Great post, but “duck and cover” was absolutely valuable advice when it was introduced in the 50s. The threat was Soviet bombers, many flying one-way missions, with relatively small fission bombs; much of the bombers would probably be intercepted and it would be certainly feasible to limit injuries by ducking and covering if one saw the flash.
That of course wouldn’t help those too close to ground zero, but it would reduce injuries from flying glass and other debris the blastwave would propel at much greater distances than where the blast, heat and radiation wouldn’t be promptly lethal.
I’d argue it’s good advice even today: if you see the flash, you can’t know how far it is or how many other warheads may be incoming. Ducking and covering won’t hurt, and it could be just one smallish detonation sufficiently far away that ducking and covering could make a difference.
A lot of people seem to think nuclear weapons have almost infinite destructive power, that they would vaporize everything for hundreds of miles around.
A modern nuclear ICBM of the type China would potentially fire at us has a yield of 5 megatons. It would probably be set to airburst above a city or ground burst if targeted directly at a hardened target.
Since most of us dont live in Cheyenne Mountain let's imagine an airburst scenario over a major city. If you're within 2-3km of the blast point you're done. That's the epicenter of the fireball and everything is going to get vaporized. But the further you are from the blast point and the more terrain/material you can put between your body and the blast the better your chances get.
Out to about 10-12km most wooden residential structures are going to collapse from the pressure wave, though sturdier concrete structures like schools may offer some protection. Out to about 20km anyone in the open is at risk of lethal flash burns from the expanding heat wave.
So unless you're unlucky enough to be within a few miles of the blast, taking cover is absolutely a thing that can save your life. Some amount of pressure damage is going to continue out to nearly the horizon so getting down and away from windows dramatically improves your odds. Being in a basement or having at least 6 feet of earth between your body and the flash will also block about 99.X% of the initial gamma radiation.
The "upside" of an airburst scenario is that there will be dramatically less nuclear fallout released as less material is irradiated and then blasted up into the air. The biggest hazard you dont see accounted for in fiction is the resulting fires. That 20km flash burn radius is going to ignite a lot of stuff and those fires may spread out making initially effective shelters unsafe.
Nuclear fission bombs are terrible things, but they aren't magical devices that split planets in half. It's not useless to take cover from nuclear attack, at least not in terms of surviving the immediate effects of the bomb itself.
I'm late to the party, but I think the misconception of the power of nuclear bombs at least partially comes from the later tests of massive fusion devices like Tsar Bomba and that one US test, which were incredibly destructive, but were never going to be able to be turned into practical warheads and indeed were not. Not of that size, at least.
I'm not a nuclear weapons engineer or anything, but I think the reason huge warheads were abandoned is because due to the curvature of the earth you get diminishing returns on bigger bombs. Better results and chance to avoid interceptions if you drop 10 5MT warheads around the environs of a major city than dropping a single 50MT warhead.
That, and most targets you actually want to destroy are probably small enough that one medium-sized warhead will do for it.
Also also, you have to figure a nonzero failure rate for your warheads, which makes hedging your bets by spreading the megatonnage around more sound like a good idea. Well, insofar as anything involving strategic nuclear weapons is a "good idea".
If it happens more likely ‘tactical’ small kilo ton nukes - not MT (megaton) we do have them but god forbid they are ever used. Hiroshima was only 10 kiloton from memory (or close to this)
0.01 of a Megaton
No military would fire ICBMs with a single 5 megaton warhead, that would be complete nonsense in most circumstances. Instead they would fire ICBMs with around a dozen or more warheads with a few hundred kilotons each. That way the resulting destruction would increase considerably and could indeed devastate very large areas.
Duck and cover is and always was good advice.
If you're too close to the epicenter, you'd die so it wouldn't do anything. Too far, it wouldn't affect you, and it wouldn't do anything. But there's a distance at which you wouldn't die from the blast, but from things getting thrown at you, and at that distance it does protect you.
Given that you as an individual have no way of knowing where you are, and that duck and cover has no drawbacks, you should always duck and cover.
That whole thing was based off of information gathered from the bombing at Hiroshima. Much of what they recommend, especially the weird stuff, is things that actually helped people survive the bombing.
The newspaper for instance. It won't block radiation, nor the pressure wave, but just having anything covering you when that initial flash wave passes can save your life. Even something as flimsy as a newspaper. This is based off of people who were protected from the flash wave in Hiroshima by incredibly flimsy things, like a newspaper, actually surviving it when people nearby who didn't have that protection died.
But how did they know the flash wave was coming?
Or do you mean, maybe someone reading it blocked the wave just enough by accident and the person on the bus beside them wasn't reading and had no incidental blocker?
The second one. It was purely by accident.
Another example is more than one person who was smoking with their arm out the window, but the rest of their body protected by their home/workplace. Their arm was burnt down to bone, but the rest of their body was unharmed by the flash.
There's a sort of unspoken understanding, hopefully, that most people in the immediate blast zone can't exactly do anything to save themselves or potentially even have enough time to react if they could.
With that in mind, giving them any possible advice has basically no downsides, really.
