Might I suggest that your sample was a bit narrow? I can remember being pretty troubled at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (yes, I'm that old), seeing that our city was thought to be in range of said missiles by the chart on the front page of the paper.

But from then on, most of the scare stuff seemed to be from the disarmament advocates--think of Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth and the nuclear winter it envisioned. Yes, there were the survivalist nuts, but there weren't that many.