Some years ago, when I was editor of a now-defunct newspaper in El Paso, Texas, my wife and I bought a house with a deteriorated, spider-filled, filthy, underground fallout shelter in the backyard. It made me shudder, not because of its appearance, but because it represented past fears of the Soviet Union perpetrating radioactive death with nuclear bomb explosions. The Soviet Union’s description? Dictatorial, imperialistic, communistic, death-dealing and evil. The context was the Cold War that did have hot-and-bloody outbursts. It was between the Russian-led Soviet Union with its allies and th…