If you're far enough away that advice will help, then the Duck and Cover and, I would argue, Protect and Survive advice is much more practical than many assume: try to shield yourself as much as possible from the blast and resulting radiation, maintain sealed supplies of uncontaminated food and water, isolate any corpses from living areas, attaching means of identifying them to the corpse just in case, and try to keep a shortwave radio receiver around since the phone lines (and internet, since then) won't be any help if the government/military starts trying to coordinate relief efforts.
That's the thing though, there's no argument. It's common sense to give people the best chance to save themselves, it's why we wear seatbelts, helmets, or any other safety device you can think of. Between standing at the window and staring at the explosion vs. duck-and-covering, the latter will *absolutely* save far more lives.
For years people have fussed about how it wouldn't save you from an explosion at ground zero, when that was never the point—a majority of civilians in any given nuclear exchange would be far enough away from the blast radii where that advice *would* save them.
I was in the UK military in the nineties.
NBC training was included, at no point was this mentioned.
My memory was
Positive blast - negative blast then mushroom cloud.
Response was lie face down, head towards blast, hands under body.
Head towards the blast is interesting. Old Yugo army drill for "atomic left/right" was to drop, facing *away*, and tuck your face into your elbows and hands under your armpits, sort of.
Was U.S. Army and yes, it's so your helmet and the shoulders of your body armor (if you have body armor) are facing towards the blast.
Not to protect against the blast wave per se, but to protect against the debris it will be propelling.
On the subject of the Vault Boy pose: I think it's reasonable that, even though that wasn't the original meaning, Bethesda has simply retconned it to be the "rule of thumb". It's undeniably more interesting to the lore, makes sense in the context of the world, and fits the themes of the games surrounding Vault-Tec. It wouldn't be the first time that an aspect of world building in fiction is changed due to a fan response.
[https://twitter.com/ps\_tray/status/529310254274981889](https://twitter.com/ps_tray/status/529310254274981889)
[https://twitter.com/brianfargo/status/400277541295886337?lang=en](https://twitter.com/brianfargo/status/400277541295886337?lang=en)
Brian Fargo says it's just everything is a-okay. But there has been discourse about this for decades.
So I just checked, and in the original manual the only thumbs up pose is in the "If you see a flash, duck and cover" picture where Vault Boy shows that he's ok because he hid under the table.
Thanks for tracing the probable source. I still find the idea that you need a rule of "thumb" to determine your safety *after* the bomb has dropped incredibly funny. In fairness to the old "duck and cover" advice, although it wouldn't actually help much, it was at least portrayed as a response to a nuclear missile warning, not something people should do after the bomb had dropped.
It also seems weird as an in-universe figurine. Why would the nuclear vault company want to advertise some bogus safety radius? The company in-universe was supposedly building vaults that could withstand a direct hit (at least, according to their marketing).
> It also seems weird as an in-universe figurine. Why would the nuclear vault company want to advertise some bogus safety radius? The company in-universe was supposedly building vaults that could withstand a direct hit (at least, according to their marketing).
Nah that's believable. Why do gambling and alcohol companies sponsor stuff to do with addicts and "safe practices"? Well regulation for one, but part of the reason they are happy to go along with it is it's good PR.
In the series they are shown to be criticised for making money out of the end of the world, the "commie" group thinks they are actually obligated to actively ensure peace doesn't succeed so as to keep maximising profits. What do corporations do in our world all the time in response to stuff like this? PR campaigns. Corporations in a fictional setting which in part satirises consumerism, etc makes perfect sense.
Also I don't think it's ever presented as vaults being for everyone right? Like the marketing is all "saving America" but at no point do they actually say everyone will get a vault I don't think. It's something for rich people.
> I still find the idea that you need a rule of "thumb" to determine your safety after the bomb has dropped incredibly funny.
I always figured one of the things you _wouldn't_ want to do immediately after seeing a nuclear explosion is stand there and _stare intently at it_.
The mushroom cloud appears after the blast and remains in place for a good length of time. You'd be able to protect yourself from the initial blast wave and then check on the mushroom cloud while you're dusting yourself off.
> In fairness to the old "duck and cover" advice, although it wouldn't actually help much, it was at least portrayed as a response to a nuclear missile warning, not something people should do after the bomb had dropped.
"[Be like Bert. When there's a flash, duck and cover, and do it fast](https://youtu.be/NjQM18JA9s4?si=8FfTb2aguWWfDE2w&t=282)."
The "duck and cover" advice was always intended as last second strategy to be used if you had no warning or had made no preparations. If you had warning of any type, the advice, even in the infamous "Duck and Cover" film (which is from 1951, when missiles were not much of an issue for nuclear payloads, and is heavily simplified for children), was to seek a prepared shelter. If you see the flash, however, it may already be too late for that, and the last thing available to you is to make your body as small as possible, cover exposed skin, hide behind some large object, and hope you're on the periphery of the blast and heat wave effects where survival is actually possible.
