I have always reckoned that, in the event of a global nuclear war, the best place to be would be at ground zero of a multi-megaton nuke; a real crowd-pleaser. May as well get it over with right away, and being vaporized sure beats dying weeks later of radiation sickness, starvation, or thirst — or all three.
As the Bard said, if the thing t’were be done, best it be done quickly.
As a child of the Cold War, I remember very well the “duck and cover” drills we practiced in elementary school classrooms, which gave the notion that there was some positive outcome to be had in surviving a major exchange of city-busting nukes. The small local city of Waterloo, Iowa, we were told, was on the Soviet Union’s first-strike list, as the massive John Deere Waterloo Tractor Works, Engine Works, Foundry, and Experimental Farm were all located there in those days and major…
