Alex WellersteinVerified account

Does duck and cover actually work?

It depends always on what one means by "actually work" — it isn't some magical thing that will help you if you are inside a nuclear fireball. But if you are in the range in which your main threats are a collapsing ceiling, broken glass, etc., then sure.

There were a lot of postwar studies done of the relationship of sheltering to casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Again, it's no absolute salve, but it makes a difference for single detonations at more distances than you might expect.

For the kinds of nuclear exchanges contemplated between the US and USSR by the 1960s — e.g., multi-megaton attacks with multiple warheads assigned to every target — it stops being very useful. Hence the move away from that and towards fallout shelters for those downwind.

But if we are talking about a single, submegaton detonation — then it could help. Putting numbers on how much it might help is hard to do. But I think as a public awareness campaign there is nothing better than embodiment of the threat. It drives it home.

But never before have we had the threat unilaterally held by such an #unstablegenius. Come on!

In the 1990s: a) Russian nuclear infrastructure was decaying and there were realistic fears about "loose nukes" and fiz material, b) India and Pakistan both became fully nuclearized and clashed over borderlands (among other issues). It was not exactly a nuclear-threat-free time!

Actually quite a lot of the old civil defence information was designed to make you feel better but would actually get you killed. A British team tries to follow a civil defence pamphlet and not only went over time and budget but would have died within 3 to 5 days anyway...

There is not very much evidence to support the idea that Civil Defense stuff was about "making people feel better." Some of the recommendations were solid, some were not. The tone of it all was quite wrongheaded, to be sure. There are better & worse ways to do this.

I'm the same age but grew up afraid and amazed at my friends obliviousness to the threat. My Dad both lived through the blitz and remembered a world without nukes. Most other kid's dads were younger.

I remember being a childhood CND campaigner and delivering the leaflets and stickers up my road!