Non News of today.

[zeitghost]

Declassified 1959 (!) plan shows that the US intended to bomb the crap out of the USSR and China.

Well, no tulip Sherlock is about all I can say about that.

Looking at the comments on FB, you'd think that no one knew that before.

<shakes head in amazement at the ignorance of the youth of today>

The funniest comment was from someone old enough to remember the "Duck and Cover" instructional films.

She's of the (quite correct) opinion that it was a complete & utter waste of time.

Of course our Glorious Leaders in the UK knew that, so they didn't bother telling us anything whatever.

And were most upset when the Beeb made that 1960s film about nuclear war, which might have frightened the horses if it had been allowed to be broadcast.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059894/

[EternalOptimist]

Duck and cover was the same as collecting railings and saucepans to make Spitfires. Totally useless and even costly, but made the people think that someone somewhere knew what they were doing and had a plan.

[SueEllen]

Most of the railings got dumped in the sea.

I dunno what they did with the saucepans though.

What was the point of that?

[OwlHoot]

What was the point of that?

The collecting iron railings thing in WW2 was mostly to improve morale, by making people feel they were actively contributing. Although the iron turned out to be useless for its stated purpose of being used to build planes and ships, I think quite a bit was in the end used for bomb cases.

The "first generation" post-war leadership of SAC (Strategic Air Command), such as Curtis Lemay, were certified nutters who didn't really fully understand how different in kind nuclear weapons were to conventional munitions. With their gung ho attitude, we were damned lucky WW3 didn't kick off in the 1950s! It wasn't until Herman Kahn wrote his famous assessment of a nuclear war that the full implications sunk in.

[SueEllen]

Strange considering they had live case studies from Japan

[EternalOptimist]

The "duck and cover" era came to an end with the Ivy Mike and Castle Bravo tests of the first thermonuclear weapons.

These were orders (3 in the case of Castle Bravo) of magnitude greater than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

So "duck & cover" was an absolute waste of time.

Ivy Mike was a cryogenic device with a yield of 10Mt, while Castle Bravo was a dry device with a projected yield of 5Mt which ran away to 15Mt due to an unexpected reaction in Lithium 7.

In a nutshell
you could have run away in 1945 and survived
you could have driven away in 1955 and survived
you could have flew away in 1965 and survived

by 1975 you have to push your head between your knees.
keep pushing
now kiss your @rse goodbye

[Troll]

A sad timeline since Trinity in 1945

French seem a gung ho about setting them off ( & a UK sorry to Aus)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=LLCF7vPanrY

[NickFitz]

The funniest comment was from someone old enough to remember the "Duck and Cover" instructional films.

She's of the (quite correct) opinion that it was a complete & utter waste of time.

Of course our Glorious Leaders in the UK knew that, so they didn't bother telling us anything whatever.

Until Protect and Survive in 1980.

In 1979 my dad was sent on a secret training course at an RAF base in Yorkshire, where all this stuff was revealed to him and he was informed that he had a place in the bunker underneath County Hall if push should come to shove. His job would be to get whatever information there might be out to whatever citizens might be left by whatever means might be available - a bit of a change from his usual duties, which covered such matters as supervising the creation of tourist information leaflets, and persuading the local press to keep schtum when a senior council official was caught cottaging in the public lavs round the corner from the Town Hall.

But in the end it never happened, so that was all right

[vwdan]

Until Protect and Survive in 1980.

In 1979 my dad was sent on a secret training course at an RAF base in Yorkshire, where all this stuff was revealed to him and he was informed that he had a place in the bunker underneath County Hall if push should come to shove. His job would be to get whatever information there might be out to whatever citizens might be left by whatever means might be available - a bit of a change from his usual duties, which covered such matters as supervising the creation of tourist information leaflets, and persuading the local press to keep schtum when a senior council official was caught cottaging in the public lavs round the corner from the Town Hall.

But in the end it never happened, so that was all right

I went to Hack Green a few years back - while there's nothing there that isn't somewhat obvious (in hindsight) of a government genuinely concerned about a devastating nuclear attack, it certainly brought it all home for me. A lot of the place is mocked up as it would be in use, and it's the weird little things that stuck with me - like a list of motorways with "Destroyed", "Military Traffic Only" etc written next to them. Or the rows of desks with titles like "Burials and Disposals"...

I sometimes wonder just how close we came to being in a place that grim.