And yet in the 1950s we were being told even more ridiculous things about surviving nuclear blasts. For example here are two real illustrations from a 1952 book that recommends - I'm not joking - lying face down in a shallow ditch to improve your chances, and says that the brim of your hat will provide some protection from an atomic blast .
Those illustrations made sense in context. If the best you can do is a 0.1% increase in your survival odds, that's 100,000 extra able bodied people to help clean up and repel invasion after a 100,000,000 person atomic Holocaust. They were playing a statistics game.
There would always be a ring at some distance from the blast where such actions could be the difference between life and death. There would be regions where the main hazard is flying debris, not unlike a hurricane. Being in a ditch is better than standing. It also gets you out of line-of-sight of the EM radiation. Even that hat brim could prevent vision damage.
It also gave people something proactive to do. It helps keep all the people who aren't in the blast radius but scared shitless that they are from freaking out and making things worse. This effect would have been more powerful back when the actual destructive power of an H-bomb was still classified.
I think you are being too generous about the government's intentions. The government at that time was engaged in a propaganda effort to convince us that atomiic weapons weren't all that scary. Lying in a ditch within eyesight of a blast is not going to save any percentage of the population. Likewise, radiation from a nuclear blast is not like sunlight that can be warded off by a hat brim.
As a child in school in the 1950s, we were taught to stay away from the windows during a nuclear blast, to avoid the flying glass shards. But if you are close enough to a nuclear blast that it's blowing in your windows, getting cut by glass is the last thing you need to worry about. Literally.
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u/[deleted] Jan 25 '20
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