“You’re telling me? I grew up with the 1st grade lesson to duck and cover...”
I remember the duck under the desk drills, the assembling in the gym and being assigned sleeping spots drill, all kinds of drills. Only to find out years later that the school was only 10 miles from a nuclear fuels plant that also produces nuclear fuel rods for the Navy. I saw a map that showed us well within the “everyone is collateral damage” zone. Sobering.
Having lived with that on my mind and considering what fruitcakes around the world have nukes now, anyone who mentions the use of nukes has automatically lost. We need a Godwin’s Rule for thermonuclear weapons.
Sad.
You know along with nuclear war we didn’t even know that we were within the radius of the deadly zone in nonfiction book We Almost Lost Detroit, in the incident in which the Fermi Nuclear Reactor was going to blow out a huge radiation cloud which would have been deadly for many miles away. Where I was.
“On Oct. 5, 1966 — — Detroit Edison’s Fermi-1 nuclear plant suffered a partial meltdown, caused by a piece of floating shrapnel inside the container vessel.”
Oddly, I had been on a much earlier school field trip to visit the place and I had raised my hand to ask what if the reactor went into a crisis mode, etc. They looked upset with me, then circled the wagons and four or five laughed at me and said “That’s not going to happen. We have safeguards to avoid that.” Followed by “But if it did we would have to bury the whole place in cement and leave a plaque on top to our future residents on what’s below.” (Laughs).
They actually do that after accidents.