Alex WellersteinVerified account

BUT, that being said, 1. we all know prevention unlikely to be perfect; and 2. there are reasons to believe that getting people to think through this stuff, to talk seriously about personalized consequences, etc., is more engaging than just saying "it's awful and unthinkable."

If #2 is true — if talking about this kind of thing seriously actually does produce a change in the salience of the risk — then it may be a precondition to getting mass action or support for #1. That's part of the thesis of the Reinventing Civil Defense project.

If #1 is the goal then I support #2 but I don't think that is what is motivating the CDC/FEMA video or the lessons that viewers will derive from it. That is one reason I liked @ArmsControlWonk use of real testimony of Hiroshima survivors in the 2020 Commission Report

I'm not suggesting #2 is part of CDC/FEMA/DHS goals — they are *our* (RCD) goals. They may be inadvertent outcomes of gov't work, though. That is something we are trying to test.

It is an open, empirical question as to whether even "sanitized" CD works towards #2. I think "Duck and Cover" drills had more to do with the later anti-nuclear movement, for example, than people realize (and certainly that was not the goal of the FCDA).

The latter is a historical hunch on my part (supported by anecdata, but not testable). But one can test how exposure to these sorts of materials impacts policy attitudes on people today (and we are doing this).