Speaking of Duck and Cover, we watched "The Iron Giant" tonight and it had a really amusing little scene involving duck and cover drills...

I hadn't heard that before, it sounds like some marvelous attempt at gallows humor. Actually, although I remember seeing the "home size" shelters advertised on tv and in newspapers, nobody I ever met had one. I've seen films of the backhoes digging the holes for the drop-in module types, and remember thinking it looked more like a porta-potty than something that could protect a family of 4. In those days we were all very naive as to the lingering effects of a blast, and that is why John Wayne and a lot of Nevada residents are no longer with us, not to mention anybody who had been on a ship at Bikini Atol. The silly little ventilation chimneys these shelters had look very unscientific to us now, but in those days everybody acted like only the largest cities would ever be attacked anyway. But before the Cold War ended and all the missles were counted, there was a bomb somewhere pointed at every city of note, coast to coast.

The main uban legend they have spread in my area is that the Central Valley of California will purposely be spared the radiation because the Russians had specific plans for us. Neutron bombs and bioagents would be used instead to eradicate the population without disturbing the facilities and farmland. Since this area produces much of the food in our country, they intended it for their own use. Possible truth? Who knows. Hope I don't have to find out.

I've a gut feeling that all these "secret plans" attribute the US and Soviet leaders with much more control and much more intelligence than is warranted. I think the reality was, when we don't know what to do next, push "the button" and see what happens. :D

I was of course suggesting that your perception of Americans that might be a bit myopic. But clearly you've been everywhere and seen everything.

Or your relatives have.

You think it's possible to require the government to do something? I just think it's foolish to expect "the government" to take care of you...especially in view of their track record in other endeavors. Education, for example. I suppose we could pass a law like the Swiss one requiring people to provide and equip their own shelters.

How well do you think that would work? Seriously.

Of course, Swiss citizens subject to conscription in emergency (all the males from 20 to 40, same law that requires shelters) are required to keep an assault rifle and know how to use it, too. And it also requires you to make any space in your shelter available for government use.

I'm sure Swiss civil defense is admirable in principle (although I don't evny them their tax rates). Apparently they were spending at the level of US$33 per capita on civil defence in the 1980s...probably gone up quite a bit since then. Of course they only have about 7.5 million people. (Compare the Philadelphia metro area at 5 million.)

Many Americans have made preparations for emergencies. They just don't talk about it a lot...perhaps so others of a more socialist bent (you know, the ones who want "the government " to take care of them) won't decide it would only be fair for them to share in the event of an emergency.

Which brings us back to that assault rifle thing. :-)

Speaking of "fallout shelters", it's quite true they were not intended to guard against blast or fire, and that's why they were callled "fallout shelters" rather than "bomb shelters".

The yellow trefoil sign indicated the presence of a public building that might offer some modest protection from prompt radiation from a nuke going off some distance away as well as shielding from the dusting of fallout afterwards. They were stocked with emergency water in 55-gal drums, crackers and hard candy sealed in cans, and simple radiation monitoring equipment. The hope was that folks who took shelter might be able to survive on the emergency rations inside the building until the outside radiation levels became survivable. Obviously the story for anybody close enough to a strike to be affected by blast or firestorm was pretty grim.

Nobody with any sense at all thought these very minimal measures offered any garauntees. It was just viewed as better than nothing for those not close enough to a target to have been immediately crisped...which was a substantial fraction of the entire poplulation, even more so back then.

At the time I was living here in Philly--with the Frankford Arsenal, the Navy Yard, NAS Willow Grove (key antisub base), Univac and GE Missile and Space division, we were pretty sure the town was worth a warhead or two,

Those viscous rumors really stick around, don't they, Foot? ;)

As a wee tad of about five, I remember Meeker, Colorado as not having direct dial in 1961-63: you lifted the receiver, the operator would say, "Number please," and you'd give her all seven digits and she'd connect you. I don't know what you did to dial out of town, but that was the local procedure. Meeker was not a big town, and our street didn't get asphalt until right about the middle of our stay.

Leaping to another comment, having grown up in the sixties myself, my experience says Tim Leary was a dope. Too, I'd have trouble awarding the "foul decade" prize to any decade I've inhabited -- too much good on the other end of the seesaw from too much bad. The Seventies did have some spectacular stupidities. Perhaps the dumbest of these was disco: dumb music doesn't make it.

Most people around here called them bomb shelters, and a few folks called them storm shelters.
I knew lots of folks who had dug a huge hole and pushed an old car in & covered it up to use as a 'bum' shelter. As a child they were very scary places. But cool.

I also take the position that fallout shelters are not bomb shelters.

I vaguely recall there being a CD sign on the front of my hospital when I started working there, but it's since been removed. I also remember a number of buildings on my college campus having that designation, and there were also actual bomb shelters on the property.