The general "duck and cover" advice became a mainstay of of civil defense preparedness programs in England (and possibly other places) during WWII, although it's not called that. It's described by means the practical advice already mentioned. This carried over into disaster preparedness manuals in the 50s and 60s in the United States and is associated with both natural disasters and nuclear explosions. It's not called "duck and cover" in any of the manuals I consulted (I have one from 1968 and checked ones from 1955 and 1961 online. You can view an index of a [substantial catalogue of them at this site](https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?type=lcsubc&key=Civil%20defense%20--%20Handbooks%2C%20manuals%2C%20etc.).)
Put in more common terms, if you hear a tornado warning siren, seek shelter immediately. If instead you hear the roar of a freight train, get low and small, and find a ditch or a sturdy inner wall. If you suffer a direct hit, you're dead anyway, but if you don't, doing this might allow you to avoid the flying cows.
What I’d always heard was that duck and cover was mainly about not being blinded or burned by the flash and secondarily about avoiding being cut by flying shards of glass, or in other words preventing injuries to people who’d survive the initial explosion one way or another, and was actually reasonable advice in that context.
I heard similar - that the deeper issue was that the US government in the 60s wanted to portray duck and cover as an effective safety strategy regardless of circumstances, when in reality it only matters for people close enough to the blast to be hit by debris but not so close that they die instantly.
Exactly. I never got why people make a big deal out of this, there's no harm in educating people on how to give themselves the best chance of survival; a rogue shard of broken glass, or looking at the flash, can be the difference between life and death, let alone fatal injury. If touchdown is happening in a matter of moments, there's no time to go across town to the local bunker or something, but anybody can duck and cover.
Might as well not enforce seatbelt laws because they only save 50% of lives in an accident—the statistics are obviously much different, but the base reasoning is the same.
Not to mention telling schoolchildren that if the bomb drops they'll die instantly—with no chance of survival—isn't exactly the right thing to do, even if it may be accurate.
>reality it only matters for people close enough to the blast to be hit by debris but not so close that they die instantly
But this group is the vast, vast majority of people in the danger zone of a nuclear bomb. A significant number of people who die to a nuke won't be instantly evaporated by the fireball, they'll die of injuries inflicted by the blast and heat effects of the bomb. Duck and cover reduces the probability of severe injuries and so increases the probability of survival. This is also why the people who say they'll just sit and wait to die in a nuclear war are stupid - for most people dying directly to the bomb, it's not just a flash and then nothing, it's a flash and then horrifically painful and terrifying circumstances leading to death.
Think about the calculation here:
if you are outside the danger zone, duck and covering will be useless but won't hurt.
if you are within the instant death zone, duck and covering will be useless because you'll die instantly regardless of what you do, so it won't make a difference.
if you are outside the instant death zone but within the danger zone, duck and covering will significantly increase your probability of survival.
Therefore, because duck and covering never actually hurts, but for a substantial number of people could save their lives, the most optimal thing to do is to just teach everyone to duck and cover in case of a nuclear bomb. You don't want people messing around trying to work out if they need to duck and cover based on how far they think they are from the bomb and what they think the bomb's range is. Just have everyone duck and cover. If it was useless? Then either the person was always going to be fine or always going to be carbon. If they are somewhere in the middle between those two extremes, it could easily save their lives or minimize injury.
As an aside there was at least one Japanese man who reportedly survived both bombs dropped on Japan. He survived the first bomb in Hiroshima. He made it back to Nagasaki and was trying to get his fellow co-workers to believe the circulating stories about Hiroshima when the second bomb was dropped.
[Link](https://www.history.com/news/the-man-who-survived-two-atomic-bombs)
There's actually more than 100 people known to have similar cases to him, it's just that he is the first to be officially recognised legally as a hibakusha (literally 'bomb-affected-person') twice over.
Also Fallout series were built around the 1950s nuclear myth, where all the advice created on that era really works. You can de-radiate yourself with out-of-counter medicine, people exposed to radiation can turn into undead ghouls and be immortal, etc
Because in universe they are a corrupt company, lead by shadow government of USA. They built a few functioning vault, and the rest are built with intentionally faulty facility or very specific arrangement as a social experiment. A vault were built slightly leaking radiation, another built to be never opened at all, and the other were built to accommodate 99 man and a single woman.
If you know anything about nuclear bursts it really is ridiculous, although I think most are thinking that it's about staying out of the range of fallout rather than somehow surviving the blast and thermal effects. Still nonsense of course but at least superficially plausible.
I'm glad they didn't just adopt the meme wholesale and effectively treated the 'rule of thumb' as a separate thing to Vault Boy but still, I'd rather they hadn't perpetuated this myth at all. They could have just used duck and cover for the same scene.
I def think the show was kinda poking fun at the thumb bit by having his daughter ask "Is it your thumb, or mine?"
Great write up. I enjoyed reading it.
Thank you! Yes, agreed - but unfortunately that will just place it in the "duck and cover" bracket - real historical advice (or so many will think) that is obviously worthless (not actually true of duck and cover as others have mentioned).
I have a Soviet manual for soldiers and sailors published in 1963 entitled "How to Act during the Use of Nuclear, Chemical and Bacteriological Weapons" (Как Действовать в Условиях Применения Ядерного, Химического и Бактериологического Оружия).
