Friend Of The Blog (TM), Tam, over at View From The Porch, has a post up noting that today is the anniversary of the much maligned “Duck And Cover” program from those crazy days of the Atomic/Cold War age.

When I was a kid in grade school we had two kinds of drills – fire drills and shelter drills. Any idiot knows what a fire drill is for, but as a kid it never occurred to me to ask what a shelter drill was for. All I knew is that we pulled the blinds in the classroom, filed into the hallways, and sat along the interior hallways with our backs to the wall. It never occurred to me that this was some sort of program to protect ourselves in case of nuclear attack. Same way it never occurred to me what those pink and blue ‘occupancy certificates’ in each classroom with the CD logo were about.

As the years rolled by, the nattering nabobs of negativism loudly proclaimed that anyone even remotely thinking a nuclear attack was survivable was some sort of stooge or idiot. There will be no survivors, they proclaimed. Never mind that there were quite a few survivors at both cities that were nuked last time someone opened up a can of sunshine. In fact, there were a couple folks who rolled snake eyes twice and got bombed at Hiroshima, transported to Nagasaki for medical treatment, and got nuked again. And lived.

Part of this mindset, I think, comes from the semantic problem of people conflating a fallout shelter and a blast shelter. Would the crowded citydwellers be safe from the devastation of their cities by cowering in the basement of the local fallout shelter? Maybe. Maybe not. But then again, a fallout shelter is for sheltering from…fallout. Whereas a blast or bomb shelter is to protect you from……

If youre sitting at ground zero when someone airbursts a new sun over your head, yeah, its not looking good…although, again, people have survived that. But if you survive the blast, which is likelier the further you are from the center of it, then something like a fallout shelter does make a difference. Which means it in, in fact, survivable.

However, the Soviet-backed and -funded ‘nuclear disarmament’ groups, who interestingly never seemed to bother the Soviets too much about disarming, were quick to hammer home the idea that there simply was no surviving a nuclear exchange and we should pack up those Minuteman silos and trust that the nobler heads will refrain from pushing any buttons.

Dude, I live about three hours from a bed of nuclear missile silos. I have zero interest in being around when an old SS-18 with out-of-date targeting data lands in Great Falls and sends a cloud of debris in my direction. But…I also know its not an ‘On The Beach’ scenario where all you can do is wait for the sunrise and your horrible death.

The ‘Duck And Cover’ drills are laughable in some ways, but in others they were a good idea. They kept people aware of the risks and problems of the Cold War, and certainly lent an air of credibility and purpose to the various local Civil Defense programs and organizations.

Nuclear war is no walk through a meadow…..understatement of the year, there. But it isn’t necessarily the death knell for the entire planet either. No more than Dresden or Hiroshima was.