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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

The 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.

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Cover 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.

Play around with 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.

The 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.

Have you ever looked at pictures of the aftermath of Hiroshima? People who weren't behind cover survived the immediate blast but got horrifying burns.

What happened to the people who were behind cover?

Roughly half of the population of Hiroshima survived.

If 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!.

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