The 'duck and cover' bit is interesting

True, but remember, the whole idea was to stress that in the event of a nuclear attack you would survive if you followed this idiotic "duck and cover" nonsense. The idea was to reassure the American people that the bomb, while a threat, was at least an easily surviveable one.

"An Archer is known for his aim, not by his arrows."
-Li Chen-Sung (Richard Loo,) The Outer Limits

'Duck and Cover' is hilariously stupid. You can download the whole video from archive.org.

In a way, I wish US government had not lulled Americans into a false sense of security that they could survive nuclear attack by lowering themselves to the ground and pulling picnic blankets over their heads (as seen in one of the films featured in this movie). If they had understood the real implications of nuclear war, many people would not have been so cavalier about calling for war against the Soviets. Thankfully, influential people on both sides of the Iron Curtain had no desire to launch themselves into mutually assured destruction.

That said, the movie is simultaneously hilarious and mildly depressing. It's bad enough that people swallowed this propaganda back in the 1950's, but some people still think commies are hiding behind every tree and rock, ready to pounce at a moment's notice. It would be fun to show this movie to some foreign college students to see what they think of it...

The Duck and Cover bit is also deceptive, and it raises serious questions about the rest of the film.

For example, Atomic Cafe splices together fragments of sentences to make new ones, and puts voice overs from one section of the film onto a different section. The film also intersperses shots of Ronald Reagan into it, but he's not in the original.

Yes, the original film is silly, but not quite as these editors portrayed. Duck and cover was not intended to protect people from the explosion or radiation, but to protect people outside the "kill zone" from the worst of the debris and heat.

"Duck and Cover" works just fine. :P

Just ask all those human shadows permanently engraved on the sidewalks of Hiroshima: "d'oh! If only we'd thought of that!"

The part I always liked was that by my day (swear this is not made up) our school's "policy and procedures" handbook dictated that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, everyone was simply to be sent home early.

WTF?!? School's sub-basement was a designated fallout shelter! HELLOO?

the pointlessness of duck and cover is perfectly illustrated in the closing moments of the film. and with grim clarity.

keep in mind that most of america lives in the country and since most bombs would be in the cities, many americans would have been out of the high pressure zone and could theoretically survive the initial blast by avoiding flying debris.
in nagasaki and hiroshima, one of the main types of injury were wounds sustained from flying debris, the type of debris that might not have embedded itself into people were they under something.

compound this with the 50s being a time where we didnt yet have 300 times more nukes than it takes to cause virtual extinction.

not to say that the idea of civil defense wasnt a huge crock in the first place, but take these things into consideration.

That cartoon in its entirety is absolute kitschy 50's Cold War paranoia gold. It's both funny and chilling in equal measure because it clearly demonstrates just how incredibly naïve the general public was about the harsh reality of nuclear fallout at the time.

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