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Nobody teaches anyone about cover during a nuclear strike anymore. In fact, the concept is frequently mocked as cynical Cold War era propaganda.
by nsxwolf 9y ago
Nobody teaches anyone about cover during a nuclear strike anymore. In fact, the concept is frequently mocked as cynical Cold War era propaganda.
- djsumdog 9y agoThe mocking isn't unjustifiable though. I mean the turtle/duck and cover is quite pointless, at least in the case of a nuclear strike (unless you're maybe on the far edge of it, in which case a ditch might save you..and that's big might). In the documentary "Iraq: The Untold Story", the creator shows civilian air raid shelters in Baghdad. They were four stories down, with the upper floors all reinforced concrete. Yet there were powerless against US bunker busting bombs, and the hundreds of civilians in the shelters that were hit all died.
- Pinckney 9y agoPlay around with NUKEMAP: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ If you are hit directly, you're fucked no matter what. But the fireball has relatively small radius compared to the other zones. Ducking underneath something solid is to protect you if the building collapses, which is likely to occur in the large air-blast radius. This is much like ducking under a desk in an earthquake. Cover will save you if you're within the larger thermal radiation radius. Even clothing can be enough to protect you from burns, so any cover you can get is good.
- khuey 9y agoCover is extremely important if you're outside the immediate fireball zone (where you're just going to be vaporized). You shouldn't infer from the fact that bunker busting bombs successfully bust bunkers that attempting to survive a nuclear explosion at some distance from you is pointless.
- Houshalter 9y agoHave you ever looked at pictures of the aftermath of Hiroshima? People who weren't behind cover survived the immediate blast but got horrifying burns.
- namelost 9y agoWhat happened to the people who were behind cover?
- Houshalter 9y agoRoughly half of the population of Hiroshima survived.
- refurb 9y agoIf I remember correctly, others was a man in a basement only a few hundred feet from ground zero who survived relatively unscathed. Don't underestimate the protection cover can offer!.
- mikeash 9y agoThe mocking is utterly unjustifiable. Duck and cover would have saved millions of lives if MAD had come to its conclusion. The inability of a building to resist bunker busting bombs is completely unrelated.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- iends 9y agoYeah, because putting your head down against an interior wall or under a desk is going to make any difference.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoIt could. If you’re in the inferno, no. If you’re outside the thermal flux, protected from ionising radiation by simple structure (i.e. away from windows) and within the pressure flux, duck and cover works. If you’re in cases one and two, you die, quickly or painfully. Since you don’t know ex ante where the bomb will burst, duck and cover makes sense.
- coldtea 9y agoIt's going to make a huge difference is the blast is far enough away for you to not be in the "obliterate everything" zone, but still close enough to be dangerous.
- cmurf 9y agoCDC was going to. But they decided to postpone it. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/cdc-delays-nuclear-preparedness-training-to-focus-on-flu.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/cdc-delays-nucl...
- major505 9y agoThe duck and cover thing I thik it was more to escape from things like glass and debris throw away by a explosion. Of course, if you were close of the explosion wold make litle sense,but the after shock can hurt lots of people.