You didn't grow up in the 60s. :eyebrow:

Are you implying that UG never grew up?

Some folks did build real "bomb shelters"....I was referring to the then-ubiquitous Federally-stocked fallout shelter sites, denoted by a sign like this one:.

http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/si...ecrapjerk2.jpg

Here's the crackers/candy/water/dosimeter/geiger type equipment I referred to:

http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/supply/supply.jpg

http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/shelsupp.html

It all looks so morbid.
I've heard them called fallout shelters, but rarely in the southeast.
Most of the older folks I knew would tell you that a nuclear attack would be 'the end of the world'. I believed it. I was very sure it would put your eye out.

Besides.....the crackers tasted like shit. :vomit:

Indeed. The candy kepy pretty well though. According to an article at that site the crackers were eventually recalled. How long they were speced to last, I don't know.

As for "morbid"...well...in those days the risk of nuclear war was quite real. In fact--although we didn't know it at the time--one Soviet sub sent to break the Cuban blockade was armed with nuclear torpedos. And they had tacical nukes that would have been used in the event of an invasion. It would only have taken one small miscaclulation on either side to light the big fuse.

T'was a very, very near thing. I'd hate to think we might have failed to prepare for what might have happened because it was "morbid". There was indeed a high level of fatalism in those days--one that is probably diffcult for somebody growing up post-Cold-War to imagine.

That would have been bad, by the time the Cuban thing happened we'd already hit the supplies in the dorm basement fallout shelter. :blush:

:lol: They slip by most people...

Those viscous rumors really stick around, don't they, Foot?
They slip by most people...

We got a couple of comedians here.

I was talking about the examples of China and Switzerland. Period. Your sarcasm is unwarranted.

Well you see, it's kinda like this. We have these old pieces of paper cluttering up our history that say a few things about the purpose of government being to defend and protect the citizens. That's why we pay taxes and allow ourselves to be conscripted into the military should the need arise one of these days. Whether they, nowdays, are actually DOING that is a different issue for discussion. I am not saying anything whatever about the government "owing" me (or anybody) anything else. Not food or housing or education or toilet paper, nothing except the very reasonable expectation that they plan to prevent another power from dropping bombs on my head or in other ways terminating me while I am just going about my business. If we peasants are all toast, the so-called governors will have nobody to foot the bill either, so that is also their incentive to keep us safe, one would think. The deal is, we give them money and they take care of "all that", that's a contract that citizens have with their governments, and otherwise we would have to go back to fuedalism in order to secure our own protection. So please don't try to turn it into another discussion about entitlement mentality. Civil defense or the lack of it is not part of the welfare programs the last time I heard.

I'll keep my own counsel on that; my sarcasm is warranted whenever I deem it so. When I suggest you're off-base about how well prepared most Americans (when you include the population *outside* the Blue cities) are to deal with emeregencies, handwaving about China and Switzerland misses the point.
Did you ever sign a contract where you exchanged valuable consideration for the promise of something as vague as "all that"? We're pretty far from universal agreement on what "all that" actually entails and how to provide it, which is one reason we have the "pieces of paper" to which you allude.

With any kind of luck we'll avoid some of the definitions in use in Switzerland and China, where the distinction between "civil defense" and "welfare" does indeed seem a bit blurry. You should go read that Swiss law you're holding up as an exemplar. When the law requires me to turn over shelter space for use as the government sees fit (i.e. to give to somebody else), I'd say we're in the blur zone.

Oh, how nice. We have somebody else like UG who feels free to jerk the conversation in any direction and attack the other person's knowledge, personality, motives or background when observed to be doing so. Well, I'll leave you there because, after all, my evil twin and I are only around to provide comic relief for people like you. Enjoy.

By the way, my mother's family has lived in Switzerland for 4 generations and if I wanted any further elaborations on what it is like there I would not be interested in having you tell me.

I just don't care to simply allow you to frame all the terms of debate. If you feel that's "jerking the conversation in any direction" and constitutes a personal attack on your motives, well, sorry. You'll just have to deal.

My main points are

1)The apparent truth of the proposition "most Americans are ill-prepared to deal with an emergency" varies widely with which subset of the population you're most familiar; it's far from isotropic.

2) The strategy of "I don't think the people are doing $X the way I think they should so let's have 'the goverment' do it for them my way at taxpayer expense." is not a winner

and

3) "How 'the government' does $X for them in China or Switzerland" is usually not portable to a country of our size, structure, situation and politics, even if we assume it was desrirable in situ.

THIS is what I said, and nothing else: "The attitude in this country nowdays about protecting the public is nonexistent. While Switzerland and China have completed massive projects to greatly increase their chances of survival, America outside the Mormon church would not even have a clue what to do or where to go."

