On the heels of the Sputnik flight in 1957, motivated lawmakers passed the National Defense Education Act, underlining the perceived importance of America’s schools in the battle for Cold War supremacy.īut in the early ‘50s, when duck and cover drills were in use, they might have helped. civil defense had moved on to the construction of fallout shelters, which the FCDA (by now renamed the Office of Defense Mobilization) recommended as the next step in protection against a possible nuclear disaster.
To confront the growing nuclear threat, the focus of U.S. It's going to protect you from an atomic bomb that goes off a little in the distance.” “People look at this and they say, how's my school desk going to protect me against an atomic bomb that goes off right overhead?” says Wellerstein.
After all, how was ducking and covering really going to protect you from a nuclear bomb detonating your school? But according to Wellerstein, in some scenarios, the drills could have actually helped. Truman’s Federal Civil Defense Administration program, aimed to educate the public about what ordinary people could do to protect themselves-and they were easy to mock. The school drills, which were part of President Harry S. “Now, instead of just seeing the bomb as this asset that we could use or not use.it suddenly is brought to bear that this is something that could be used against us.” “During this period, the United States is suddenly having to really reckon with the fact that it is not the only nuclear power out there anymore,” says Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear weapons and professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. By the early 1950s, schools across the United States were training students to dive under their desks and cover their heads. The now-infamous duck-and-cover drills simulated what should be done in case of an atomic attack-and channeled a growing panic over an escalating arms race. On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear device at a remote site in Kazakhstan, signaling a new and terrifying phase in the Cold War.
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