, murders, suicides etc. I was very aware my survival was at stake as a child when I was around most veterans. IF they were officers often they were more mentally disciplined but this didn't mean they might not go off on you and beat you up as a child verbally or physically in any given moment. So,  I often didn't feel safe like I do now as an older adult and wasn't sure how long I would be able to stay alive in the 1950s and 1960s. I was 12 in 1960 and 14 during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and then 15 when Kennedy was killed mostly because of the Cuban Missile Crisis and soon after they deep sixed

Nikita Khrushchev - Wikipedia

within  year or so of Kennedy's assassination which I think was directly related as well.

So, rightly so, people were more paranoid than now. For example, I met one army soldier who said to everyone regularly, "I could kill all of you right now and not bat an eye" to his friends and relatives. He was the only one of his company of men who landed in Italy to survive all the way to Germany and to come home. So, literally ALL his buddies in his company were dead.

One of the reasons why J.R.R. Tolkien wrote" Lord of the Rings" is that literally everyone of his friends died in World WAr I but him. So, writing "Lord of the Rings" was his therapy so he didn't have to kill himself from his memories of World WAR I. 

So, what I"m saying here is that with the exception of veterans from the World War II, the Korean WAr, and the Viet Nam war and from Afghanistan and Iraq no one in the U.S. is very realistic about just how bad things can get in life and more especially in warfare.

Most people in the U.S. live in a kind of Disneyland world where intellectually everything might be real but who haven't really experienced the true suffering of thousands to millions dying horribly around them while they are close to starving to death.

Not having experienced these things yet it makes people here very unrealistic except maybe in an intellectual but not emotional or physical way.

So, unless they see millions die in reality they aren't going to actually get it at all.

And this is now the danger of the unrealistic nature of Americans who have been safe here in the U.S. since the civil war tore our country apart then in the 1860s.