Do you know what to do if the Bomb drops? Until recently, I sure didn’t. The bulk of my civil-defense training had come from those black-light posters that were popular in the early 70s, the ones that listed ten steps to prepare yourself for a thermonuclear explosion. I forget what the first nine steps were, but number ten was always “Bend over and kiss your ass good-bye.” The advice looked cool hanging next to the Day-Glo poster of Jimi at Monterey, but as a practical reference guide to surviving a nuclear war, it didn’t pack much megatonnage.
With the states in control, some pretty strange ideas reared their nuclear heads. In 1951 New York City allocated $87,000 to buy metal identification tags for its schoolchildren. The tags, which were modeled after U.S. Army dog tags, were issued with the express purpose of aiding civil-defense workers in identifying lost children in an atomic attack. Left unspoken was that the tags would also be handy in identifying children burned to a crisp in a nuclear explosion, which their heat-resistant tags would survive. By the following year, New York had handed out two and a half million free tags to all children from kindergarten to the fourth grade in public, parochial, and private schools.
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No time to lose, I thought, knowing how much can happen in a nanosecond in the nuclear age. Let’s get to it.
Well, you wouldn’t have to bother with any more of those review questions, for one. The Attack Warning Signal, by the way, is one of the more fascinating–and largely unknown–aspects of America’s civil-defense program. According to the text, the Attack Warning Signal is a “wavering sound on sirens or a series of short blasts on horns or whistles.” In some towns the system may be made up of factory whistles or church bells. The Attack Warning Signal will be sounded for three to five minutes when an enemy attack has been launched. “When you hear this signal,” the course instructs, “you may have only five to 15 minutes to find shelter.”
