Absolutely give people clear and direct orders during an emergency. The other thing is to practice emergency responses, because people will fall back on what they’ve practiced. The myth is that duck and cover is pointless busywork.
If the nuclear bomb falls on your head, or within a few miles of your head, nothing is going to save you, but there is a large region of destruction where getting under a school desk, away from outside windows, and such will be just as effective against a nuclear explosion as it is against a tornado. Which is to say, a whole lot better than doing nothing.
And this was markedly more useful in the early days when duck and cover was first invented, because there were a lot fewer bombs back then (much less over all destruction, less fallout, etc.).
Also, especially in the early days of the Cold War, accuracy of any sort of bomb or missile sucked, so even if the bomb was targeted directly for the top of your head, it might still land far enough away that duck and cover could save you.
Still probably wouldn’t help if there were a dozen independent nukes aimed for the top of your head, but that’s not most places.
Just running straight will work with an ambush predator, but zigzag movements IS a valid tactic for avoiding a predator faster than you. Antelope and gazelle are fast but can’t outrun a cheetah, yet escape 60-70% of the time, sometimes not even teaching their own to speed, but weaving and dodging until the cheetah has to give up.
I’m often amused at what, for example, medieval naturalists believed (or claimed to believe) about animals—for example, that hyenas mimic the voices of human beings to eat them. I suspect a lot of animal urban legends endure out of the same mix of “isn’t that cool?,” “helpful” warnings, and lack of familiarity.
The urban legend that coyotes play with dogs in order to lure them away and eat them is as silly as the one about hyenas—this does not happen—but interestingly:
Didn’t become common until the late '70s, at which point America had firmly urbanized and most people were not seeing coyotes on the regular, and
Is just a cut-and-paste version of the same story when it was told about wolves, most famously by Jack London, who obviously had no first-hand experience of this when he wrote it into White Fang.
(The hyena story, like goose barnacles, probably doesn’t rate “urban legend” status these days but a lot of TikTok commenters believe the coyote one so it’s probably not going anywhere until it finds a new animal to adopt)
Not UL, exactly, but an old medieval myth that those barnacles were baby geese. Thus, by some standards one could eat goose during certain fasts as it was “seafood”.
Allow me to focus in one one part of this quote whilst including the entire quoted post.
" Still probably wouldn’t help if there were a dozen independent nukes aimed for the top of your head, but that’s not most places. "
THIS. It’s 2026. It isn’t at all dystopian near-future fiction to talk about drones being used to deliver lethal payloads. See…oh, the last month’s world news from verifiable sources.
I say this because the idea of "a dozen independent nukes’ is a bit of a stretch. Nukes are heavy as fuck. Hard to transport without being detected by, well, any other nation-state. Dirty bombs? Hella easy. Unfissionable nuclear waste makes for a superb dirty bomb and can be easily delivered in small packages by dozens if not hundreds of high-speed drones.
This ain’t your Gramma’s Cold War, people.
I would agree- a dozen independent nukes aimed for the top of your head ISN’T most places. A large area selected for long-term lethality using dirty bombs? That’s every place.
Dirty bombs are a terror weapon, in the most literal sense of the word. They’re really scary… but they’re not actually particularly deadly. Yeah, yeah, fallout and radiation, but it’s not actually that hard to clean up.
Yeah. The idea that my DNA has been fucked over slowly instead of blasted by a direct hit is equally unnerving. I’d rather not die of leukemia, thank you very much.
Nobody wants to die of leukemia. So you leave when you get the evacuation order, and stay away for a few weeks while the hazmat crews clean it up. There’d still be a chance of some people getting cancer (there’s always a chance of that), but even counting the cancer deaths, the terrorists could kill a lot more people by just shooting them with a gun. And guns are a lot easier to get ahold of than radioactive material.