I am *just *old enough to remember this. When I heard the Russians had missiles pointed at us, I thought by “us” they meant my house on Greentree Lane, so I hid under the coffee table. I remember my mother standing there saying, “that’s not going to do any good, you know, dear.”
I still have that coffee table, though, it’s good strong rosewood!
Eve!!!
Nice to see you!!
(I just noticed you came back, I have been traveling and I have more time now to check what I missed.)
I was a senior in high school when the crisis occurred. We knew something potentially ugly was happening but not how bad it was. We did not know there were Russians leading Cuban troops ,who has control of small nukes. We did not know our military, like always, were spoiling for a fight and kept advising strong military action.
Kennedy was in a tough spot. We always pretend the military has understandings that we don’t. We give them way too much respect in a crisis. Yet in just about every case, they are for aggressive and dangerous action. That is why civilians should have the last word.
And here I thought that the only 8-year olds who got depressed about world politics were characters in sitcoms.
Nope. It was all over the news. We were likely to die.
Did you know anybody with a fallout shelter? They later made nice wine cellars.
Duck and Cover: Duck and Cover - YouTube
AKA, the put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye method.
That was probably before duct tape was available. Bush came up with that powerful idea.
I always thought that one of the reasons the kids of the sixties rebelled was because they told all of us the lie even a child couldn’t believe-Stop Drop And Cover. As kids we watched horror films about nuclear explosions, and we watched nightly news reports about possible nuclear war, and then our government, our school teachers and our parents tell us that all we have to do in case of a nuclear explosion was jump under our desk and put our jackets over our heads and everything would be a.o.k. It’s no wonder kids grew up not trusting the establishment.
Can you provide a reference for anyone actually saying “all we have to do in case of a nuclear explosion was jump under our desk and put our jackets over our heads and everything would be a.o.k.”
Stop, drop and cover is extremely sound advice. It;s still given to military trainees to this day. Of course it isn’t going to stop anybody being vapourised. What it is going to do is prevent literally tens of millions of injuries from flash burns, flying debris and flash blindness caused by people standing their looking at the fucking explosion and then being hit by first the flash then the shockwave.
Duck and cover is excellent advice to give young children, The best advice possible. I doubt very much that anybody ever said that if you practiced duck and cover everything would be a-ok.
I was too young to notice at the time, but my mother related the story to me. We lived in Savannah GA, home of the Hunter Army Air Base, and theoretically within range of both the Cuban missiles and Cuban-based MIGs on a one-way suicide mission. Mom said that for a week B-52s were constantly taking off and landing so as to keep as many planes in the air as possible against being caught on the ground by a surprise attack. So yeah, we lived on a huge effin’ bulls-eye.
Re. Kennedy being a psycho: what you have to realize was that basing missiles in Cuba looked (without benefit of 20/20 hindsight) as if the whole Cuban revolution had been a Soviet plan to get a decapitation force within 15 minutes of the US southeast coast. Soviet bombers took hours to reach us, Soviet ICBMs still took 40-90 minutes. Fifteen minutes meant nukes would be going off before we could even confirm that an attack wasn’t a false alarm.
“Duck and cover” was solid advice. Pretty much all of that civil defense stuff was. It gets made fun of now because people have a vastly inflated sense of the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but following that advice would’ve saved many lives.
Yeah, if a 125kt nuke goes off in your back yard, ducking and covering isn’t going to do anything. But explosive power decreases with the cube of the distance - the areas that would receive a blast, but not a ground zero everything dies level blast, was far bigger than the area where everything would die.
For the people in those vast areas that weren’t in the annihilation zones, big dangers are stuff like flying glass from windows shattered by the blast wave and fires. You know a good way to avoid a big shard of flying glass? Duck and cover.
If you ducked and covered right on top of a bomb, it wouldn’t matter. If you ducked and covered 5 miles away from a 125kt bomb, it could’ve saved your life.
Just my opinion, but I’d have to say that any 8-year old who felt the way you did had misguided parents. 8 is way too young to be told about such stuff, or to be allowed to watch news shows about it. I’m picturing Butters’ parents on South Park right now.
To be fair, I’m not unbiased on the issue, since I was nine at the time, and neither I nor any of my friends were bothered by international politics. Plenty of time for that when you’re 11 or 12.
We were taught that as a way to survive a nuclear explosion. We had 2 kinds of air raid drills. One was a surprise attack, in which you would dive under your desk, turn away from the window, and cover your neck and eyes.
The other was one that we would all go to the shelter under the school. We had huge bunkers in the basements. Then we would wait , listening for an explosion.
