<Under current conditions, where the most likely sources of massive radiation are nuclear accidents, dirty bombs, or a few scattered warhead strikes from either terrorists or an accidental launch, there is no excuse for the "doomsday" scenario any more, and people need to be properly educated, just as they are for earthquakes and other emergencies.

I'll willingly stipulate that I bought into the non-survivability of nuclear war, and the equaly compelling notion that life after one would not be worth surviving for - despite hopeful Reagan Era novels like David Brin's The Postman, and Warday by James Kunetka and Whitley Strieber (yeah, that Whitley Strieber...), or juvenile fantasies like Farnam's Freehold. True to my birth cohort, I found myself (morbidly?) fascinated by the topic, and spent no little time learning. From where I sat, the arguments seemed pretty convincing:

-- Human nature would escalate any 'limited' use into a paroxysm of vengeance; or

-- Mutually Assured Destruction (which was, after all, official Defense policy for a number of years) meant exactly what it said; or

-- Launch On Warning (a latecomer to the scenario array) merely accelerated MAD's timetable; and

-- MIRVed submarine launches from the coasts reduced even the LOW decision time from minutes to seconds... and left the target populations with no time at all.

Contrary to many people's tendencies, I didn't apply a Left/Right political filter to the input, preferring instead to look at war-fighting strategies in terms of their results, and aftermaths in terms of severity. I kept always in mind that hard data were scarce, atmospheric modeling was no more accurate than the 5-day weather forecast, and the psychology of the button-pushers was completely unpredictable. I read the original "nuclear winter" paper in Science (subscriptions were affordable to the educated layman back then), and granted it status as another plausible outcome among the many possibilites. (The Pentagon and The Kremlin did too, btw, which explains the Reagan/Gorbachov Reykjavic Summit.)

It's already a truism - or, to be more accurate, an Article of Faith - that the next use of nuclear weapons will not come in what, with cynicism acknowledged, might be called a 'traditional' manner. And there's no arguing with the common sense of your statement quoted at the top of this post. Knowing what to do - as well as following instructions - will be crucial to those downwind and downstream of Ground Zero. If, as you claim, the anti-war movement actively worked to suppress the continued dissemination of shelter construction plans and related items, that seems to me counter to their cause. It seems more likely to me that the pro-war movement - which is to say, the Vietnam Era defense budget - sucked up the available funding. Nevertheless... what I posted above (and I apologize for baiting you with the phrase 'Big Lie') was in response to this:

Civil Defense in America died out. Not so in many other countries, both Communist and free, which continued intensive civil defense programs and shelter construction.

My point was, and still is, that the US never had the kind of CD program you lament as having been killed by The Left. The condition of the designated public shelters I described in my previous post was not due to lack of maintenance - they never were proper shelters, from the day those barrels first arrived. National Civil Defense in the United States has only ever been "every man for himself."

By the way: the Truth is still Out There.