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In late 1967, just three years after graduating from Western, Air Force Capt. George “Sam” Sevier was assigned to fly missions under Operation Chrome Dome, the airborne alert program that kept B-52 bombers armed with nuclear weapons in the air around the clock. If a surprise Soviet nuclear strike destroyed U.S. jets and missile silos on the ground, the U.S. could still unleash a counterattack with its airborne nuclear weapons fleet.

"The concept was to make a surprise attack just as costly for the Soviets as it would be for the U.S," Sevier says.

Sevier was his crew's electronics warfare officer. If war broke out, he was to jam enemy radar, allowing the big bomber to penetrate enemy defenses and drop its nuclear weapons on predesignated targets.

Fortunately, there was never a call to execute a retaliatory strike. Any call to action could have meant the unthinkable - nuclear war. Even if the airborne crews were able to carry out their missions, they would probably have had a heavily damaged, radioactive country to return to. "Nuclear missiles would have devastated our nation," Sevier says.

This was life in the Cold War, a 46-year standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during which both sides maintained the weaponry to blast each other and much of the rest of the world back to the Stone Age.

The standoff began in 1945 when Sevier was 9 years old. As World War II ended, Soviet troops forced the nations of Eastern Europe under its control, triggering the Cold War's beginning.

On August 29, 1949, four years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan, the Soviets exploded their first nuclear weapon at a test site in Kazakhstan. From that day until the Cold War ended in 1991, the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever present.

But Sevier knew little of this history as he grew up in rural Deming, in Whatcom County. "I wasn't up on the Cold War any more than any other 18 year old," he recalls. "I was more interested in cars and getting a job."