With similar themes to the more adult oriented civil defense training films, the film was widely distributed to United States school children in the 1950s. It teaches students what to do in the event of a nuclear explosion.[5]
In 2004, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."[7][8]
The film starts with an animated sequence, showing an anthropomorphicturtle walking down a road, while picking up a flower and smelling it. A chorus sings the Duck and Cover theme:
There was a turtle by the name of Bert
and Bert the turtle was very alert;
when danger threatened him he never got hurt
he knew just what to do ...
He'd duck! [gasp]
And cover!
Duck! [gasp]
And cover!
(male) He did what we all must learn to do
(male) You (female) And you (male) And you (deeper male) And you! [bang, gasp] Duck, and cover!
The significant scene before Bert ducks and covers.
Under the theme, Bert is shown being attacked by a monkey holding a lit firecracker or stick of dynamite on the end of a string. Bert ducks into his shell in the nick of time, as the charge goes off and destroys both the monkey and the tree in which he is sitting. Bert, however, is shown perfectly safe, because he ducked and covered.
The film then switches to live footage, as narrator Middleton explains what children should do "when you see the flash" of an atomic bomb. The movie goes on to suggest that by ducking down low in the event of a nuclear explosion, (crawling under desks and covering their necks with clasped hands)[6] the children would be safer than they would be standing, and explains some basic survival tactics for nuclear war (facing any wall that might lend protection).[6]
The last scene of the film returns to animation in which Bert the Turtle (voiced by Carl Ritchie) summarily asks what everybody should do in the event of an atomic bomb flash and is given the correct answer by a group of unseen children.
Purpose
After nuclear weapons were developed (the first having been developed during the Manhattan Project during World War II), it was realized what kind of danger they posed. The United States held a nuclear monopoly from the end of World War II until 1949, when the Soviets detonated their first nuclear device.[citation needed]
This signaled the beginning of the nuclear stage of the Cold War, and as a result, strategies for survival were thought out. Fallout shelters, both private and public, were built, but the government still viewed it as necessary to explain to citizens both the danger of the atomic (and later, hydrogen) bombs, and to give them some sort of training so that they would be prepared to act in the event of a nuclear strike.[citation needed]
The solution was the duck and cover campaign, of which Duck and Cover was an integral part. Shelters were built, drills were held in towns and schools, and the film was shown to schoolchildren.[citation needed] According to the United States Library of Congress (which declared the film "historically significant" and inducted it for preservation into the National Film Registry in 2004), it "was seen by millions of schoolchildren in the 1950s."[7]
Other media
The song "Bert the Turtle (Duck and Cover)", performed by Dick Baker, was released as a commercial recording by Coral Records and accompanied by a color campaign pamphlet. It sold three million copies.[9]
Accuracy and usefulness
Test shot Nectar of Operation Castle produced a yield of 1.69 megatons. Note the distinctive near instantaneous double flash, with the second being brighter than the sun, and the blast wave slowly, by comparison, spreading out turning the calm Elugelab ocean water a frothy white as it passes. The maximum average nuclear fireball radius is approximately 1.3 to 1.5 km (0.81 to 0.93 mi).[10] The outdoor blast and thermal burn LD50s would be 8 and 12 km respectively.[10][11] Assuming personnel did not take any prompt countermeasures.
Many historians and the nuclear disarmament public at large have generally sought to mock and dismiss civil defense advice as mere propaganda, including Amy Cottrell,[who?] who argues the film was made primarily as an American red scare political tool, to remind children of the dangers posed by the Soviet Union and communism.[4]
Detailed scientific research programs lay behind the much-mocked UK government civil defense pamphlets of the 1950s and 1960s, including the advice to promptly duck and cover.[12] The advice to duck and cover has made a resurgence in recent years[when?] with new scientific evidence to support it.[3] While this (or any) tactic would be useless for someone at ground zero during a surface burstnuclear explosion, it would be beneficial to the vast majority of people who are positioned away from the blast hypocenter.
Even a thin barrier such as cloth can reduce the severity of burns on the skin from the thermal radiation.
Recent[when?] scientific analysis has largely supported the general idea of sheltering indoors in response to a nuclear explosion.[3][13] Staying indoors can offer protection both from the initial blast as well as the following radioactive fallout that accumulates during the aftermath. Additionally, such a response would leave roads clear for emergency vehicles to access the area. This is termed the shelter in place protocol, and together with emergency evacuation advice, they are the two countermeasures to take when the direct effects of nuclear explosions are no longer life-threatening and the need for protective shielding from coming in contact with nuclear weapon debris/fallout in the aftermath of the explosion, begins to become a concern.