It was probably a way to make kids feel a little safer. It did not work. We were wondering why the hell someone far away wanted to blow us up.
The flash travels at the speed of light. The trick is you have to duck really quick.
Tris
I spent the Cuban Missile Crises working in the main switching building of Southwestern Bell in Dallas; we were told we were a primary target and that we would be responsible for maintaining emergency military communications. We weren’t allowed to leave the building; we caught naps on cots in the basement and the Salvation Army brought in meals. None of us expected to leave the place alive.
I don’t think anyone then or now was implying you ducked after the detonation, the idea was you duck and cover when the warning sirens went off–which if things were going properly they could have had running at least 15 minutes prior to detonation.
They used to publish pictures in the paper showing the most likely spots to drop a bomb for maximum effect. I was not going to get a lot of warning from the time it went off. One spot was about 1/2 a mile from my house. In the park within walking distance, there was an underground Nike missile base. It was always in the back of your mind.Well, the blast wave travels at the speed of sound, so if you’re a few miles away from the blast, you’ll have a few seconds to react to the flash which arrives practically instantly. It’s like lightning and thunder.
Of course you were. US Military personal right now are being taught it as a way to survive a nuclear explosion. This is the best possible advice to adhere to as a way to survive a nuclear explosion.
We’ve already established all that.
The question was whether anybody was told that “all we have to do in case of a nuclear explosion was jump under our desk and put our jackets over our heads and everything would be a.o.k.”
Those are two completely different subjects.
For example, do you understand why children are taught “Don’t smoke if you don’t want to get cancer?” Do you agree that this is sound advice to give to children?
Do you see why it would be astonishing if a child were to claim that they were taught "“all we have to do to never get cancer cancer is not to smoke”?
Oh no, hundreds of million of people are taught that you ducked after the detonation. Military personnel are still being taught this. It’s excellent advice.
What people like Triskadecamus apparently don’t understand is that a nuclear “explosion” doesn’t occur instantaneously. There is the initial detonation which releases a bright flash of light that is visible even indoors on a bright sunny day. If you are close enough to be killed during that initial flash, then you have been literally vapourised.
However the radiation released then *continues *to heat the atmosphere for 2 minutes after that initial detonation. For a ground burst the firebal may not even reach it’s maximum extent at ground level for over 8 seconds after the initial flash. This isn’t the pressure wave blast, it’s the fireball, the actual physical explosion. So it’s perfectly possible to be close enough to see the flash, telephone someone to say that you have seen it, and still be completely vapourised by the explosion several seconds later.
More importantly, EM radiation capable of causing third degree burns will be emitted for a full two minutes after the initial flash is seen. The idea behind duck-and-cover is in large part to avoid exposure to the ongoing radiation emission. If you are several kilometres from the detonation point, the radiation emissions will cause second-degree. and may even cause third degree, burns if you are unfortunate enough to expose it to your bare skin for the full 2 minutes. Basically ultra-severe sunburn. However, as with sunburn, the effects can be stopped entirely by thin cloth. The simple technique of pulling a jacket over one’s face will mean the difference between death or permanent scarring and walking away no injury whatsoever.
The other issue is gazing at the fireball. The fireball produces large amounts of UV radiation as well as visible light, and it is an impressive sight, which causes people to stare at it. Unfortunately looking directly at the fireball for more than a fraction of a second, especially during the first 10 seconds after detonation, can cause flash blindness as the retinas get burned. This can be either temporary or permanent, but in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, even temporary blindness is to be avoided. Even at distances so far removed from the detonation that a person standing in an exposed field will suffer little more than sunburn and a few scratches from flying debris, the same person can be permanently blinded if they watched the explosion for the first 10 seconds.
Then there is of course the issue of flying debris that SenorBeef has already addressed.
So yes, if you see a nuclear detonation, *that *is the time to duck and cover as much of your exposed skin as you can. While the flash itself travels at the speed of light, the radiation continues to be emitted for two minutes after the flash. The blast likewise will take several seconds to arrive. During those first two minutes, it is critical to stay down and stay covered up.
What is kind of sad is that after 50 years, it is still seen as trendy to laugh at this advice, invariably by people who don’t actually understand the facts behind it.
I remember in the mid-80s there was severe media criticism of any official planning for a post-nuclear exchange or any suggestion that it could be survivable in any way as a society. The thinking seemed to be that if officials made such plans, then they were considering nuclear war as a viable option. I imagine that’s another reason why it became trendy to laugh at “duck and cover”: if you believed it might be effective, you were either a warmonger or a stooge lapping up the warmongers’ propaganda line.
Yep, in a nuclear explosion, we will hide under kindling, a wooden desk. That was good advice?