Of course, the reason they want you to build a shelter out of all your internal doors is so they don't have to kick them down when they come to clear away your body. The reason you build a shelter and stay inside is so they know where your body will be. Makes the clearup easier, assuming anyone will bother clearing up.
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Aliens? Us!? Is this one of your Earth "jokes"?
Man, you can stop the irony right there. The whole point of the film is that they were simple country folk doing what their government advised them to.
And those leaflets, flyers and tryptichs were actually distributed in the UK in the 70's.
"Protect and Survive", that was the leaflets name. It's a chilling little leaflet. I wish I had one of the originals. You can easily find the full text on-line.
shareI have one...
The most disturbing thing for me is that all the information given is to make life easier to clear up, as the first poster pointed out - eg the documentation in a box, tidy.
Watched it again last night, first having seen it about 15 years ago; it broke my heart. Makes you realise how powerless we are - and how reliant we are on the powers-that-be, who may or may not have our best interests at heart anyway.
I would say they don't.
shareJust got done reading "Protect and Survive" online. I got more than a few chills from it.
Every time you read this signature, an orphaned puppy gets fed into a meat grinder.
Actually, the one benefit of staying in one sealed off room and creating another shelter inside it is that, while no material neutralises radiation, the thicker the barrier between you and the radioactive material is the more chance you have to survive.
I'm not disputing that the system also makes things easier to clean up - especially the part in "Protect and Survive" that tells you "If a death occurs while you are confined to the fall-out room place the body in another room and cover it as securely as possible. Attach an identification. You should receive radio instructions on what to do next. If no instructions have been given within five days, you should temporarily bury the body as soon as it is safe to go out, and mark the spot."
However, there are also valid reasons why, if you can't make it to an actual shelter, you should try to create something as close as possible in your own home. That's if you actually wanted to survive something like that.
Y'know I didn't think of it like that also I suppose it's easier for the police and army to take over houses to give people homes.
Reminds me of that scene where the policeman is telling the old man in his house to take in survivours of the nuclear war.
He refues and despite being forced to do as the the armed policeman wants in the end he old man doesn't make it easy for him.
That's if you actually wanted to survive something like that.
As a person who grew up in that era, I was born in 1968, I forgot how real the danger of the "big" nuclear was. looking back it seems sureal that duck and cover(u.s. term) and protect and survive were taken seriously. It seems so clear looking back that the U.S government, and apperantly the british governmemt as well had no clue how to dela with the aftermath of such a distaster. instead people got orders on how to make life easier for the government to clean up the mess only they were told it was for survival, a survival which would be impossible for most. even if you did survive you have to ask yourself if you were a lucky one or did the lucky ones die in the inital attack. Thinking back I answered that question when I was nine or ten years old. I said to myself if the unthinkable happend I would do every thing possible to die in the first attack, it seemed a beter way to die than dealing with radation and stravation among other things which would likley kill you and make life not worth living anyway.
The question of civil defence was a thorny one for governments during the Cold War. While on one side, the government was criticised for doing too little to prepare the population for nuclear war, when they attempted to offer advice (in the form of P&S), they received the same sorts of criticism being levelled here. I think P&S was a genuine effort to inform and prepare us if the worst came. Clearly, any informed member of the public would have to ask himself some searching questions - would I want to survive a nuclear attack, for example. If the answer to that central question was 'Yes', then P&S did offer genuinely valuable information to the average person on how he could maximise his chances of immediate survival without recourse to expensive construction work. Thankfully, though, nuclear deterrence worked which means that for those of us who lived through that period, it's now just a ghoulish memory as opposed to contemporary reality.
"Someone has been tampering with Hank's memories."
So why is the West still stockpiling nuclear weapons, and basing missile defence systems in Eastern Europe while Putin points his nukes westward, if the threat has been confined to the past? I think you are being a little complacent in assuming how safe the world is from the eventuality of this kind of apocalyptic destruction and how the maintenance of a nuclear arsenal is any kind of guarantee of protection.
shareHow should those idiotic advices maximise your chances of survival?