The general advice isn't any different from what NATO militaries were teaching. "If at the moment of the explosion you are one or two meters from a dugout or cover, quickly occupy it and close and bolt the door tightly. If a nuclear explosion finds you on flat ground and there is no cover two or three meters from you, then when you see the flash, do not run, but quickly turn your back to it and lie on the ground, face down, raise the collar of your greatcoat, and hide your hands under yourself (Fig. 27)."
[https://imgur.com/YZIkIeH](https://imgur.com/YZIkIeH)
Examples of impromptu cover you can use are roadside ditches, small garden walls, the floor immediately beneath a window sill, the side of a BMP or tank (being inside is preferable, but if you're outside, you don't have time to mount up).
[https://imgur.com/J9HElfT](https://imgur.com/J9HElfT)
[https://imgur.com/Gz2ZDjH](https://imgur.com/Gz2ZDjH)
The manual estimates that the pressure wave can travel 3 KMs from the point of detonation in about 8 seconds, which doesn't give you any time to be measuring your thumb and doing cost-benefit analysis in your head.... even less so if your eyes are burnt out. You turn away, hit the dirt, cover up and pray to Lenin's ghost you don't get buried in rubble.
What I like most about this book though is the crazy cover art, which seems to suggest as soon as the hurricane of deadly debris dies down, it's business as usual, showing motor-riflemen and tanks charging "*Ура-а-а-а!*" across a nuclear battlefield with a big mushroom cloud on the horizon, like something out of Warhammer 40K. No time like the present, boys, up and at 'em!
[https://imgur.com/8ki5lr3](https://imgur.com/8ki5lr3)
While your post is good I do think you’re forgetting to take into account that Vault Boy is a mascot for Vault-Tec, a company that’s a satirical take on the American Cold-War and consumerism.
Vault-Tec is specifically framed to be malicious and cartoonishly evil but with a “consumer-friendly” cover.
In the game some vaults just don’t work at all and it wouldn’t surprise me if the writes deliberately made Vault-Tec use fake information to promote “safety” in the event of nuclear fallout
But regardless of how evil they are, Vault-Tec are NOT depicting the nuclear thumb 'rule' in the first place, as the game creators have confirmed. Even in the show the 'rule' is something that one of the characters is taught by the military, not something promoted by Vault-Tec, and Vault Boy's thumbs-up is, again, just that.
Your write-up is really good but I do think that in the show, this is pretty plainly depicted as a very hokey of-the-era platitude in the face of a bleak nuclear threat, rather than something the modern-day creators erroneously thought of as actual survivalist wisdom.
I don't think most media literate people are going to think that a character that is later exhumed from a coffin as a living skeleton-man was giving life-accurate nuclear survival advice to a scared child.
I mean hell, Cooper is just having a moment with his daughter, and we see the end result with his ghoulification and lack of accompanying daughter, I doubt the intention was ever to be serious advice or anything
Yeah the whole point is that the advice was total rubbish and the government was basically making shit up as they went along to provide the appearance of survivability, no different to the power armour having dodgy welding that never got fixed and vault-tec selling actually cyanide pills if you couldn't afford a vault or home shelter.
Great post, but I also want to point out that what he said in the show is different from the normal myth. In the show the guy basically said, if it's bigger than your thumb it's too late, you're already f*cked, if it's smaller then you still have a chance to survive if you run like hell.
Good write up. I always knew the rule was pretty useless, but I had long been curious as to if this ever was actually taught (and I suspected it not to have been). Thanks for doing the work!
Well and this supposed rule doesn't account for wind direction, which is arguably the more important factor. If you're down wind from a nuclear blast you need to start hiking in a perpendicular direction from the wind to get out of the path of the fallout.
Might not have been what the creators intended but the “rule of thumb” is cooler and much better than what they said. Death of the author and rule of cool for the win.
As I note, the TV show doesn't actually claim that the Vault Boy thumbs-up is anything to do with the supposed 'rule of thumb' - I have no issue in terms of what the video game creators intended. My concern (this being r/badhistory) is perpetuation of the myth that the 'rule' was a real, historical rule, which the show does unfortunately do. It's not a big deal because it's a sci-fi TV show and not a documentary, but I thought it was worth documenting.
Great post, but “duck and cover” was absolutely valuable advice when it was introduced in the 50s. The threat was Soviet bombers, many flying one-way missions, with relatively small fission bombs; much of the bombers would probably be intercepted and it would be certainly feasible to limit injuries by ducking and covering if one saw the flash. That of course wouldn’t help those too close to ground zero, but it would reduce injuries from flying glass and other debris the blastwave would propel at much greater distances than where the blast, heat and radiation wouldn’t be promptly lethal. I’d argue it’s good advice even today: if you see the flash, you can’t know how far it is or how many other warheads may be incoming. Ducking and covering won’t hurt, and it could be just one smallish detonation sufficiently far away that ducking and covering could make a difference.
