Edit: I know, through the eyes of an 8 year old. My city was a target of the U.S. nuclear missiles, so the I had the same fear. Saw nuclear exposions all the time in my dreams.
Do you think, that having been through Cold-war era conditioning and propaganda, that you're sort of sensitized to the "modern Russia tropes"? I ask because, well Russia seems like a shithole. A sort of noncompete on the global scale outside their natural resource stockpiles, but the US demagogues seem to like to point fingers there and I see it as more or less a propaganda tool. I suspect it's aimed at the generations that experienced the cold war, but I'm inducing hard.
The situation changed ever so slightly after 1985, culminating in dissolution of USSR. Good riddance!
And now the same forces - or new incarnation of the same forces - are working again to create that image of an absolute enemy - on both sides. It's just so easy.
The parent commenter relates that they were 8 years old and not a missile identification expert at that age; but stressed about by something that actually was a realistic fear.