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Atomic Alert (Elementary version) 1951 Encyclopaedia Britannica Films
🕑 Added 2020-07-08 19:03:57 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
'Frightening civil defense procedure film aimed at Cold War-era elementary school students...
Explains steps to take in case of an atomic bomb alert or a bombing without warning at school, in the open or at home. Gives simple explanation of nuclear fusion.'
Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_and_cover
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
"Duck and cover" is a method of personal protection against the effects of a nuclear explosion. Ducking and covering is useful at conferring a degree of protection to personnel situated outside the radius of the nuclear fireball but still within sufficient range of the nuclear explosion that standing upright and uncovered is likely to cause serious injury or death. In the most literal interpretation, the focus of the maneuver is primarily on protective actions one can take during the first few crucial seconds-to-minutes after the event, while the film by the same name and a full encompassing of the advice, also caters to providing protection up to weeks after the event.
The countermeasure is intended as an alternative to the more effective target/citywide emergency evacuation when these crisis relocation programs would not be possible due to travel and time constraints...
As a countermeasure to the lethal effects of nuclear explosions, Duck and Cover is effective in both the event of a surprise nuclear attack, and during a nuclear attack of which the public has received some warning, which would likely be about a few minutes prior to the nuclear weapon arriving...
In the Record of the "Nagasaki A-bomb War Disaster", those close to the hypocenter (Matsuyama township), were described as all having been killed, with the exception of "a child who was in an air-raid shelter." A little further away, Professor Seiki of Nagasaki Medical School Hospital was building an air-raid dugout 400 m from the hypocenter of the detonation and survived. Chimoto-san, who was atop a distant hill that creates the valley in which Nagasaki is situated, performed the similar "hit the deck" maneuver upon seeing the bomb drop, which was notably prior to the detonation. However despite having these few seconds of relatively unique warning, he did not stay on the ground for long enough after the flash subsided, and received some translational injuries due to prematurely standing-up again, at which point the slower moving blast wave swept past him and carried him with it for a few meters.
According to the 1946 book Hiroshima and other books which cover both bombings, in the days between the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some survivors of the first bombing went to Nagasaki and taught others about ducking after the atomic flash and informed them about the particularly dangerous threat of imploding window glass... Many people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki died while searching the skies, curious to locate the source of the brilliant flash.
When people are indoors, running to windows to investigate the source of bright flashes in the sky still remains a common and natural response to experiencing a bright flash. Thus, although the advice to duck and cover is over half a century old, ballistic glass lacerations caused the majority of the 1000 human injuries following the Chelyabinsk meteor air burst of February 15, 2013. This response was also observed among people in the vicinity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
