The terror my parents' generation had of a nuclear apocalypse, lest we forget

[arewethereyet]

I remember the drills where we were to hide beneath our desks in case of a nuclear attack.  That basically meant we had a slab of wood with a metal drawer under it over our heads.  I couldn't figure out even at that young age what good that was for protection from anything.

Protection from schrapnel and debris is a start. For instance, due to her position in the lobby of the Bank of Japan, a reinforced concrete building, Akiko Takakura survived the Hiroshima bomb despite being 300 meters away from the hypocenter of Little Boy's fireball, with a lethal zone that extended well beyond that. She lived until 2003.

Or thermal radiation. Covering from something as insubstantial as a newspaper can protect you from the burns of thermal radiation. 

Caption from a site that showcased this photo:

The shadow of a Japanese fatsia exposed to the heat rays was imprinted on a telephone pole near the Meiji Bridge (about 1.3 kilometers south from the hypocenter). New shoots replaced the leaves that were burnt away, so the new outline differs from the shadow.

And apparently, in the interim between the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one cop from Hiroshima went to Nagasaki to explain that the police there to duck when the bomb went off. When the bomb dropped there, not a single Nagasaki cop died in the initial blast.

 Of course, Duck and Cover focuses on the initial blast. In the long term, though, especially if fallout and nuclear winter are a huge problem, and they likely will be, the living will probably envy the dead.

I am sure that there were incidences of people being in the exact right place at the exact right time and came out of the blasts in Japan just fine.

As for being protected by debris and shrapnel, those desks may have protected us from something falling straight down from above though I doubt the spindly legs of those desks would have held up under much pressure.  As for any debris and shrapnel that was ricocheting in directions other than straight down, I am pretty sure that the 1-1/2" metal pipe legs that held the desk up would not have provided protection...again, unless it was coming at you in the exactly correct position and could be fully stopped.

My point is more that it was quite unnerving as a first, second, third grader to be made to hide under a desk to save yourself from a nuclear or other air attack.  Hell, they moved us to an interior hall or room to save us from tornados and severe thunderstorms.  

Stop, drop, and roll if you caught on fire at least made sense and seemed like an appropriate reaction to that threat.