Random information gathering. Feel free to answer if you're not on my friends list, if you stumble upon this post at some point in the distant future, or repost if you happen to share my curiosity
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For what it's worth, I grew up right next to a Navy base (literally - my first elementary school shared a fence with it, and we lived across the street from the school), and within a few miles of the downtown of a major city. Now we live a few miles from another military base. But I'm not sure I even heard of the concept of nuclear war before the cold war ended.
It wasn't so much duck and cover but get out in to the hallway and kneel down with your back to the wall and cover your head with your hands in case the hurricane blew through. The hallway because of no windows. The cower was so if anything fell it wouldn't dash our brains out.
Born 1983, went to grade school and high school in Montana, never had a civil defense drill, a tornado drill, an earthquake drill, or any drill that involved ducking and/or covering.
The area of Montana where I grew up got sirens installed some time after 9/11; I believe they're only used for tornado warnings, or, at least, that's the only time I've heard them which isn't the first-Monday-of-the-month self-test.
When I lived in the Sunset district in the city, there was a siren that would go off every weekday at noon. We have one here in Alameda, too. But I have always assumed it was a lunchtime siren. It doesn't go off on the weekends.
We had earthquake and fire drills in school, but no "OMG NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST" drills.
In the UK, we all pretty much figured that if the nukes started flying, we - meaning Western Europe - were all dead anyway. US global strategy at the time was based around MAD and the idea that a "theater nuclear war" could be won by the US, where a "theater nuclear war" basically meant one in which only Western Europe got turned into a blasted radioactive wasteland. We knew quite well that all it would take was two 600MT warheads air-burst at 50,000 feet, one over north London, one over about Manchester, and the whole of England would be pretty much fucked.
I recall one of the better-regarded scholars of military strategy and technology - Gen. Sir John Hackett, iirc - estimating that if the Warsaw Pact launched a massive conventional assault across the North European plain, the first tactical nukes would fly between four and six hours after they crossed the Iron Curtain.
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The area of Montana where I grew up got sirens installed some time after 9/11; I believe they're only used for tornado warnings, or, at least, that's the only time I've heard them which isn't the first-Monday-of-the-month self-test.
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We had earthquake and fire drills in school, but no "OMG NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST" drills.
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I recall one of the better-regarded scholars of military strategy and technology - Gen. Sir John Hackett, iirc - estimating that if the Warsaw Pact launched a massive conventional assault across the North European plain, the first tactical nukes would fly between four and six hours after they crossed the Iron Curtain.
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