The Gemini Effect

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The extermination of the human race began in a salvage yard.

Under the left rear fender of what remained of a 1962 Chevrolet Nova, to be exact. A rusted shell of what was once called a Chevy II — a “Deuce” to those who loved them — built at the old Kansas City GM Leeds assembly plant during the last week of November 1961. Wagon Train was America’s favorite TV show in the winter of ’61. On the radio, Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John” replaced Dion’s “Runaround Sue” at the top of the Hit Parade. Roger Maris, Mickey Mantle, and the rest of the New York Yankees had won their nineteenth World Series by beating the Cincinnati Reds 13–5 in game five.

The world turned, counting down.

In the weeks and months before Chevy’s newest grocery getter rolled off the assembly line, the world witnessed Berlin split in two by concrete barricades and concertina wire, and heard news of a 58-megaton Soviet nuclear device — Царь-бомба, the Tsar Bomb — detonated over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Eleven months later, grainy reconnaissance photos of Soviet missile sites in Cuba would take the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

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