On "Duck and Cover"

[cmdr_zoom]

It's been fashionable for a while now to dump on this old Civil Defense propaganda educational film, and in some ways it is naive and uninformed by today's standards. (There's a lot that no one, even the military, knew about the Bomb back then.) But it should be remembered that when it was made, back in 1950, the Reds had perhaps a few dozen bombs, total, and they probably would have been delivered by big slow bombers. Those of us growing up thirty-odd years later, when there were enough MIRVs to hit every silo, base and major city (and most of the small ones) and blot out the sun, faced a very different situation.

Comments

[caluche.livejournal.com]

Which old Civil Defense film?

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

This one. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0K_LZDXp0I)

"We must all get ready now."

[caluche.livejournal.com]

I've only gotten about 1/3rd the way through but so far it actually seems more or less accurate. You want yourself covered - unexposed skin is very much at risk to the initial flash but even minor cover (like newspaper) goes a long way to protect you from the flash (unless you're so close that the actual thermal pulse will get you).

It's even more important in a MIRV situation, one is likely to detonate a few seconds before the others - chances are you'll see a distant detonation before the nearby one occurs, even getting a few cm of dirt between you and the line of site of the blast will provide significant protection. So maybe something is a little wacky later on but early on it seems to be useful. What are people making fun of?

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Mostly the shift in the forces involved and the accompanying doctrine. From 1950 to 1980, we moved from a few devices to hundreds, then thousands, and from the prospect of a limited, "winnable" nuclear war to Mutual Assured Destruction, where it was generally assumed that if things got to that point, there would be no winner(s) and precious few survivors, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. The precautions in the old film were thus seen as absurdly insufficient in the face of most of the nation, if not the human race, being wiped out in the nuclear exchange or dying in the aftermath of fallout, disease and starvation. "Duck and Cover" was made in the context of something like an atomic version of the London Blitz, not an extinction event. Like I said, a bit of a difference in scale.

In fact, there were many at the time - myself included - who felt it might be better to die relatively quickly during the initial attack rather than live a little longer to see what came next.

Naturally, our leaders tried to assure us we'd be protected by various mechanisms to intercept and stop the expected first strike by the Evil Communists (if we threw enough money at the problem). Such attempts at a "missile shield" were, of course, interpreted by the other side as the Evil Capitalists trying to get around MAD and launch our expected first strike without reprisal. (Plenty of fear to go around in those bad old days.) In the end, their economy collapsed first and the rest is history.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

(As an aside, it's quite darkly amusing to look back, with the benefit of a couple of decades of hindsight and declassified accounts from the other side of the Iron Curtain, and see how much both sides saw themselves as The Good Guys, who would never launch first and only kept building bombs to defend themselves against the aggression and ambition of the freedom-hating, world-coveting __________.)

[caluche.livejournal.com]

Even now though in an NBC operating environment, "take cover" is still very frequently cited as a good first response to use of battlefield / tactical nuclear device use (presuming that cover doesn't have depleted uranium armor subject to fast fission / neutron radiation thanks to the use of such a weapon nearby).

wrt "each side thought they were the good guys" - I got to experience this with Vika's aunt, uncle and father in Kiev. Interesting hearing it from the Soviet side, and their impression on what the outcome of such a war would have been.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

And that was?