What to do if an atomic bomb goes off : Omni Brain

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The Omnibrain is a psychology graduate student at an online university. He hopes that the three weeks and $29.95 that he is spending on his Ph.D. will get him a job at a Tier 1 research university. Do online universities have postdocs? Ok...just kidding, The Omnibrain is a real graduate student at a real school somewhere in the continental United States - or maybe Europe.

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What to do if an atomic bomb goes off

Category: Policy & Politics • Popular Culture • Stupid People • Video
Posted on: December 23, 2007 8:23 AM, by The Omnibrain

Why Duck and Cover of course! Check out this great video from the cold war:

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Comments

Is the video edited, or are the shots of Reagan, Oppenheimer etc original?

Reminds me of the souhpark volcano episode.

Posted by: joe | December 23, 2007 12:30 PM

I'm old enough to remember blast curtains in our school basement, and the bomb drills we had every month or so. Years later they became ''civil defense' drills, which were bomb drills lightly euphemized.

When I got to college, there never were any bomb drills or civil defense anything, and I wondered why.

Now I think the bomb drills were to frighten children so they would grow up to be frightened adults. It worked.

Posted by: CRM-114 | December 23, 2007 1:27 PM

What if you cover and THEN duck? Would it still work?

Also, that kid on the bike looked like he got curbed when he planted his face into the sidewalk... My G-d!

Posted by: Snacho Ponze | December 23, 2007 4:09 PM

I remember seeing that turtle in first or second grade. They would also show video of whole houses being blown over or set on fire by the bomb. I could never figure out how ducking and covering would help at all. In Chicago we had air raid sirens that went off every Tuesday at 10:30am. We all had to duck and cover. And in my school if you covered and then ducked you would get a strong whack from the nuns.
What was really scary about this vid is the fact that they always referred to "the bomb" like they knew it was coming. Between looking for the flash and for Communists, growing up in the 50's was tons of fun.

Posted by: wrpd | December 23, 2007 6:35 PM

Ah, yes, the good old days. I remember the air raid drills in second grade. The sirens would go off, like in The Time Machine (the original one with Yvette Mimieux). We had to go out in the hallway and crouch down against the wall and cover our necks with our hands.

And yes, it did scare the hell out of us. I think that ironically the constant fear of imminent nuclear attack was largely responsible for the attitudes young people developed in the 60s. We often reasoned that "the world might end tomorrow" and this kind of thinking was often used to justify things like taking drugs and having sex.

Posted by: Riesz Fischer | December 23, 2007 11:23 PM

They had the ear-splitting air raid sirens here, but I don't recall the turtle. I think the fear-mongering was worse because we lived on a military base.
Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Posted by: witchypoo | December 24, 2007 1:44 PM

There are many useful informations in this great article�I really enjoy reading the whole blog that you write. Thanks!

Posted by: �bersetzungen | February 19, 2008 5:40 PM