Duck and Cover is not stupid, it's not a lie to the public to 'keep them compalcent'. It's not a joke, and the Lieberals who pretend it is and laugh at the videos are idiots. I can say that because I bought it, when I was in my teens I saw a TV show making fun of it and I stopped thinking, and accepted it as truth.
Then in college I actually got curious and researched nuclear exchanges, and came across a US congressional report, concise, not too long but full of details, that was a GREAT read. I'll try to find the title again, or buy the whole thing from the Library.
Essentially in a nuclear exchange on hardened targets they try to put the warhead directly on the silo or bunker, and that maximizes blast overpressure but minimizes ***secondary effects. Every other exchange would use airbursts, targeting oil refineries, industrial or urban areas, it will be a burst way up in the sky that will cause overpressure to a greater area, but less of it. If there was a ground-burst downtown the buildings would severly mitigate all of its immediate effects. For example a bomb in the KiloTon ranges would be truly destructive in a radius measured in blocks, not miles.
HEALTH EFFECTS:
IMMEDIATE:
The immediate effects of a blast are the burst of radiation and the overpressure. The radiation has many forms, but it's all direct. The infra-red radiation will be as bad as the Gamma , but the former can be impeded by a wall or even a curtain, while the latter requires extreme density to catch all the ionizing particles (getting ionized is bad). For example food irradiating plants use 14' thick walls, for absolute safety. And of course lead will catch more radiation than an equivalent thickness of concrete, because it is denser.
So a bomb goes off, and the average Lieberal is out in the open being a dumbass. What happens to them?
#1) Close up They get burnt to death really really quickly.
#2) Farther away they get burnt, but not enough to kill them. Instead they simply become a burn victim as if they were smoking while taking a bath in kerosene. Even farther away they'll simply have moderate or severe burns, which will likely be debilitating but something they might recover from, if they don't get infection (which is easier said than done when there's no medical infrastructure, probably not even clean water). They're probably also blind, to varying degrees. On cloudy days, with snow on the ground, you could get exposed flesh burnt by a blast tens of miles away that you didn't even see, and that you won't hear for several minutes.
#3) Farther away they catch ionizing radiation, Alpha, Beta, or Gamma. A is stopped by paper, B by tinfoil, G by 14' concrete. It might kill them in days, or weeks, or not. And they won't know if it will kill them, because people take it differently. But after a few days of being sick they'll start feeling better, and they'll feel healthy enough to do activity, maybe dig a grave or something. And then there's a variable chance of whether they'll stay 'healthy' or get very sick again - yes some people will recover from smaller doses, and live for many years being healthy, but they're more likely to get cancer and stuff later on.
#4) Close up their body is destroyed by overpressure.
#5) Farther away they get smashed by large & small debris.
#6) Farther they get impaled by boards from their neighbor's picket fence being blown away from ground zero. The distance this is deadly varies with warhead size, but doubling warhead yield does not equal doubling overpressure radius - you have diminishing returns. A warhead chart can show rings of overpressures, and a legend should list the damage to common structures by said overpressures, measured in PSI.
AFTER EFFECTS:
#1) With a groundburst there'll be a fallout plume downwind. If Detroit was hit Windsor would get fallout, it goes miles and miles. The plume will look just like the profile of a candle, if it was burning on its side, the wick was ground-zero, and the flame went horizontally. It's hotter in the middle, a little less hot as you move to the sides, and noticeably cooler the farther downwind you go. Iirc the Gamma radiation often has the shorter half-life (but it all depends on what the bomb was made of), so after a short period of time (weeks) if will be 'safe' to come out because Alpha and Beta can be easily shielded against. But if you've only listened to Lieberal media you might not realize that your clothes and skin are doing an OK job of shielding you, but you're eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and open wounds are NOT protected. So if you don't wear a respirator and goggles and stuff you're going to get fried by radiation that gets INSIDE you, and that stuff can do even more damage.
#2) With an airburst there isn't going to be much fallout, because the bomb didn't dig a crater and throw dirt up up into the air. But still, stay upwind. Also things that are 'irratiated' won't be safe to stick in your mouth for many years, totally depending on the bomb and the material. Don't buy 2nd hand cars, no matter how low the mileage, or guns even with nice bores.
So what happens to all the Lieberals who got their info from TV? Well there'll be a lot of worm food. And the immediate and delayed effects of the bomb aren't all that will kill you. A single large airburst above an average city would produce about 15,000 severe burn cases, and the entire USA hospital capacity can't treat anywhere near that many, ever. So most of them die. And the moderate burn victims probably get infections, and then die. And it'll be tough to get to the hospital for that severe cut from your window breaking, so moderate to serious injuries are probably write-offs too. And your blinded folks won't survive without help either. And if you need medicine, good luck with that. And if you have a non-bomb-related accident a month later, guess what all the lingering but inevitably dieing victims from the bomb used up all the medical supplies already, so you're back to civil-war medicine and the higher mortality rate associated with it - nothing like a doctor with a hacksaw.
Wow, that all sucks eh? You probably wonder how to avoid dieing like all those people. Well you're in luck, because the ways to not die like that are IN THE VIDEOS.
No offence to anyone, but it just really pisses me off when I found out I was lied to (by a gov't made show on the gov't TV station!) and that Duck and Cover is NOT B.S. And I feel a twinge of anger whenever I see the myth repeated, not at the victim of the lie but at the perpetrators.
