Thursday, December 16, 2010

If Nuked stay in your Car or go to your Basement quickly

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/science/16terror.html

begin quote from above article:
Suppose the unthinkable happened, and terrorists struck New York or another big city with an atom bomb. What should people there do? The government has a surprising new message: Do not flee. Get inside any stable building and don’t come out till officials say it’s safe.
George Alexanderson/The New York Times
Employees entered a sub-basement shelter during a Port Authority Civilian Defense Drill in 1951.
Sal Veder/Associated Press
A mother and her children made a practice run for their $5,000 steel backyard fallout shelter in Sacramento, Calif., in 1961.

Readers' Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far. end quote.

As a child born in 1948 getting prepared for being nuked out in California. It was about a weekly or monthly experience in  grade school. At random or on a specific day we were told to crawl under our desks and cover our heads with our arms while in a kneeling "rolled into a ball" position under our desks. There was usually a lot of laughter and moaning from the  bumping of heads as one crawled under or out from under our desks. And at least one boy in the class would always say, "Yeah. Just bend over and kiss your  ass goodbye." There would always be laughter from all the most practical people in the room and usually horrified looks from the others.

I was going through the comments to this article in the New York Times and thought this one was important:

Wow, talk about isolationism! Just about every building (including many private homes) in Switzerland has in its basement a room (or rooms) with blast doors and emergency supplies. Wisdom in circa 1950's Switzerland,a famously neutral county, is political dynamite in front-line US?? end quote.

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