Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisdhoover | Hacker News Reader

Grew up in the ‘60’s in DC. Our school had an air raid siren and monthly drill where we stood in the hall along the wall ordered alphabetically by last name. We never ducked and covered, we just stood there. At least we were practicing to die standing on our feet and not cowering in a fetal position

View on HN

Duck and cover gets a lot of mockery, but my understanding from reading morbidly fascinating Cold War history and source material is that is was an easily-taught response that was pretty effective at minimizing the damage from a shockwave and associated debris, or from direct exposure to the thermal pulse. Of course, that is only a narrow range of all possible causes of injury from a nearby nuclear detonation.

Rational Wiki has a good summaryhttps://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Duck_and_Cover

99 Percent Invisible had a nice episode on duck and cover (amongst other things).

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/atomic-tattoos/

was an easily-taught response that was pretty effective at minimizing the damage from a shockwave and associated debris

My freshman physics professor had a story about working for a cold war defense research lab, and not being told what the graph he was working on was about until he absolutely had to know. Eventually, it was revealed that the graph was for % fatalities from flying glass by height of airburst, megatonnage of weapon, and distance from ground zero.

It was at that moment, he decided to find a job elsewhere.

Beats rushing to the nearest plate glass window.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com