Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for December 17, 2021

Many places have a bunch of stuff under the counter, so ducking under the counter won’t work.

Appears to me that there are no tenable counter arguments to a nuclear blast.

We were told to Squat down, put your head between your knees and kiss your butt goodbye.

At least we didn’t have “active shooter drills.” :’(

That was among the sillier things the government ever had us do. My family also built a fallout shelter… of sorts. With some of those metal 5-gallon cans of dried food. And some buckets of water. But without any air filter. Or radio. Or battery-powered lights.

Good thing we didn’t need it.

I also did the “duck and cover” at school, which didn’t make sense, even with conventional bombs, given what I saw in WWII combat films… Then, I read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and saw the photos and figured that I, and my classmates would be dead either way…

We didn’t know any better, we were just dumb kids. But yeah, looking back on it, it was all totally pointless.

I hope the meteor hits my brother.

I heard that the guy who thought up “Duck and Cover” also wrote “Reefer Madness”.

MAD is still on the table. Don’t underestimate the size of the egos involved in the current international struggle for supremacy. It takes just one fool in a fit of pique to push one button or utter one word to achieve what some so-far unidentified space rock is fated to do at some unspecified time in the future.

It would probably work just about as well as anything else.

“Duck and cover” has been made a joke for ages, but it was never intended to protect anyone from the explosion directly.

What it CAN do is protect you from being severely injured or killed by shockwave-caused flying debris (outdoors) or falling ceiling fixtures or structural components (indoors) should you be NEAR an explosion but outside the worst of it. You have a few seconds before the shock wave reaches you. Many people killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki well outside the 1-mile total-destruction zone died that way and didn’t need to.

The people making these slogans weren’t morons. There is method behind the madness of “Duck and cover” other than just giving false hope. I can only pray we never have to put it to the test.

Brings back a lot of memories from 2nd grade.

Is it a geiger countah?

Easy. Blame it all on President Trump. BOOM. And the old guy with the cat on his shoulder is cool. :)

When I was in grade school (early ’60’s), the nuclear drill was to go into the hallway and hold our coats over our heads. Good protection from nuclear holocaust.

before under desks became the accepted position circa 1968/69 we squatting in the windowless halls with our coats over our heads… and before that, down to the basement where we rested out kindergarten heads against the nice, soft, sparkly when you scratched at it, insulation on the heating pipes… didn’t learn of asbestos until years later….

I remember “duck and cover.” Our school was about 2 miles line of sight to midtown Manhattan. I don’t think a wooden desk in a wood-frame building in a room with 8 foot high glass windows on the fourth floor was going to be much protection.

The good news was: I would have been vaporized instantly and been dead before I knew it.

We have one thing the dinosaurs didn’t: telescopes. It is only a matter of time before a meteor is on a collision course with us.

We’ve already identified those that would cause mass extinctions and we are safe from them for centuries.

We’ve also identified most of those that would wipe out a city and we are also safe from them — for now.

Hopefully, when the time comes we will have the technology to deflect them.

The wild cards are comets. The one passing by today us has a period of 70,000 years. We know the period of a lot of them, however, there are literally trillions of them out there floating in the Oort cloud waiting to get nudged in.

So there may be one with our name on it that has been tumbling in for the past million or so years. It might have been orbiting at hundreds of miles and hour way out there, but after a million years of free fall, it will be traveling at tens of hundreds of miles a second.

Asteroids will most likely come in on the same plane as the rest of the planetary bodies orbit. We know where to look for them. Comets can come in from any direction. A comet will appear to come out of nowhere and we won’t have a lot of time to react to it.

Fortunately we have a couple of “bouncers” out there: Jupiter and Saturn that “take the hits” for us a lot. Also, cosmically speaking, Earth’s orbit is a small target and the comet is likely to miss it and if it does, Earth is even a much smaller target.

In case of nuclear attack I am heading to ground zero. I’ve seen the movie Threads!! I ain’t interested in surviving!!

If I knew a meteor was heading towards Earth and would cause an E.L.E., I’d just party until it hit! What the hell…what else CAN you do???

Most of the schools I went to as a kid, there wasn’t any “under the desk”. Which was fine. I don’t remember any nuclear blast drills, either. Tornadoes, ice storms, plagues of locusts, inland hurricanes, yes.

A-yuh.

I’m thinking we are going to go down to an EMP. I mean I love electronics and all the stuff we have, but when the power goes out we are pretty helpless. Think about a full year with no electricity.

Move to the Northeast corner of the. room. Get under a table or desk. Bend over and kiss your a$$ good bye.

I was raised in Los Angeles. As a child, I asked if we shouldn’t build a fallout shelter. Dad just pointed out how many military targets are in the Los Angeles area and that we’d be dead instantly. A few years ago, a woman from the L.A. area said her father had told her the same thing – Nuclear war was nothing to worry about because we’d be dead before we knew it.

The old “duck and cover” was a placebo to try and calm the fears of the public during those terrible years. Just like the mask mandates we have today. Even airline CEOs are starting to speak out on the subject and the Governor of Colorado did to.

We had two kinds of drills. Fire drills, where we learned to stay calm, line up, follow the teacher outside and stay together so we could be counted to make sure everyone was out of the building. We looked forward to fifth grade because fifth through eighth grades were on the second floor and they got to slide down the “fire escape,” a large tube attached to the outside of the building. The other drill was always called a tornado drill (living in the Midwest, this was a given) and that drill was to get under our desks (old-fashioned, solid oak, heavy, attached to runners in rows of four), face away from the windows, and hold still until the all-clear was given. What both of those drills taught us (in spite of our making fun of them) was a way to control our fear in a crisis situation, to stay calm, follow directions, and regroup at the end. Much better than having a crisis with 25 panicky kids and a panicky teacher. And, sometimes, it got us out of a test.