Haven´t you understood the movie: The chance to survive a nuclear attack is nearly zero. Against the blast, such a grotesque shelter would do nothing. And concerning
the fallout: Maybe it could hold relativly big fallout particles off, but don´t forget: fallout is also in the air, so you will breathe it, while you are in the inner refuge. And how long you will stay in it? Uranium 238, which coats nuclear warheads has a half-life of 100 million years. That mean, that it takes so long, until the have of the radiating substance stops to radiate and again so long, until the half od the half stops radiating and so on. And Uranium 238 isn´t the only radiating substance of a warhead.
And what about food and water? Where want you to get it? And there will be also
lots of epedemies. And there propable will be violence between the survivors, fighting for the remaining foodstuffs.
To me it seems, that "P&S" and similiar works had just been written to calm and appease the public and prevent too much demonstrations, strikes or even civil war against a government planing nuclear war.
"I think P&S was a genuine effort to inform and prepare us if the worst came."
Wow. Just wow.
You're about as naive as the characters in the movie.
Actually, they do...
You have to remember, a LOT of above-ground nuclear tests were done between the 1940's-1970's, and one of the main studies done, was survivability.
You also have to remember, that many of those above-ground tests were conducted a mere 40 miles from Las Vegas, Nevada: granted, there's a mountain range or two between Mercury and Las Vegas, but the blasts could be clearly seen from the strip.
This also means that, depending on WHERE the wind blew, Vegas got some fallout.
Vegas is still There, as are its residents. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Trinity, and Bikini, are all still there - and you can even go to New Mexico, and stand at ground zero at the Trinity Site (where the very first Nuke was detonated). It hasn't been 100 years, either, and all of these places are safe.
So, it is possible to survive a nuclear war - but not if you're located in a primary target zone.
If there ever is one (and with the way things are going with Crimea these days, it's entirely possible that the Obamination or Putin may push that button), not only do I plan on surviving, I also plan on bitch-slapping the bastard that ever starts a nuclear war.
Oh - and while I've never seen this film, I do have the soundtrack on vinyl.
:)
'Reminds me of that scene where the policeman is telling the old man in his house to take in survivours of the nuclear war.
He refues and despite being forced to do as the the armed policeman wants in the end he old man doesn't make it easy for him'
That scene was not in this film. I think you're quoting from 'Threads' which came out at the same time and dealt with a similar subject.
"Everbody in the WORLD, is bent"share
The public information films had the voice of Patrick Allen (swarve sounding devil) For you Americans he was the sampled voice in "Two Tribes" (Frankie goes, etc). For you Engles he was the man in a helicopter selling Barratt homes.
He did not give any sales spiel about those Barratt homes having on-suite hardened bunkers though.
To think that "Phillip of Burgundy" (Blackadder) gave out advice on what to do when your nation is about to endure the unleashed atom!
The radio broadcasts had voices of actors and actresses unknown to me.
Enjoy it while it lasts
As Threads pointed out, there would rather be no clear-up.
shareOP is a dick, who the *beep* locks internal doors? why'd anyone have to kick an unlocked door down? twat.
i bet the *beep* also thinks 9/11 was an inside job...
Wow, that's quite an insulting post, not to mention judgemental. There's no need for language like that.
I never said anyone locks internal doors, but people do close them, and that would slow down a search and cleanup operation. The cleanup (assuming that anyone would be left to do such a thing) would be quicker if everyone removed the internal doors and crawled into a shelter, because it would be obvious where the bodies were. The authorities knew that a home-made wooden shelter would be useless against fallout.
And no, I don't think that 9/11 was an inside job. Nobody sane believes that.
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82.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
I think his son in London had the right idea. At least if your killed by the blast your death will be quick and painless. A nuclear war is survivable but the real question is is it really worth surviving, IMO no it isn't.
shareAgreed...
I would be sat in by back garden with my dogs, my wife and 12 cans of lager and get myself p****ed
"Every day above ground is a good day!"
No, richielaceyone, you`re the dick. I work in building maintenance, in an area with high indian occupation. as they often have two or three families living in a house, they have locks on all the doors. but hey who needs to let facts get in the way of abusing people? twat.
I got it,I got it,I got it...I ain`t got it
I also heard that the advice was to make the cleanup easier... But that could also mean it's just a rumour... In any case, I am not sure why there would be such a rush to clean out all the houses.
The fact is they knew that you have next to no chance of surviving a nuclear blast if you are close enough to it. But what if you are far enough away? That flimsy shelter could make a difference between living and dying on the outskirts of a nuke...
