Michael Katz Hyman sends along this brilliantly funny manual, NSRB DOC. 130 Survival Under Atomic Attack (1950).
Remember kids, “Beyond 2 miles, the explosion will cause practically no deaths at all.”
The atomic age inspired all sorts of “you can survive” silliness, including this story from Friend of Wonk Stephen Schwartz:
My favorite story concerns the tale of Willard Libby, the former Atomic Energy Commission chairman who opposed public funding for shelters and insisted they could be constructed cheaply. To promote his cause, Libby wrote a 15-part newspaper series titled “You Can Survive Atomic Attack,” featuring a less-than-$30 “poor man’s shelter” he had built in West Los Angeles out of railroad ties, old tires, and bags of dirt. “Libby’s argument for the viability of the poor man’s shelter was undercut somewhat when this structure was subsequently destroyed in a brushfire.” When physicist and former colleague Leo Szilard heard about the fire, which occurred during the Cuban missile crisis, he said it proved not only “that God exists, but that He has a sense of humor.”
Indeed.
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It specified the fatality risk for a Hiroshima/Nagasaki weapon (“nominal yield”) airburst.
Here is a chart of casualty vs distance for Hiroshima:
http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309036925/html/211.html
— yale · Jun 14, 09:05 AM ·
— David Isenberg · Jun 14, 09:52 AM ·
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJTk_g3810M&search=nuclear
— Andy · Jun 14, 02:05 PM ·
— Anonymous · Jun 14, 04:04 PM ·
— Burt T. Turtle · Jun 14, 08:40 PM ·
This site has some astounding artifacts:
http://www.conelrad.com/index.php
Check out the Convertible Basement Wet Bar/Fallout shelter Plans:
http://www.1134.org/adventures/atomic/
http://www.coldwar.org/
Great cold war era films:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=atomic%20AND%20mediatype%3Amovies
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3Amovies%20AND%20collection%3Aprelinger%20AND%20%2Fmetadata%2Fsubject%3A%22Atomic-nuclear%3A%20Civil%20Defense%22
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=mediatype%3Amovies%20AND%20collection%3Aprelinger%20AND%20%2Fmetadata%2Fsubject%3A%22Atomic-nuclear%3A%20Weapons%22
Particularly check out the film “House in the Middle”
Shows why being a bad housekeeper is dangerous in the event of an atomic attack.
yale
— yale · Jun 14, 11:14 PM ·
my favourite:
“Sir, you can’t let him in here. He’ll see everything. He’ll see the big board!”
— stevensnell · Jun 15, 04:55 AM ·
Fireball radius: 0.1 km
Air blast radius (near total fatalities): 0.75 km
Radiation radius (500 rem): 1.48 km
Air blast radius (structural damage): 1.99 km
Thermal radiation radius (third degree burns): 2.35 km
At two miles out (3.22 km), you’re missing the worst of it. Which doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, of course, but it’s not the (literal) end of the world. There are still fallout considerations, and infrastructure issues, but these are the sort of things such pamphlets are trying to address (don’t eat food which has been outside, stay inside for awhile, don’t panic, etc.).
Though I sympathize completely with the humorous aspect of Civil Defense, I think sometimes it gets a bad rap. Sure, if you’re right under ground zero, you’re toast. But if you’re not, then you probably could stand a greater-than-zero chance of survival if you made some preparations.
In any case, it’s fairly obvious that the “Civil Defense is worthless” approach is one which is intended to re-state the direness of a nuclear war, to make it seem so unimaginable that no one would ever dare to think it something worth doing. I respect the moral stance of the position to a degree, but I’m also suspicious of it in terms of its willingness to bowl over assessments of people like Herman Kahn, who for all their nuttiness did have a political point (if nuclear warfare is only total war, then in a world of guaranteed secondary strikes, it quickly becomes an empty threat, and thus has no real deterrence effect except against a first strike, allowing plenty of leeway for other nuclear maneuvers).
These are general reflections, not criticisms of this particular post. I’ve always thought it interesting, though not incomprenhesible, that the anti-nuclear community is often far more eager to tell you how important and powerful the weapons are than the people who actually build and field the things. I have a hard time finding a stable ground between thinking nuclear weapons are in general a Not Very Good Thing but at the same time feeling nothing but disdain wooly thinking no matter where it comes from.
— fastfission · Jun 15, 05:48 AM ·
Is that the consensus? Is it reasonable?
I ask specifically because Henry Hyde brought that up as a fact on the House Floor during the real debate on the fake H Res 861.
— Josh Narins · Jun 15, 06:59 AM ·