I didn't live through the drills, but they were pretty smart. The popular scorn towards "duck and cover" is completely undeserved. Those drills would have saved a lot of lives if war had actually broken out. The popular misconception of nuclear weapons is that there's a zone of total destruction and that's about it, but in reality there are huge areas where buildings would collapse or windows would shatter but people could easily survive with some protection. Protection like being under a sturdy piece of furniture.
Which is very useful, but doesn't solve the problem that those people will almost certainly die of radiation exposure from fallout 2-4 weeks later, unless they get to a shelter within 15 minutes or so, and stay there for 2-4 weeks, at a minimum, without running out of supplies or going mad.
Or that they'll die of starvation and disease 2-4 months later.
Or of the effects of nuclear winter 2 to 4 years later.
Or that virtually everything they're used to - food manufacture and distribution, electronics, machinery, transport, energy, medicine - will no longer be working, and maybe one survivor in a thousand will have the skills and knowledge needed to start even the most basic rebuilding program.
First of all, "duck and cover" is from the 1950s. Before ICBMs existed, and before there were as many bombs as later on.
>those people will almost certainly die of radiation exposure from fallout 2-4 weeks later, unless they get to a shelter within 15 minutes or so, and stay there for 2-4 weeks, at a minimum, without running out of supplies or going mad.
Many people survived at Hiroshima. Not everyone is downwind of fallout. Even if you are, many of the projections I've seen show many expected survivors.
>Or that they'll die of starvation and disease 2-4 months later.
We wouldn't run out of food anywhere near that quickly. The US has vast supplies of stored food and unslaughtered animals. And radiation doesn't create disease.
>Or of the effects of nuclear winter 2 to 4 years later.
Nuclear winter has been greatly exaggerated. AT worst the growing season would be reduced and it would get a bit colder.
"Duck and cover" dates from a time when an all-out nuclear war would have resembled General Turgidson's description of an outcome where we "get our hair mussed." It still would have been devastating beyond anything in human history (except for what would have happened to Europe and the USSR) but it the country would have been left largely intact. Most of what you describe is what would have been the aftermath of a war some decades later, when the USSR's ability to strike the US had increased by orders of magnitude.
Fallout is the one thing that would have been a major danger, but it tends to be directional depending on winds. Lots of people would have been close enough to an explosion to benefit from "duck and cover" without being subjected to lethal amounts of fallout.