The only statement of yours which even approaches it is 1). If you wish to take my statement, which I still stand by, and turn it into a discussion of entitlement mentality while dragging me by a noose around my neck into YOUR territory, forget it. I am not talking about anything else this government does or does not do, I said simply that if our government has abandoned any pretense of civil defense, there is no other way to do it on the scale which is required. I'm not interested in your survivalist mentality about every man for himself when the balloon comes down so let's stock up on ammunition and too bad if you other scum want into my shelter cause it ain't gonna work. I'm talking about the CITIZENS, all of the country, the 300 million people give or take a few million illegal aliens, who will be forced to take the consequences when a government who has only provided sanctuary for their highest officials leaves them in the open. I said that Switzerland and China have long ago addressed this issue and resolved it as well as possible, which is TRUE. That was the only point on which these other countries were mentioned and whatever else they do with their citizens or revenue is not at issue; nobody is analyzing HOW or WHY the did it, they just DID IT. One country is Socialist and the other Communist, they have nothing whatsover in common in this thread except that they looked to the security of their citizens. Our way of government has practically nothing in common with either of those countries, and although we have the ability to follow their example or go them one better, we have not and probably will not. My statements stop there. If you want to take those thoughts somewhere else and extrapolate into your own take on the situation, do not drag me with you. Go by yourself.

So, "how or why"...

one Socialist country twice the size of New Jersey with a population comparable to metro Philadelphia

and

one Communist country with five times the population of the US (in slightly less land area)

...have done what they've done to "protect the public" aren't germane to your version of the discussion, and that one is Socialist and the other Communist is irrelevant too (presumably because there's obviously no connection between Socialism and Communism).

My sense is "the attitude in the country nowdays about protecting the public" is that people should plan and provide their own protection as much a possible, rather than relying on "the government" to protect them. Of course, that's the attitude prevailing amongst the crowd *I* run with; *your* peeps obviously have a different view.

I think centralized planning and provisioning for emergencies sucks rocks; a distributed approach is much more robust. I suppose we'll find out how effective the centralized approach is if one of those systems you cite is ever called upon to perform, since they've "solved it as well as possible".

this is good

No, unfortunatly he did, but not in the 60s.
He said he was 5 in 61~63, so at the end of the 60s around 13, clearly not old enough to make the decisions that people facing the war had to make. He was probably mimicing the the adults he wanted to so dearly please.
When he did grow up in the 70s/80s, he busied himself with learning languages so that he could find authors that agreed with his left over childhood notions and never had to make real choices.
Sad really. :(

I'm an even bigger geezer now. I had completely forgotten this thread.

17, but you only need a good background in social history to get most of them.

I got 15.

1. B
2. C X
3. C
4. A
5. B
6. A
7. C
8. C X
9. A
10. C
11. C
12. C X
13. B X
14. C
15. C X
16. A
17. B
18. C
19. A
20. A

I got 20, even tho I had a problem with a couple of answers. Number 16 had a misnomer, calling ditto, or spirit duplicators mimeos. Mimeo sheets usually stunk, but dittos, which have been banned from classrooms here, have that nice smell of alcohol. I didn't use it to get high, and neither did anyone else I knew. It just smelled good.
Number 19 I only heard sang by the Mills Brothers. The answer says the Ink Spots were a fifties group, but they were around long before the fifties.
Okay, it's just details, but I'm geezer enough to be allowed to be crotchety.

I got 15...and most of them I lied/guessed. Very little relevant to Brits.

13. boy do I remember those air raid drills!

I date back to the Eisenhower Administration -- not that I really remember.

The adults I wanted to please didn't have an input here. Sometimes they looked quite askance at things I said. But they weren't going to tell me I was being some kind of evil monster for being anticommunist, after all.

So you think you understand the motives behind my endeavors. If that's what you've come up with, you're only kidding yourself. Kidding yourself is a great way not to think in an enlightened way, which is regrettable in a man of your parts, Bruce. Right now, you're being a wanker, looking for any excuse however specious to reject proliberty, prohuman thought, just to see if you can make me feel bad. Not gonna happen; too much enlightenment and prodemocracy, proliberty thinking on this end. If there's not enough on your end, isn't it time to pull up your socks? You really seem to disapprove when I inveigh against totalitarianism and declare it should be made extinct -- which tells me you want it around. If you didn't, you'd sound more like me, and I have a very good way to sound. I make democracy's slackers quite uncomfortable by pointing out the horrors with which they declare themselves in sympathy -- I can see behind a lot of what people write, looking at their reasoning process. If you can't tell when you're slinging the BS, Bruce, I certainly can.

[edit] And I got 17. Tended to miss the music/popculture ones.

Something you boys want to share with the board?



[eta] I'm sorry. I can't help it. I'm British. I am genetically programmed to pick up on unintended smut.

:bolt: They're geezers.:bolt: