Yes - I clearly recall how we were instructed to hide from Soviet 57 megaton nuclear bombs by hiding under a $3.50 wooden desk.
Duck And Cover (1951) Bert The Turtle Civil Defense Film
Didn't do any of that in school because it was a little late for it (1970s) and if you stood on the roof of my school you could see the B-52s sitting on alert about a mile away. Not much chance a desk could stop that fireball.
“Duck And Cover (1951) Bert The Turtle Civil Defense Film”
Yeah, but Bert always left out that critical part about kissing your ass goodbye after you ducked and covered.
I don’t remember if I ever saw that film in grade school. I heard about it on tv and saw the civil defense commercials. I grew up in a rural area, a hundred miles south of Chicago, which would have been a target. I think my mindset, as a child, was we were too far away from Chicago to be hurt by it being ‘nuked.’
Of course in my adult years being in the Army during the Cold War and living in Washington, DC, while assigned to the Pentagon. I took a more fatalistic attitude: I was literally at ‘ground zero’ being in the Pentagon. With the warning times for ICBMs there was no way for the city to be evacuated, thus I decided that my attitude would be ‘oh well, I’ll go so quick I’ll never know it.”
Yes - I clearly recall how we were instructed to hide from Soviet 57 megaton nuclear bombs by hiding under a $3.50 wooden desk.
Wow! Did this scare the kids?
Our school never did the duck and cover drills for a nuclear threat - we did tornado drills and most of the instructions were the same. Part of the school had the nuclear shelter logo.
My husband taught civil defense classes in the late 60s. Our basement has a space reserved for a shelter, but did not have the bucks to complete it.
Interestingly, I feel like we are more likely to see a nuclear event now than at any time since the Cuban Missile crisis. I even had a printed architectural plan, which I can no longer locate.
I looked at a lot of this old stuff a couple of years ago, because I had checked to see if there had been any Government updates since then. Nada. Guess the Feds don’t really care if we the people survive- but we can prepare anyway.
