I think there was also a very real sense of dread during the Cold War when people genuinely feared that the world’s superpowers would just destroy each other. They needed the superhero fantasy to escape from reality.

Interesting enough, the Soviet Union did not have a superhero comic book culture. In the Soviet Union, heroes are just normal people who went beyond their duty and sacrifice themselves for the greater good, not people born or engineered with god-like superpowers.