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Comment by alethiophile | Hacker News Reader

In most any kind of disaster, secondary effects kill way more people than primary effects. Even if it seems silly, taking effective measures against the secondary effects is very worth doing.

(Also, for nuclear bombs specifically, hiding under the desks keeps kids out of view of windows, and hence not vulnerable to being blinded/burned by a flash.)

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For example, one school was maybe a mile outside the front gates in Quantico. No desk is going to help us there. We were going out in the very first volley, regardless of furniture.

How long ago was this? Soviet missiles were extremely inaccurate for a long time, so there's the definite possibility of a near miss at a range where the building collapsing on top of everybody would be the biggest danger.

I would imagine at the time, the first strike would be in the hundreds, of not thousands of warheads. Coupled with the blast radius, missing doesn't seem relevant in that scenario.

Like the saying goes, "almost doesn't count except horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear warheads."

During the era of "duck and cover," the Soviets had an extremely limited ability to strike the US. They had a mediocre bomber fleet which would probably have been torn to pieces by North American air defense. They had ICBMs from the late 50s, but not in significant numbers until well into the 60s. The popular idea of nuclear war starting with thousands of warheads coming in over the pole all at once wasn't really a possibility until the 70s or so.

Fair.

But most schools aren't, and they aren't going to roll out those procedures unevenly.

You may be right, though things were far less standardized back then. When I went to boarding school, they had no such drills. I'm not sure if that compares, as it was also in a different State. So, you may be right. I dunno, really.

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