Historical context
Video of shot MET (Military Effects Test) of Operation Teapot, fired on 15 April 1955, with a yield of 22 kilotons, typical of the yield of nuclear weapons when the film was first shown and approximately of the same yield and height of burst as the Fat Man bomb detonated over the city of Nagasaki in 1945.
The United States' monopoly on nuclear weapons was broken by the Soviet Union in 1949 when it tested its first nuclear explosive (Joe-1), and with this many in the US government and public perceived that the nation was more vulnerable than it had ever been before. Duck-and-cover exercises quickly became a part of Civil Defense drills that every American citizen, from children to the elderly, practiced to be ready in the event of nuclear war. In 1950, during the first big Civil Defense push of the Cold War and coinciding with the Alert America! initiative to educate Americans on nuclear preparedness;[14] The adult-orientated Survival Under Atomic Attack was published and contains "duck and cover" or more accurately, cover-and-then-duck advice without using those specific terms in its Six Survival Secrets For Atomic Attacks section. 1. Try To Get Shielded 2. Drop Flat On Ground Or Floor 3. Bury Your Face In Your Arms ("crook of your elbow").[15] The child-orientated film Duck and Cover was produced a year later by the Federal Civil Defense Administration in 1951.
The adult-orientated Survival Under Atomic Attack issued in 1950, pre-dated the release of Duck and Cover in 1951–52. The Booklet was accompanied by a companion film by the same name.[16]
Education efforts on the effects of nuclear weapons proceeded with stops-and-starts in the US due to competing alternatives. In a once classified, 1950s era, US war game that looked at varying levels of war escalation, warning and pre-emptive attacks in the late 1950s early 1960s, it was estimated that approximately 27 million US citizens would have been saved with civil defense education.[17] At the time however the cost of a full-scale civil defense program was regarded as lesser in effectiveness, in cost-benefit analysis than a ballistic missile defense (Nike Zeus) system, and as the Soviet adversary was believed to be rapidly increasing their nuclear stockpile, the efficacy of both would begin to enter a diminishing returns trend.[17] When more became known about the cost and limitations of the Nike Zeus system, in the early 1960s the head of the department of defense determined once again that fallout shelters would save more Americans for far less money.[citation needed]
The video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1986 song "Christmas at Ground Zero" features footage from the film, mostly during an instrumental break. Bert the Turtle is shown in time with the lyric 'I'll duck and cover/ with my Yuletide lover'.[20]
The video for Peter Gabriel's 1980 song "Games Without Frontiers" features footage from the film at the end of song.[21]
The 2015 Oscar-winning film Bridge of Spies, about an exchange of captured spies between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War, features a prominent scene in which grade school children watch Duck and Cover in their classroom.
In the 1997 South Park episode "Volcano", the South Park residents are urged to "duck and cover" by a volcano safety film which loosely parodies Duck and Cover. This proves ineffective as the people who follow the film's advice are subsequently disintegrated by the lava from the volcanic eruption with only their skeletons remaining.
The 1999 Warner Brothers animated feature film, The Iron Giant, set in 1957, features a social guidance film-within-a-film titled, Atomic Holocaust, the style and tone of which parodies the film.[22] In another instance, near the end of the feature film, the villainous character Kent Mansley suggests they duck and cover into a fallout shelter in response to an offshore nuclear SLBMPolaris missile being launched by mistake at their position by the USS Nautilus,[note 1] however all the other male adults in the vicinity claim that this would be of "no use", convincing bystanders and the young protagonist at the heart of the feature film to not attempt to evacuate to shelter.
Season 1, Episode 5 of Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies shows a group of teenagers being shown the film.
In 1991, Season 3, Episode 21 of Quantum Leap showed two children watching the film on television.
The 2024 indie horror video game Shipwrecked 64 uses a slowed-down remix of the song used in the film, which is played when the player character is being pursued by the "Dwellers" that stalk the "Layer 3" area and below in the "1997" version of the game, hinting that the player should find a hiding place immediately.
See also
Duck and cover, for further discussion of this method of self-defense.
^Despite the fact that the USS Nautilus never had a complement of nuclear missiles and the first test launch of the Polaris occurred on the USS George Washington in 1960, three years after the date in which the movie is set.
References
^Kopp, David M. (5 December 2018). "Mental Hygiene Guidance Films and Duck and Cover". Famous and (Infamous) Workplace and Community Training. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. pp. 143–156. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-59753-3_9. ISBN978-1-137-59752-6.