If it increases your chance of surviving from 2% to 3%, and a nuke hits a city with a million people, that's 10,000 lives saved.
__________________
I said there'd be a pandemic when pigs fly!
But the swine flu.
Partially. If you survive a nuclear blast, due to being far away from the blast zone, radiation fallout is your biggest threat, since the immediate death of the blast is over. It's much safer isolating yourself as much as possible than running around in radioactive ash that's falling from the vaporized city.
Plus, I think a lot of the pamphlets were written when ICBMs weren't a threat, and rather, people have a much better warning due to bomber aircraft, on top of this, the bombs wouldn't have been the massive nuclear warheads we have now.
Haha, genius use of the hyphen!
Born when she kissed me, died when she left me, lived whilst she loved me
Sure and white paint on the windows deflects the blast away. Yeah rigghht
shareBlast is not the only problem with the initial explosion of a nuclear bomb. You also have heat, light, and a *beep* great "boom" (but we'll ignore that for this post since it's irrelevant). Heat is one of the major side effects of light as you'd know if you've ever touched a light bulb that's been on for a while. Thus you reflect the light, you reflect the heat.
White reflects more of the incoming light than other colours. I'm not going into the reasons for that one but it's about the visible spectrum of light and the absorption/reflection of it on the surface of the material that you are viewing.
That's why the Gov. gave that advice to paint windows white.
I think these brochures show that the government was cueless itself. Jim, in the movie, has confidence in the government, and he considers these recommendations actual orders. In fact, since a nuclear attack of that scale had not occurred yet (I think Little Boy and Fat Boy were more like grenades compared to the thing launched in the movie…now, this is NOT to downplay the countless people who died and suffered because of the Japanese attacks) they could not see beyond "duck and cover". Yes, "duck and cover" can save your life, if you are not in the core of the nuclear explosion…but what will you do next?
I remember reading similar brochures as a child…and I was shocked most adults did not follow any advice about a security room or zone, and the stuff you should keep. But thinking back: The list of stuff you were supposed to have on hand was quite long…Jim recites a portion of it in the movie. And, of course, a supply of food for 14 days. And if the 14 days are over? I guess it's starvation time then…provided that you are still living.
Most adults I knew in my childhood had the attitude of Jim's son. If it happens, we are all going to die, no matter how many precautions we take.
As a kid I read that booklet as it was posted through our letter box and some of the advice was a joke.
Its that man again!!
It all makes sense if there's no basement in your house, you can of course take off all the doors and construct an inner core refuge there too, that would be helpful, putting pillows and books on top of it, the more matter surrounds you the safer. The type of matter best used as a radiation neutralizing barrier would be sh!t, feces. But how do you plan to apply it?
Accounting for the dead isn't evil either.
my vote history:
http://www.imdb.com/user/ur13767631/ratings
Really feces would be a good protectibe barrier? Didn't know this.
shareCorrect!
I lived in Visalia, California, for 8 years, and I used to joke that, I was 200 miles from Sacramento (Mather and McClellan AFB's), 200 miles from San Francisco (half of the Navy's pacific Fleet), 200 miles from Los Angeles (March, Norton, George AFB's, and more of the navy's pacific Fleet - and shipyards), and 300 miles from Las Vegas (Nellis AFB): I was clear of all of the blast zones!!!
Fallout, OTOH, would have been a problem, depending on the wind, and for how long.
And yes - the weapons of today, make Fat Man and Little Boy look like a couple of M-80's: they were what - 4-15 KT? Weapons of present-day, are upwards of 15 MT!!!
You need to be a good 100-150 miles from Ground Zero, or you're screwed. :(
Then again, if you're at Ground Zero, you won't feel it for more than a millisecond.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both in the area of 15KT - 20KT.
Today's systems aren't multi-megaton, most are MIRV systems (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles) or low flying rockets from subs, most likely are in the realm of 100-300 kt.
There are warheads up to a couple of megatons, reserved for hardened targets and the like, but city-busting 15 megaton devices are not likely to be stockpiled anymore.
(A number of smaller bombs are more efficient than one large bomb).
Also delivery systems are much more accurate these days, especially the Russian systems have improved, so there is no need for multi-megaton warheads anymore.
- People would still be buggered though.
And you would have risked a direct hit from a 2-4 mt device in the 70's, since a simple overshoot would have landed right in your back-yard very quickly ^^
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