In my opinion, this video was intended to provide false security to the public. A lot of instructions in this video are only relevant if you're many miles (I'd say at least 25 - 30) from the explosion. Either way, I love watching videos like this.
So you are saying the producers of the film sat around and discussed "how can we make a film that will provide false security to the public.?" They actually purposely did that? This is often said about CD related stuff.
Duck and Cover is by far the most widely ridiculed CD film since it's the one film that's always hauled out every time any CD related subject is reported in the media.
I never hear anyone bring up the fact that D&C came out in 1950.
That's about a year after the Soviets exploded their first A-bomb. That's "A-bomb" not thermonuke megaton range bomb.
Put the thing in context of the time it came out. At the time the Soviets had very few 20kt range A-bombs and they would have been delivered by their first bombers. Hardly an "end of the world" scenario.
The D&C drill was obviously never intended to protect people close to an explosion. It's intended to reduce injuries for those farther away out of direct blast range. At the time that would have been a few miles away not 20-30 miles.
The 1950 D&C film is always applied equally across the time of the cold war in order to ridicule it. It's interesting to note that another CD film that promoted D&C was never released after 1950. At least I haven't seen one.
From what i heard, Fallout could still get to you. In a 10 mile or less radius you'd be done. 10 miles might seem a log way, But that's where the technology of the Atom/ Nuclear bomb comes in. These days an atomic bomb the size of a small Television (19 inches) can blow away about 25 miles of area (Coverage of fallout). I have No idea as to if this theory is true, But it seems like as how long ago it was that it took a bomb the size of a propane tank to cover a 10 mile raduis with fallout.
It all depends on where the bomb is exploded. A ground burst generates far more fallout because of the debris that is pulled up into the atmosphere by the explosion. If there is a high air burst there isn't as much fallout.
Even in the later Cold War days CD planners knew they were dealing with something that would have been a "last ditch effort."
Below is what I call the "Last Ditch Effort" graph. This graph was published in a booket summarizing the national fallout shelter program in 1963. It proves that the fallout shelter program that was the last effort of the CD program was a "Last Ditch Effort." At the time the U.S. Poplulation was 190 million. At the very left of the graph they have almost half of the poplulation being killed in an attack. At the right just about everyone dies. Yes there would be millions of people that would survive no matter what. Sure you can say why survive with what would be left but this graph proves to me that the CD "guys" weren't painting a nice picture of what would happen in a nuke war. The fallout shelter program of the 60s was pretty much a "Ok. We're gonna have millions left alive after an attack. What to we do" type of plan. The fallout shelter program was pretty much all they could come up with. The "Grand Plan" was to have a missle defense system (Nike X) to protect from attack along with the shelter system as a back up. That never happened and the shelter program faded away pretty quickly starting in the late 1960s.
