Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Duck and Cover

No duck, no cover, but some interesting books.
podrock — (archived)

During the Cuban Crisis, I was an infant. Being a military brat, I lived on base. My father knew how close it got.

But at all the schools I attended on military bases, never a duck and cover drill. The big civil defence sirens went off every month and sometimes at random, we knew where the shelters were from the signs everywhere, the commissary sold things in bulk civil defense tins, but was never a big deal. Early years are full of memories of sheltering from tornados, running to the basement in PJ's in the middle of the night.

The book was good though. I can't remember the exact military title, or the manual number, but it had all the information you'd need to open wide the eyes of a young boy who found it in his father's study and read it cover to cover. I laughed reading about drinking the toilet tank water but grew somber when looking at the maps with the colored circles, each color representing how many dead, how much destruction from the center of the blast. I realized too, being on a military base, which color belonged to our house, to my school.

In high school, my political science teacher, a former officer, had us read "On Thermonuclear War" by Herman Kahn, but I didn't see Dr. Strangelove until college.

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