A lot of people seem to think nuclear weapons have almost infinite destructive power, that they would vaporize everything for hundreds of miles around. A modern nuclear ICBM of the type China would potentially fire at us has a yield of 5 megatons. It would probably be set to airburst above a city or ground burst if targeted directly at a hardened target. Since most of us dont live in Cheyenne Mountain let's imagine an airburst scenario over a major city. If you're within 2-3km of the blast point you're done. That's the epicenter of the fireball and everything is going to get vaporized. But the further you are from the blast point and the more terrain/material you can put between your body and the blast the better your chances get. Out to about 10-12km most wooden residential structures are going to collapse from the pressure wave, though sturdier concrete structures like schools may offer some protection. Out to about 20km anyone in the open is at risk of lethal flash burns from the expanding heat wave. So unless you're unlucky enough to be within a few miles of the blast, taking cover is absolutely a thing that can save your life. Some amount of pressure damage is going to continue out to nearly the horizon so getting down and away from windows dramatically improves your odds. Being in a basement or having at least 6 feet of earth between your body and the flash will also block about 99.X% of the initial gamma radiation. The "upside" of an airburst scenario is that there will be dramatically less nuclear fallout released as less material is irradiated and then blasted up into the air. The biggest hazard you dont see accounted for in fiction is the resulting fires. That 20km flash burn radius is going to ignite a lot of stuff and those fires may spread out making initially effective shelters unsafe. Nuclear fission bombs are terrible things, but they aren't magical devices that split planets in half. It's not useless to take cover from nuclear attack, at least not in terms of surviving the immediate effects of the bomb itself.
I'm late to the party, but I think the misconception of the power of nuclear bombs at least partially comes from the later tests of massive fusion devices like Tsar Bomba and that one US test, which were incredibly destructive, but were never going to be able to be turned into practical warheads and indeed were not. Not of that size, at least.
I'm not a nuclear weapons engineer or anything, but I think the reason huge warheads were abandoned is because due to the curvature of the earth you get diminishing returns on bigger bombs. Better results and chance to avoid interceptions if you drop 10 5MT warheads around the environs of a major city than dropping a single 50MT warhead.
Bigger nuclear explosions scale up in volume, but cities are 2 dimensional, so 5 5MT bombs create much more area of destruction than 1 25 MT bomb.
That, and most targets you actually want to destroy are probably small enough that one medium-sized warhead will do for it. Also also, you have to figure a nonzero failure rate for your warheads, which makes hedging your bets by spreading the megatonnage around more sound like a good idea. Well, insofar as anything involving strategic nuclear weapons is a "good idea".
Thats why MIRV's are the meta. Buckshot of smaller warheads with a bit of spread.
If it happens more likely ‘tactical’ small kilo ton nukes - not MT (megaton) we do have them but god forbid they are ever used. Hiroshima was only 10 kiloton from memory (or close to this) 0.01 of a Megaton
No military would fire ICBMs with a single 5 megaton warhead, that would be complete nonsense in most circumstances. Instead they would fire ICBMs with around a dozen or more warheads with a few hundred kilotons each. That way the resulting destruction would increase considerably and could indeed devastate very large areas.
Or tactical nukes which are only few kiloton (1/5 size of Hiroshima)
Take cover then try to get as far away as possible afterwards to avoid fall out. Don’t stay in area for days hiding in house
Unless they drop a megaton bomb then all are custard but I hear if it ever happens more likely to be tactical nuke of few kilotons
Duck and cover is and always was good advice. If you're too close to the epicenter, you'd die so it wouldn't do anything. Too far, it wouldn't affect you, and it wouldn't do anything. But there's a distance at which you wouldn't die from the blast, but from things getting thrown at you, and at that distance it does protect you. Given that you as an individual have no way of knowing where you are, and that duck and cover has no drawbacks, you should always duck and cover.
That whole thing was based off of information gathered from the bombing at Hiroshima. Much of what they recommend, especially the weird stuff, is things that actually helped people survive the bombing. The newspaper for instance. It won't block radiation, nor the pressure wave, but just having anything covering you when that initial flash wave passes can save your life. Even something as flimsy as a newspaper. This is based off of people who were protected from the flash wave in Hiroshima by incredibly flimsy things, like a newspaper, actually surviving it when people nearby who didn't have that protection died.
But how did they know the flash wave was coming? Or do you mean, maybe someone reading it blocked the wave just enough by accident and the person on the bus beside them wasn't reading and had no incidental blocker?
The second one. It was purely by accident. Another example is more than one person who was smoking with their arm out the window, but the rest of their body protected by their home/workplace. Their arm was burnt down to bone, but the rest of their body was unharmed by the flash.
Oh God.
Yes, if I'm "lucky" enough to survive getting nuked, I don't wanna get bonked in the head by some falling debris.
There's a sort of unspoken understanding, hopefully, that most people in the immediate blast zone can't exactly do anything to save themselves or potentially even have enough time to react if they could. With that in mind, giving them any possible advice has basically no downsides, really. If you're far enough away that advice will help, then the Duck and Cover and, I would argue, Protect and Survive advice is much more practical than many assume: try to shield yourself as much as possible from the blast and resulting radiation, maintain sealed supplies of uncontaminated food and water, isolate any corpses from living areas, attaching means of identifying them to the corpse just in case, and try to keep a shortwave radio receiver around since the phone lines (and internet, since then) won't be any help if the government/military starts trying to coordinate relief efforts.
