The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind by Martin Sixsmith

Author:Martin Sixsmith [Sixsmith, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781639361816
Google: z3ABEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1639361812
Published: 2021-11-11T13:42:17+00:00

22

DUCK AND COVER

There was a turtle by the name of Bert

And Bert the turtle was very alert,

When danger threatened him he never got hurt,

He knew just what to do …

He’d duck! And cover!

Duck! And cover!

He did what we all must learn to do –

You, and you, and you, and you –

Duck and cover!1

Had the Soviets fired their missiles from Cuba in October 1962, as Castro was urging them to do, schoolchildren all over America would have slid down from their chairs and hidden under their desks. For the previous decade, at the insistence of the US authorities, teachers had instructed young Americans to ‘duck and cover’ as soon as they heard the sound of the nuclear air-raid sirens in their cities, towns and villages. The drill had been repeated so often that for many children it became a Pavlovian response – an instinctive, unthinking reaction to a learned stimulus. The bouncy refrain of the ‘Bert the Turtle’ song, with its breezy doo-wop backing, made it sound like a jolly jape, but for those it was aimed at, duck and cover would leave a disturbing aftertaste.

The retrospective mockery with which Americans later spoke of duck and cover, and of the hapless inadequacy of Bert the Turtle’s prescriptions for survival, was in part a coping mechanism. Neither Bert’s turtle-shell nor the flimsy shelter of a school desk would have mitigated the effects of a 15-megaton bomb. Dropping to the floor and shielding your face may have protected you from the initial blast wave, but there would be no defence against the nuclear fallout that followed. Radioactive particles sucked into the explosion’s fireball would be scattered for miles on the wind.

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