In junior high, my brother used to read books from the 1960s on nuclear warfare and we worked out at dinner one night that the thing to do was hope you were killed instantly or duck and cover.
The "emergency procedure" sheets when I was in school always had a space for the euphemistically entitled "nuclear emergency". Surely filling that blank in would be a first step. (Heck, duck and cover's not that dissimilar from school earthquake drills, I don't think. I explain school tornado drills to Californians by telling them it's duck and cover or an earthquake, but in the hallway, rather than under the desk.) Or just putting an item on the local news with some old civil defense video and the reporter saying "By the way, we figured out that really wasn't as stupid as we all thought it was." It might be enough to put the idea back in people's heads without alarming them. It's not as if people don't know what duck and cover is/was, so telling them it isn't the joke we treat it as would be a first step.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 02:33 pm (UTC)The "emergency procedure" sheets when I was in school always had a space for the euphemistically entitled "nuclear emergency". Surely filling that blank in would be a first step. (Heck, duck and cover's not that dissimilar from school earthquake drills, I don't think. I explain school tornado drills to Californians by telling them it's duck and cover or an earthquake, but in the hallway, rather than under the desk.) Or just putting an item on the local news with some old civil defense video and the reporter saying "By the way, we figured out that really wasn't as stupid as we all thought it was." It might be enough to put the idea back in people's heads without alarming them. It's not as if people don't know what duck and cover is/was, so telling them it isn't the joke we treat it as would be a first step.