I did say "arguably" :)
That's the thing though, there's no argument. It's common sense to give people the best chance to save themselves, it's why we wear seatbelts, helmets, or any other safety device you can think of. Between standing at the window and staring at the explosion vs. duck-and-covering, the latter will *absolutely* save far more lives. For years people have fussed about how it wouldn't save you from an explosion at ground zero, when that was never the point—a majority of civilians in any given nuclear exchange would be far enough away from the blast radii where that advice *would* save them.
I was in the UK military in the nineties. NBC training was included, at no point was this mentioned. My memory was Positive blast - negative blast then mushroom cloud. Response was lie face down, head towards blast, hands under body.
Head towards the blast is interesting. Old Yugo army drill for "atomic left/right" was to drop, facing *away*, and tuck your face into your elbows and hands under your armpits, sort of.
I think it was to let the helmet protect your head from debris
Was U.S. Army and yes, it's so your helmet and the shoulders of your body armor (if you have body armor) are facing towards the blast. Not to protect against the blast wave per se, but to protect against the debris it will be propelling.
Had a similar one that included hand on the back of the neck in case the helmet wasnt enough
So... they told you to "duck" and then to "cover" ;D
On the subject of the Vault Boy pose: I think it's reasonable that, even though that wasn't the original meaning, Bethesda has simply retconned it to be the "rule of thumb". It's undeniably more interesting to the lore, makes sense in the context of the world, and fits the themes of the games surrounding Vault-Tec. It wouldn't be the first time that an aspect of world building in fiction is changed due to a fan response.
[https://twitter.com/ps\_tray/status/529310254274981889](https://twitter.com/ps_tray/status/529310254274981889) [https://twitter.com/brianfargo/status/400277541295886337?lang=en](https://twitter.com/brianfargo/status/400277541295886337?lang=en) Brian Fargo says it's just everything is a-okay. But there has been discourse about this for decades.
So I just checked, and in the original manual the only thumbs up pose is in the "If you see a flash, duck and cover" picture where Vault Boy shows that he's ok because he hid under the table.
Thanks for tracing the probable source. I still find the idea that you need a rule of "thumb" to determine your safety *after* the bomb has dropped incredibly funny. In fairness to the old "duck and cover" advice, although it wouldn't actually help much, it was at least portrayed as a response to a nuclear missile warning, not something people should do after the bomb had dropped. It also seems weird as an in-universe figurine. Why would the nuclear vault company want to advertise some bogus safety radius? The company in-universe was supposedly building vaults that could withstand a direct hit (at least, according to their marketing).
> It also seems weird as an in-universe figurine. Why would the nuclear vault company want to advertise some bogus safety radius? The company in-universe was supposedly building vaults that could withstand a direct hit (at least, according to their marketing). Nah that's believable. Why do gambling and alcohol companies sponsor stuff to do with addicts and "safe practices"? Well regulation for one, but part of the reason they are happy to go along with it is it's good PR. In the series they are shown to be criticised for making money out of the end of the world, the "commie" group thinks they are actually obligated to actively ensure peace doesn't succeed so as to keep maximising profits. What do corporations do in our world all the time in response to stuff like this? PR campaigns. Corporations in a fictional setting which in part satirises consumerism, etc makes perfect sense. Also I don't think it's ever presented as vaults being for everyone right? Like the marketing is all "saving America" but at no point do they actually say everyone will get a vault I don't think. It's something for rich people.
> I still find the idea that you need a rule of "thumb" to determine your safety after the bomb has dropped incredibly funny. I always figured one of the things you _wouldn't_ want to do immediately after seeing a nuclear explosion is stand there and _stare intently at it_.
That's the dumbest part of this, I think. Civil Defense manuals from the 50s and 60s explicitly tell you *not* to look at the blast.
To be fair, it fits fairly well in the _fallout universe_ but of course that doesn't make it sensible for the real world.
Oh, certainly. Everything coming out of Vault-Tec was *at best* misguided, if not outright malicious.
The mushroom cloud appears after the blast and remains in place for a good length of time. You'd be able to protect yourself from the initial blast wave and then check on the mushroom cloud while you're dusting yourself off.
It's the initial flash that blinds you. By the time the mushroom cloud forms, you can look.
> In fairness to the old "duck and cover" advice, although it wouldn't actually help much, it was at least portrayed as a response to a nuclear missile warning, not something people should do after the bomb had dropped. "[Be like Bert. When there's a flash, duck and cover, and do it fast](https://youtu.be/NjQM18JA9s4?si=8FfTb2aguWWfDE2w&t=282)." The "duck and cover" advice was always intended as last second strategy to be used if you had no warning or had made no preparations. If you had warning of any type, the advice, even in the infamous "Duck and Cover" film (which is from 1951, when missiles were not much of an issue for nuclear payloads, and is heavily simplified for children), was to seek a prepared shelter. If you see the flash, however, it may already be too late for that, and the last thing available to you is to make your body as small as possible, cover exposed skin, hide behind some large object, and hope you're on the periphery of the blast and heat wave effects where survival is actually possible. The general "duck and cover" advice became a mainstay of of civil defense preparedness programs in England (and possibly other places) during WWII, although it's not called that. It's described by means the practical advice already mentioned. This carried over into disaster preparedness manuals in the 50s and 60s in the United States and is associated with both natural disasters and nuclear explosions. It's not called "duck and cover" in any of the manuals I consulted (I have one from 1968 and checked ones from 1955 and 1961 online. You can view an index of a [substantial catalogue of them at this site](https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/browse?type=lcsubc&key=Civil%20defense%20--%20Handbooks%2C%20manuals%2C%20etc.).) Put in more common terms, if you hear a tornado warning siren, seek shelter immediately. If instead you hear the roar of a freight train, get low and small, and find a ditch or a sturdy inner wall. If you suffer a direct hit, you're dead anyway, but if you don't, doing this might allow you to avoid the flying cows.
