Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Duck and Cover

re: Duck and Cover
TB — (archived)

Never had such drills myself. "Duck and Cover" has long been a source of immense amusement to those who wisely realize that a nuclear exchange would destroy the Milky Way galaxy, but in real life, it can make the difference between safety, or serious burns and glass damage from a hit some miles off.

Same for fallout shelters, or even a basic knowledge of fallout defense methods. It's a big joke nowadays, but they could have made the difference between life and death for the vast number of Americans who would not have been in the direct blast range of a nuclear strike.

There was a television movie called "Testament," where a mother and her children somewhere in Marin County dealt with a nuclear attack that took place many miles off, but still generated fallout. The abysmal ignorance of everyone in the film had me tearing my hair out. Nobody in the movie had the slightest idea how to deal with fallout. People wandered around the grounds of a huge brick school, totally unaware of its potential as a shelter. No precautions were taken at all ("Mommy, my plate is dusty." "Just wipe it off, dear.") When her kid died hemmoraging, I almost had no sympathy for her character at all.

We used to have a working civil defense program in this country. Networks of shelters and supplies that would have been a great deal of use in many emergencies other than nuclear war, such as storms, outages, other forms of attack, or nuclear power plant accidents.

These shelters were abandoned by the government since the idea that a nuclear war could be survived had for some bizarre reason been equated with the idea of being "pro-nuclear-war."

At least the destruction of our civil defense system let me score a nice set of radiation detection equipment as surplus.

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