Let’s learn (again) how to survive a nuclear holocaust

So I’ve been reading Garrett Graff’s “Raven Rock,” which is a fairly gripping history of the Cold War effort to ensure “continuity of government” in the event of a nuclear apocalypse. As the Cold War progressed, defense experts went from “duck and cover”-type initiatives, to plans for massive evacuations from major cities, to fallout shelters within those cities, to an abandonment of efforts to protect the civilian populations in favor of trying to save a decision-making core of government and industry.

This sounds callous, and the book’s subtitle — “The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself, While the Rest of Us Die” — makes it sound more so. But in fact, plenty of top leaders, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy to Chief Justice Earl Warren, rather than fleeing, said that they would die at their desks in the event of a nuclear exchange. (And after the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to safety while he stayed on site, saying, “That’s what deputies are for.”) So it’s not that our leaders were cowards.

Instead, the thinking was that if the Soviets couldn’t be sure of knocking out the U.S. government completely, they wouldn’t even try. And, hey, we survived the Cold War without the nuclear Armageddon everyone expected, so maybe the Cold Warriors knew what they were doing.

But now we face a situation where things look a lot like the earliest days of the Cold War, where we faced a handful of Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, not the (literally) thousands of bombs often (literally) nearly a thousand times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb that were around by the late 1960s. We no longer face such a Strangelovian apocalypse, but rather an attack with one or a few atomic weapons of Hiroshima size, from places like North Korea or Iran. So maybe the old duck-and-cover training (which was based on the experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors) makes sense again.

The Obama administration seemed to think so when it rolled out some civil-defense plans aimed at responding to such an attack over half a decade ago. The idea was to teach people what to do in the event of such an attack, and it sounded a lot like the old “duck and cover” advice, because while politics may be different than they were in the Truman era, the physics are the same.

When an atomic bomb explodes, it produces a brilliant flash of light, which after a few seconds turns into a wave of searing heat, which is followed by a powerful blast, and then, 30 minutes or an hour later, by radioactive fallout. If people know what to do, they can seek shelter as soon as the flash of light appears (instead of going to the window to see what’s happening, a natural but fatal response). If they can shelter from the blast (which kills mostly through flying glass and other objects), then they have a little while to find a basement or something before the fallout settles. Even a couple of days of sheltering from the fallout from a Hiroshimasized bomb makes a huge difference (the radiation falls to one-tenth the intensity in seven hours, and to one one-hundredth the intensity in 49). But people won’t do that unless they’re trained to.

The Obama administration started work on this this but hit political roadblocks. (Among other things, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., blocked a training exercise that used Las Vegas as an example, for fear of harming its tourist industry.) But politics or not, the physics haven’t changed, and the situation with North Korea and Iran hasn’t gotten any better.

The knowledge that most people possessed back during the Cold War is gone, and I know that among my students, only a few ex-military and emergency-services types know much about nuclear weapons and their effects nowadays. Maybe it’s time for a little remedial education. It just might save some lives.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a University of Tennessee law professor and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors. Email him at pundit@instapundit.com.