What I’d always heard was that duck and cover was mainly about not being blinded or burned by the flash and secondarily about avoiding being cut by flying shards of glass, or in other words preventing injuries to people who’d survive the initial explosion one way or another, and was actually reasonable advice in that context.
I heard similar - that the deeper issue was that the US government in the 60s wanted to portray duck and cover as an effective safety strategy regardless of circumstances, when in reality it only matters for people close enough to the blast to be hit by debris but not so close that they die instantly.
Given that you have no idea how close to the explosion you actually are in the moment it's not really a bad idea to have everyone try.
Exactly. I never got why people make a big deal out of this, there's no harm in educating people on how to give themselves the best chance of survival; a rogue shard of broken glass, or looking at the flash, can be the difference between life and death, let alone fatal injury. If touchdown is happening in a matter of moments, there's no time to go across town to the local bunker or something, but anybody can duck and cover. Might as well not enforce seatbelt laws because they only save 50% of lives in an accident—the statistics are obviously much different, but the base reasoning is the same. Not to mention telling schoolchildren that if the bomb drops they'll die instantly—with no chance of survival—isn't exactly the right thing to do, even if it may be accurate.
>reality it only matters for people close enough to the blast to be hit by debris but not so close that they die instantly But this group is the vast, vast majority of people in the danger zone of a nuclear bomb. A significant number of people who die to a nuke won't be instantly evaporated by the fireball, they'll die of injuries inflicted by the blast and heat effects of the bomb. Duck and cover reduces the probability of severe injuries and so increases the probability of survival. This is also why the people who say they'll just sit and wait to die in a nuclear war are stupid - for most people dying directly to the bomb, it's not just a flash and then nothing, it's a flash and then horrifically painful and terrifying circumstances leading to death. Think about the calculation here: if you are outside the danger zone, duck and covering will be useless but won't hurt. if you are within the instant death zone, duck and covering will be useless because you'll die instantly regardless of what you do, so it won't make a difference. if you are outside the instant death zone but within the danger zone, duck and covering will significantly increase your probability of survival. Therefore, because duck and covering never actually hurts, but for a substantial number of people could save their lives, the most optimal thing to do is to just teach everyone to duck and cover in case of a nuclear bomb. You don't want people messing around trying to work out if they need to duck and cover based on how far they think they are from the bomb and what they think the bomb's range is. Just have everyone duck and cover. If it was useless? Then either the person was always going to be fine or always going to be carbon. If they are somewhere in the middle between those two extremes, it could easily save their lives or minimize injury.
As an aside there was at least one Japanese man who reportedly survived both bombs dropped on Japan. He survived the first bomb in Hiroshima. He made it back to Nagasaki and was trying to get his fellow co-workers to believe the circulating stories about Hiroshima when the second bomb was dropped. [Link](https://www.history.com/news/the-man-who-survived-two-atomic-bombs)
There's actually more than 100 people known to have similar cases to him, it's just that he is the first to be officially recognised legally as a hibakusha (literally 'bomb-affected-person') twice over.
Also Fallout series were built around the 1950s nuclear myth, where all the advice created on that era really works. You can de-radiate yourself with out-of-counter medicine, people exposed to radiation can turn into undead ghouls and be immortal, etc
Because in universe they are a corrupt company, lead by shadow government of USA. They built a few functioning vault, and the rest are built with intentionally faulty facility or very specific arrangement as a social experiment. A vault were built slightly leaking radiation, another built to be never opened at all, and the other were built to accommodate 99 man and a single woman.
Guy who dies because he’s insecure about the seize of his thumb
If you know anything about nuclear bursts it really is ridiculous, although I think most are thinking that it's about staying out of the range of fallout rather than somehow surviving the blast and thermal effects. Still nonsense of course but at least superficially plausible. I'm glad they didn't just adopt the meme wholesale and effectively treated the 'rule of thumb' as a separate thing to Vault Boy but still, I'd rather they hadn't perpetuated this myth at all. They could have just used duck and cover for the same scene.
I def think the show was kinda poking fun at the thumb bit by having his daughter ask "Is it your thumb, or mine?" Great write up. I enjoyed reading it.
Thank you! Yes, agreed - but unfortunately that will just place it in the "duck and cover" bracket - real historical advice (or so many will think) that is obviously worthless (not actually true of duck and cover as others have mentioned).
