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.”
What we discovered was that the Soviet Union’s nuclear capability was vastly overstated. It was dependent on rigorous discipline by their armed forces and that simply was never going to happen.
A basement was a perfectly acceptable shelter. Bomb shelters were usually built in areas where basements were not the norm....like where I grew up. Basement is from the Latin word “basemada” meaning “something that floods”. I knew 1 family with a shelter. The rest relied on their basement or a friends basement.