Back in the day, my grandpa (WWII combat vet) felt that all the nuclear war preparations were a waste of time, so my mom remembers being teased for her dad refusing to build a bomb shelter. (And in fairness, we do get tornadoes here, so a bomb shelter might actually see some use, other than as a root cellar.) But his thinking was that it would be better to die quickly in the blast than slowly in the aftermath.

Anyway, he liked to explain his version of duck and cover:

1) Sit down on the floor, well away from windows.2) Put your head between your knees.3) Bend over as far as you can, and kiss your butt goodbye.

Not only do I remember the air-raid drills in grammar school ( along with the fire drills that occasionally rescued us from a math test ) but I remember the fear and consternation when they build a Nike missile base in our town around 1954.

Not that we weren’t a target already, what with Pratt & Whitney, Hamilton Standard, Sikorsky, and Kaman – major aircraft companies at the time, – all within a short distance from our Connecticut town.

Our country school district built a new grade school. Two classrooms! While it was being built, there was some construction going on nearby and then the school board was notified that the new school was too close to the missile site and the school had to be moved. The school board considered this and wrote back to the government that the school was there first and to move the missile. After some time, the board received a letter notifying them that the school would be destroyed if the missile was ever launched and that a blast wall should be constructed. The wall should be reinforced concrete and said how many feet thick and how many feet high it should be. The school board considered that and eventually a row of lilacs was planted between the school and the missile site. The lilacs grew nicely and bloomed for years.

Yes body count in the center and in the outer ring protection from flying debris. I compare it to wearing a motorcycle helmet. It won’t (unlikely) save you from the 100mph crash but where you generally tumble.

Or, if you’re outside, as soon as you see the blast, lie down on your stomach and put your face on your crossed arms (so the heat wouldn’t melt your eyeballs).

Read “With Enough Shovels” by Robert Scheer for a great summary on gov’t strategies for ‘surviving’ nuclear war.

makes as much sense as the meteor strike itself or the time frame in which it didn’t happen…

Such great planning from those who were suppose to know things.

The real threat is an EMP. With power out, life will come to a standstill

The way conservative deniers are dealing with the pandemic is a metaphorical form of duck-and-cover.

When I was a kid, we lived on an Air Force base within nuclear missile range of Cuba. There would periodically be nuclear alert drills. You were supposed to go to “shelters” on the base. My father was a sergeant there and knew all about the destructive power of nuclear weapons. The Air Force base would be ground-zero. Shelters were for people who lived some distance from targets. He would just pack us all in the car and drive around in the country until the alert was over.

Where I lived while I was in elementary school, there wouldn’t have been anyone left to count the bodies.

In 1964 as a Air Force weather observer it was our responsibility to do two very important things. (1) Each day at 6:00 AM, we would take out our geiger counter to measure and report the ambient radiation level – it always was zero. Unfortunately we probably got more radiation exposure from the radioactive test strip we would play with. (2) There was a requirement to report any nuclear detinations we observed. Count the number of seconds from the flash to bang and calculate the distance. We all knew that was all kind of stupid and if you saw a blast – just put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodby!

The question about how humanity would handle a giant meteor heading our way is the exact theme of the movie Don’t Look Up, due to open this weekend.

♫♪♫♪ duck and cover♪♫♪

Know that you think about it, it was dumb, but we were not the sharpest knives in the drawer!

Personally I think that sentient quantum supercomputers seem most likely to wipe us all out.

You Never Can Tell…

I was about 9 when I figured out that drawing the drapes and getting under your desk wouldn’t do anything for you.

Only the wealthy, our beloved politicians and cockroaches will have any chance of surviving, while we were dying.

Duck and cover only worked if the flash was at some distance away, so when kids saw the ‘brighter than the sun’ flash they’d have time to get under desks before the windows blew in and the roof blew off.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd8_vO5zrjo

Sometimes theres nothing one can do that really helps… but just doing Something feels better.

If only it were that simple.

Because those flimsy wood and steel school desks were specially designed to render you immune to the effects of an atomic blast

We have the technology capable of doing so, it just isn’t being used.

Even in elementary school the idea of hiding under desks was ridiculous after seeing the footage of those A and H-bombs exploding.

I remember being in 4th grade and us kids talking about how to get to the airfield (we were about 5 miles from Boeing Field in Seattle, where B52s were made) so we’d be atomized quickly and not have to die of radiation sickness.

The devastating effect of the meteorite that cleared out the dinosaurs was probably greater than all the worlds nuclear arsenals combined. Also, it was the long-term climate effects that caused the planet-wide extinctions, not the immediate blast.

Hiding under the desk was never intended to make a difference in the event of a direct hit. In the 60s I lived about 20 miles from an Army camp that would’ve been a legitimate (if low-priority) target. Had a small nuke hit that spot, being lower than the windowsill and having a wooden desk over us would’ve made a lot of difference.

And after the blast, what would be left would be a scattering of ‘Lord of the Flies’ societies, with people reverting back to primitive tribal survival tactics.

we did the emergency drills in grade school…but by the time we were in high school, we figured out we were in a “First Strike” zone, and wondered why they bothered

A policeman I know once imparted the following, “the reason they want use to wear seat-belts is, it makes easier to find the bodies”

We don’t do “duck and cover drills” in schools anymore, we do active shooter drills.