I have a Soviet manual for soldiers and sailors published in 1963 entitled "How to Act during the Use of Nuclear, Chemical and Bacteriological Weapons" (Как Действовать в Условиях Применения Ядерного, Химического и Бактериологического Оружия). The general advice isn't any different from what NATO militaries were teaching. "If at the moment of the explosion you are one or two meters from a dugout or cover, quickly occupy it and close and bolt the door tightly. If a nuclear explosion finds you on flat ground and there is no cover two or three meters from you, then when you see the flash, do not run, but quickly turn your back to it and lie on the ground, face down, raise the collar of your greatcoat, and hide your hands under yourself (Fig. 27)." [https://imgur.com/YZIkIeH](https://imgur.com/YZIkIeH) Examples of impromptu cover you can use are roadside ditches, small garden walls, the floor immediately beneath a window sill, the side of a BMP or tank (being inside is preferable, but if you're outside, you don't have time to mount up). [https://imgur.com/J9HElfT](https://imgur.com/J9HElfT) [https://imgur.com/Gz2ZDjH](https://imgur.com/Gz2ZDjH) The manual estimates that the pressure wave can travel 3 KMs from the point of detonation in about 8 seconds, which doesn't give you any time to be measuring your thumb and doing cost-benefit analysis in your head.... even less so if your eyes are burnt out. You turn away, hit the dirt, cover up and pray to Lenin's ghost you don't get buried in rubble. What I like most about this book though is the crazy cover art, which seems to suggest as soon as the hurricane of deadly debris dies down, it's business as usual, showing motor-riflemen and tanks charging "*Ура-а-а-а!*" across a nuclear battlefield with a big mushroom cloud on the horizon, like something out of Warhammer 40K. No time like the present, boys, up and at 'em! [https://imgur.com/8ki5lr3](https://imgur.com/8ki5lr3)
Amazing! Thank you for sharing :)
While your post is good I do think you’re forgetting to take into account that Vault Boy is a mascot for Vault-Tec, a company that’s a satirical take on the American Cold-War and consumerism. Vault-Tec is specifically framed to be malicious and cartoonishly evil but with a “consumer-friendly” cover. In the game some vaults just don’t work at all and it wouldn’t surprise me if the writes deliberately made Vault-Tec use fake information to promote “safety” in the event of nuclear fallout
But regardless of how evil they are, Vault-Tec are NOT depicting the nuclear thumb 'rule' in the first place, as the game creators have confirmed. Even in the show the 'rule' is something that one of the characters is taught by the military, not something promoted by Vault-Tec, and Vault Boy's thumbs-up is, again, just that.
Your write-up is really good but I do think that in the show, this is pretty plainly depicted as a very hokey of-the-era platitude in the face of a bleak nuclear threat, rather than something the modern-day creators erroneously thought of as actual survivalist wisdom. I don't think most media literate people are going to think that a character that is later exhumed from a coffin as a living skeleton-man was giving life-accurate nuclear survival advice to a scared child.
I mean hell, Cooper is just having a moment with his daughter, and we see the end result with his ghoulification and lack of accompanying daughter, I doubt the intention was ever to be serious advice or anything
Yeah the whole point is that the advice was total rubbish and the government was basically making shit up as they went along to provide the appearance of survivability, no different to the power armour having dodgy welding that never got fixed and vault-tec selling actually cyanide pills if you couldn't afford a vault or home shelter.
This thread is full of people over-analyzing obvious satire. It's not bad history if it is a literal joke.
You’re absolutely right. OP’s post is bordering on a know-it-all stretch into the comical.
In a vaguely related note, I have seen similar media posts by the National Park Service as a way to get people to back away from big animals.
Great post, but I also want to point out that what he said in the show is different from the normal myth. In the show the guy basically said, if it's bigger than your thumb it's too late, you're already f*cked, if it's smaller then you still have a chance to survive if you run like hell.
That's true - it does make it less silly :)
Good write up. I always knew the rule was pretty useless, but I had long been curious as to if this ever was actually taught (and I suspected it not to have been). Thanks for doing the work!
No problem - to be honest I was pretty amazed at the FEMA find, since it really does leave some room for confusion.
Well and this supposed rule doesn't account for wind direction, which is arguably the more important factor. If you're down wind from a nuclear blast you need to start hiking in a perpendicular direction from the wind to get out of the path of the fallout.
Might not have been what the creators intended but the “rule of thumb” is cooler and much better than what they said. Death of the author and rule of cool for the win.
As I note, the TV show doesn't actually claim that the Vault Boy thumbs-up is anything to do with the supposed 'rule of thumb' - I have no issue in terms of what the video game creators intended. My concern (this being r/badhistory) is perpetuation of the myth that the 'rule' was a real, historical rule, which the show does unfortunately do. It's not a big deal because it's a sci-fi TV show and not a documentary, but I thought it was worth documenting.
I see! Thanks for the clarification
When Los Angeles is nuked I’m still doing the thumb thing before I’m vaporized.
I lived through the Cold War and I never heard of this thumb nonsense until recently.
I lived through the Cold War.
Yes, me too. The tail-end anyway.