“Enough shovels to go around”: Ars looks back at the lies of the Cold War

In the fall of 1971, I got my first taste of what the Cold War was really about. I was in the second grade at Coram Elementary School. As an alarm sounded, my teacher, Mrs. Cohen, led us out of the classroom into the school's brick-lined central hallway and told us to kneel with our heads down in the "duck and cover" position.

"Why are we doing this?" I asked her.

She replied, "It's what we do if there's a bomb."

I pictured Boris Badenov lobbing a bomb toward our school and wondered what kneeling in a hallway would do to protect us from that. I figured it had something to do with the windows. I would have dreams about that for some time after—a dark figure lobbing cartoon bombs at my school.

As a former military officer from the Reagan and Bush eras, I'm Ars Technica's unofficial Cold Warrior in Residence. The recent release of the latest Fallout game coming on the heels of some truly frightening documents from the National Security Archive seemed designed to bring back some vivid memories from both my military service and from growing up under the nuclear deterrent umbrella—when civil defense evacuation maps were in the front of the phone book, the Emergency Broadcast System test alert sent a chill down everyone's spine, and we were all 30 minutes from being dead at any given moment.

So, to bring everyone a bit of perspective of what to be thankful for this holiday weekend, we've thrown together a collection of comforting reminders from our Cold War past of the sorts of things the government did to make us stop worrying and learn to love (or at least tolerate) the idea of a survivable nuclear war.

Duck and cover

In the 1950s and 1960s, the US government went through the motions of trying to prepare the American public for nuclear war. The Federal Civil Defense Administration (which would later become the Office of Civil Defense within the Department of Defense, and then eventually the Federal Emergency Management Agency) produced an array of educational films to educate people on how to evacuate cities—and what to do if there was no time for evacuation because of a surprise attack. These films tried to make planning and practicing for attacks a routine part of being a homeowner. FCDA even published specifications for building home fallout shelters—specifications that would raise their head again in the 1980s.

The most famous (and perhaps infamous) of these films is Duck and Cover, the film that used a cartoon turtle to teach children the basics of surviving a sneak nuke attack.

In the 1960s, the education program moved into multimedia, including film strips for use with newfangled auto-advance slide viewers—the PowerPoint of its era.

But after the Cuban Missile Crisis—and with the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which rendered air defenses moot—most Civil Defense planning went cold for much of the 1970s; Mutual Assured Destruction meant not thinking about survival. My experience in elementary school was the last civil defense drill my Long Island school district staged. Even so, the Civil Defense office continued to publish educational material on surviving nuclear war, including this 1965 film on fallout first aid:

Back to the future (of fallout)

That all started to change in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration started talking about America surviving, or even winning, a nuclear war. Thomas K. Jones, Reagan's deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, famously said that if there was a nuclear war, "if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it."

 

At a National Security Council meeting in December of 1981, Reagan approved a new Civil Defense program. In his diary entry, Reagan wrote, "Right now in a nuclear war we'd lose 150 million people. The Soviets could hold their losses down to less than were killed in WWII." That plan would become a February 1982 secret order calling for the creation of a civil defense plan that would "provide for the survival of the US population" even in the event of a protracted nuclear war.

So FEMA started evaluating which American communities were the most vulnerable in the event of an attack and producing plans for their evacuation in the event of a crisis that might lead to nuclear attack. In 1982, the Defense Department was saying that with the right "crisis relocation program" in place, 80 percent of Americans could survive a nuclear war (and about 30 percent would survive without such planning).

I was distinctly aware of these numbers for a reason: the town I moved to for my last year of high school—Plattsburgh, New York—was the home of a Strategic Air Command base. General Dynamics FB-111 bombers rattled the windows with their afterburners when launching on alert. The Federal Emergency Management Agency rated Plattsburgh as having a "Category I" vulnerability to nuclear attack—a missile launched by a Soviet ballistic missile sub from the "Whiskey patrol box" could hit in 10 minutes. There was a nuclear war evacuation map in the phone book with instructions on where to drive and what to take with you (your will, your credit card, and extra socks).

But my real Cold Warrior credentials come from my service as part of the nuclear deterrent as a US Navy officer. And that experience is a story to share another time. In the meantime, we'd like our readers old enough to remember the end of the Cold War to share their duck and cover memories.

Listing image by Michigan Civil Defense Museum