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Sadly Mistaken. On the other hand, if Khrushchev expected that he could bully and stampede the free world into a state of defenseless fear, he was sadly mistaken. "We must not be cowed," said Secretary General Shigesaburo Maeo of Japan's ruling Liberal-Democratic Party, "but must reaffirm our determination to continue resistance against such inhuman conduct." Said Philippines President Carlos P. Garcia: "If Russia does not stop her defiant disregard of the feelings of entire humanity, she will inevitably reap what she has sown." Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke for the entire free world when he said: "If Khrushchev's reason was to spread panic among our people, then he has signally failed."
Nowhere was that truer than in the U.S. itself, where Americans, far from being frightened or cowed, were fighting mad, "When a rattlesnake is loose in the house." said the Dallas News, "you get down your gun and go after it." Said Robert J. Holton, 55, a Columbus, Ohio, grocer: "We should start testing some of our own bombs just as close as we can to Russia, and let them have some of that fallout." "Among the people I've talked to," said University of California Professor Harry B. Keller, "there's a hardening of attitudes. Now that the Russians have done their bit, people tell me, it's time we got cracking ourselves—even if it means atmospheric testing." Detroit's Police Commissioner Herbert Hart felt that the Russians may have done the U.S. a service: "I believe that the Russian superbomb angered our people and succeeded only in placing them more firmly behind any decision that President Kennedy might now have to make."
Radioactive Clouds. What frightened the world more than the specter of Soviet military might was the reappearance, after a three-year absence, of a much-feared, fiercely debated and vastly misunderstood phenomenon: radioactive fallout. With radioactive clouds from the Soviet tests spinning around the earth, fallout was on almost everybody's mind. U.S. housewives worried that their milk might be contaminated by the tests or that their children might get cancer. The Finns worried that their reindeer meat might become radioactive when reindeers munched on contaminated lichen. Great Britain set up plans for rationing baby foods and dried milk if radioactivity became too high. And in India, some people stopped buying chicken and other fowl because they feared radiation poisoning.