‘This Is Not a Drill’: The Growing Threat of Nuclear Annihilation

If you were in elementary school in the early 1950s, chances are that you had the fear of nuclear holocaust drummed into you with fair regularity. Children were taught “duck and cover” techniques, which typically meant hiding under their desks as if that would save them from an atomic bomb landing nearby.

In big cities like New York, many pupils received military-style dog tagsbearing their names and addresses — to help parents identify their bodies, they were told. (Of course, Mom and Pop had to survive themselves.) Some recall that the tags also listed the family religion. That, a teacher explained to one class of second-graders, was to guarantee their burial in an appropriate cemetery. Somehow, this was supposed to reassure them.

Those days are long gone. Or are they?