How do you prepare for an atomic bomb attack?

Answer 1

I live in a city of about 60,000. There were five air raid sirens on roofs of large buildings around town when I was a kid, and they used to test them at noon every Tuesday. A very eerie sound. There were yellow and black Civil Defense signs in many public buildings, directing people to the basement in the event of an air raid. Food, water and blankets were supposed to be stored in these air raid shelters too, and medical supplies, including morphine, until the junkies broke in and stole the morphine. We used to have "air raid drills" when I was in elementary school. Sometimes we'd go out in the hallway and sit down on the floor with our backs to the walls, other times we'd all crowd into the "big room", which was a windowless room at the front of the lower level of the building, below ground level on that end. When I was young I worked in the Greyhound Bus Station and found an old yellow and black Civil Defense Geiger Counter in the ravaged remains of what had been the "bomb shelter" in the basement of the Bus Station. New in the box. I took it home, and later donated it to the physics lab at the local university. They did not have a Geiger Counter ("Radiological Dosimeter"). Lots of Americans dug air raid shelters in their backyards in the 50s, and you could go to places like Sears and buy a prefab unit to bury out back.

And not any of this would have been the least little bit of help. All the crowding into public air raid shelters would have just made it easier to find the corpses afterward.

Somewhere in my childhood they stopped testing the air raid sirens every Tuesday. The government had said we were a Class II nuclear target, due to our proximity to other high priority targets, and the fact that most Russian missiles had ten separate warheads - each its own bomb - which had to be dispersed in a radius of less than four hundred miles. Ballistic missiles fly about six thousand miles an hour, so they said we could expect twenty minutes warning, at the most, before the detonations. You would not be able to get anywhere. You cant get out of town in twenty minutes when the roads aren't clogged with people trying to flee for their lives. When I was about twenty, one Saturday morning, as I lay hungover in bed, some fool said "Hey, what's this" and pushed the button that activated the air raid sirens, which had not been tested for several years, and never on a Saturday. I half woke, decided that twenty minutes was not going to do me much good from where i was, and decided to die in bed.

So, how to prepare. Here's what we told one another: put your head between your legs, and kiss your butt goodbye.