Via Instapundit… there are people who actually find this movie from the 1950s funny, and not in a good way.
Umm… it’s not. It’s practical advice geared to kids in order to try to minimize flash burns and cuts from a nuclear blast. That people find it amusing is an indictment of our time period, not theirs.
Moe Lane
PS: Fallout is most dangerous when ingested, breathed in, and/or in direct contact with the skin. If, God forbid, you are ever in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, cover yourself up as much as possible. I mention this because a lot of people, judging from YouTube, seem to be getting their information on nuclear explosions from video games.
Most people who make fun of this are forgetting that it was geared towards the time when Soviet nukes were delivered by bomber, not missile. The video didn’t make sense when compared to the later period when nuclear war meant total annihilation.
The most cynical, though accurate, description I have ever heard of “history” is “judging the people and actions of a prior era by the standards and morals of today.”
Moe, you can’t use YouTube commenters as a benchmark against which to measure the intelligence of the general public. I would say that by and large the YouTube commentariart is congenitally retarded, but honestly the mentally handicapped possess far more common sense and human decency than the average YouTube commenter.
MikeCG: true about the intelligence thing. I could see the average IQ of the blogosphere rise when YT’s comment section got popular.
I can’t find my old copy of Glasstone’s “Effects of Atomic Weapons” with its great circular slide rule calculator, but I always impressed me about how many people survived the Japanese attacks. Radiation sickness was survivable for those with large exposures and longer term cancers were less than expected. Surviving the blast was the highest priority.
The assumptions of a total missile war in the 70’s were probably way out of whack then as they are now. A real nuclear war would be at most 10’s of warheads. Pretty awful, but one where civil defense mattered.