The civil defense policies that emerged from this research all stressed that America could survive, but only if everyone - not just the authorities but everyday citizens - did their part. The lesson seemed clear: in the event of an atomic bomb, if you could stay low and stay shielded (ducked and covered) you could be OK.Įven as the ABCC was publishing its findings, researchers had already begun studying things like psychology, group dynamics and infrastructure to see how society as a whole might hold up under a nuclear attack. People who had been lying down when the blast wave hit, much more often … survived. And during the blastwave that followed, it was the people who were standing up who were most likely to be killed by shattering windows and falling debris. There were various sources of radiation to be avoided, but what mattered most was being shielded at the moment of the blast. People who stood behind trees were also more likely to live longer. According to one account, a group of children who were diving off a cliff into a lake all got sick, except for the one who happened to be underwater. And further out, researchers discovered that people who had taken cover (even momentarily) survived and actually seemed healthy. Yet within just a few blocks of the hypocenter people who had been in the basement of a large concrete building had survived. The researchers looked into things like cancer rates, irregular pregnancies and heart disease, but they also asked every survivor the same thing: where were you at the moment of detonation?īefore the ABCC researchers arrived, the physicists who had developed the bomb had assumed that they wouldn’t be finding survivors anywhere close to ground zero (or: hypocenter). They wanted to understand who would survive and who would not if or when an American city was hit with an atomic bomb. It was American lives - not Japanese - they were hoping to save. This program would also prove to be highly controversial, because the researchers who arrived in Japan weren’t there to treat the survivors, but only to study them. That program would eventually be named the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC). In September 1945, just one month after the bombings of Japan, the US military sent a team of American doctors and geneticists to Japan to interview people who’d survived the attacks, looking to understand both the short and long term effects of radiation. But, in fact, the films and posters about ducking and covering were based on actual research of survivors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s considered the number one example of the kind of Cold War-era propaganda that seems totally ridiculous now - kitschy and absurd and unimaginably naive. The idea of “duck and cover” gets made fun of these days. The idea that with enough canned food, shelters, fearlessness (and maybe tattoos) the American people would be able to survive an atomic attack. It was just another manifestation of the concept of survivability. It sounds morbid in hindsight, but many kids at the time took it in stride. They called it a “walking blood bank” - no need for cold storage. In this case, the thinking was that if Russia attacked, the tattoos would make for quicker transfusions. In 1952, the Cold War was in full swing and the government was busy developing civil defense strategies - things ordinary citizens could to do to help protect the homefront. At the age of 16, producer Liza Yeager’s grandmother, who went to school in Lake County, was permanently marked in anticipation of a nuclear catastrophe. It was administered by the county and the idea was simple: to make it easier to transfuse blood after an atomic bomb. This experimental program was called Operation Tat-Type. Each one was in the same place on the torso, just under the left arm, and spelled out the blood type of the student. There, fingers were pricked, blood was tested and the teenagers were sent on to the library, where they waited to get a special tattoo. In the early 1950s, teenage students in Lake County, Indiana, got up from their desks, marched down the halls and lined up at stations.
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