Question for people under 40: - Did you ever do Duck and Cover drills?

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KiwiFuzz

KiwiFuzz

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If so, what was the context?

(Don't dox yourself. If you don't know what this is, ask a boomer.)
 
I grew up post Columbine so active shooter drills were all the rage. Nothing ever happened though.
 
Nah. Closest we got were school shooter drills. Teachers locked the doors and had us line up along the wall next to it to hide from somebody peeking in the door's window.
 
Why limit it to under 40s? Did American schools do "Duck and Cover" much after the early 1960s (once people realized that what had a small chance of working at defending yourself against a regular atomic bomb wouldn't be nearly as effective against a hydrogen or neutron bomb)?

I went to elementary school in the 1980s and all I remember along those lines were fire drills. I guess I was born too late for "Duck and Cover" and too early for active shooter drills.
 
sasazuka said:
Why limit it to under 40s? Did American schools do "Duck and Cover" much after the early 1960s (once people realized that what had a small chance of working at defending yourself against a regular atomic bomb wouldn't be nearly as effective against a hydrogen or neutron bomb)?

I went to elementary school in the 1980s and all I remember along those lines were fire drills. I guess I was born too late for "Duck and Cover" and too early for active shooter drills.
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I'm wondering when the shadow of the bomb faded. I'm assuming people under 40 never spent a lot of time thinking about it, and might not have spent time ducking and covering, at least not with that rationale.
 
KiwiFuzz said:
I'm wondering when the shadow of the bomb faded. I'm assuming people under 40 never spent a lot of time thinking about it, and might not have spent time ducking and covering, at least not with that rationale.
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There was still the shadow of the bomb in the 1980s (think about harrowing movies showing the aftermath of full-blown nuclear exchanges like The Day After and Threads as well as movies with a nuclear threat backdrop like The Terminator and Miracle Mile) but governments and school boards had, by the 1980s, realized that, if the bombs started launching when kids are in class, there's not a lot they'd be able to do to protect the kids.

A lot of schools had inner rooms, often cafeterias, designated as "fallout shelters" (which is quite likely why the cafeteria in my elementary school was in a half-basement) but that's more for protecting against fallout from nuclear attacks in other cities and probably wouldn't save anyone if a hydrogen bomb went off just a few miles away.

My own elementary school was in a semi-rural area roughly a 45 minute drive to the city centre so we might have initially been able to survive a nuclear attack (depending on how far from downtown the closest nuke had landed, considering larger cities like Montreal probably would have been targeted by several warheads from a MIRV missile) but I suspect most of us would have died in the weeks and months afterwards from radiation poisoning, hunger, hypothermia (if the nuclear war had happened in winter) or lack of medicine and medical care.
 
sasazuka said:
Why limit it to under 40s? Did American schools do "Duck and Cover" much after the early 1960s (once people realized that what had a small chance of working at defending yourself against a regular atomic bomb wouldn't be nearly as effective against a hydrogen or neutron bomb)?

I went to elementary school in the 1980s and all I remember along those lines were fire drills. I guess I was born too late for "Duck and Cover" and too early for active shooter drills.
Click to expand...
Duck and cover would've been extremely effective for nuclear blasts. This is a common misconception. You don't win wars by blowing up schools or even cities. You win wars by blowing up the military and the industry that feeds it. Not to mention that as time has gone on, bombs have gotten smaller and far more accurate. Only some schools on military bases would've been subject to a near direct hit, the overwhelming majority of schools in what are called "target areas" would be miles away from blasts, and even if the blast is at about a mile away, as long as it was a standard Russian 400kt warhead, most of the serious effects of the immediate blast (overpressure, flying debris, and burns) could be mitigated by taking immediate cover under something as simple as a desk.

On the whole, Civil Defense, if properly funded, would've likely allowed the US to fight and win a nuclear war, which is why the communists spent so many millions of dollars trying to discredit it (even though Russia also was trying to develop a robust CD system). The history of Civil Defense is very complicated and I recommend more reading on the subject. There's a lot more than what I can write here.

To answer OP's question though, no, I'm too young for that, although we did have duck and cover drills for other natural disasters such as earthquakes and tornadoes.
 
No, though I have done fire, tornado, and active shooter drills. There was this one time my high-school made all the students evacuate the building because they got a bomb threat or something of that nature and a supposedly suspicious package also showed up that day. We were all herded into the near by district office or whatever it was until the package was revealed to be not a bomb.

The whole thing was kinda of exciting and funny because if I was told correctly, the package that arrived was only some uniform or clothing for the band/choir. Somewhere in that building we all had to evacuate to has a desk with my name and the date of the incident scrawled on the underside.
 
I did when I was in kindergarten and elementary school. From then on, I either did fire drills or active shooter drills.
 
I went to a very Christian private school so after 9/11 we did do a few duck and cover exercises along with the active shooter drills and that sort of thing.
 
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