Nuclear Missile Warnings

When I was a wee lad my mother would take us to the Oscar's Drive-In for a hamburger treat.

In hindsight, it was a ridiculously long way to drive for a simple burger but it was a primitive time when fast food joints weren't on every street corner.

Anyway, a short distance away was an air raid siren.

If the Russians sent nuclear missiles to destroy the navy base in our city, the siren would wail a warning that in a few minutes everything we knew and loved would be obliterated. The siren would go off periodically to test if the rats living in the speakers had gnawed through the wires.

If I was in school when the test happened, we students would duck-and-cover.

We would duck under our flimsy wooden desks, put our heads between our legs to kiss our butts goodbye while the teacher closed the window blinds so we wouldn't be cut by broken glass. Yeah, like that was the worst that could happen.

Adults were supposed to remember where the too few public fallout shelters were.

They would remember their strategy to ruthlessly stampede over their friends and neighbors to find shelter in a drab, filthy basement bunker with too little food and water and inadequate sanitation before the blinding flash and melting flesh happened.

Hawaii got a taste of that history over the weekend. They learned how utterly useless are such warnings and how totally insane the world is.

Rod Serling's Twilight Zone showed what would really happen in the episode, The Shelter.