[unsupp0rted]

Apparently getting under their desks was on the off-chance their school is far enough away to avoid being incinerated but still close enough for a pressure wave to blow out all the glass in the windows and turn it into projectiles.

[_carbyau_]

Honestly, seems like a couldn't-hurt move.

Too close? Incinerated. Doesn't matter.

Goldilocks nearby enough for glass shrapnel? Dodged some glass by being under desk! Win!

Far away? Heard a distant boom while under desk.

Hard to fault really.

[unsupp0rted]

The tradeoff is raising generations of children terrified of nukes destroying their world at any moment. Better safe than sorry, as you suggested, but it's not a zero cost strategy.

[_carbyau_]

While true, at that point in time the parents were also similarly terrified.

Schools educate children to fit into society.

That was society at the time.

[pfdietz]

This came in handy when that meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk a few years ago. A teacher remembered the training and had everyone hide under desks, and they were spared laceration from the blown-in windows.

[int_19h]

In Russia, this kind of training is not a long-gone relic - there's a class in school that's dedicated to survival in various situations, covering all kinds of stuff from emergency first aid to making shelter in the wilds. A subset of that is dealing with anthropogenic disasters, and a subset of that is civil defense. If I remember correctly, we had two hours covering nukes alone - likely targets in the vicinity, what kind of damage to expect where, how to build fallout shelters, when to evacuate etc. So far as I know, this all is still taught in schools there.

[lostlogin]

Probably quite handy if that is all the training you get before your call up and your country is threatening nuclear war.

[int_19h]

In Soviet times, the class was called "preliminary military training", and focused more on that aspect - not quite to the point where they'd shoot things, but it would involve timed field-stripping an AK, for example, and reading military topographic maps.

After 1991, the military aspects were stripped out, although in many schools they turned into an opt-in afterschool "patriot club" or some such. These were the primary source of videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrxjYfl05ek.

Recently, they've announced that they'll be reviving the old Soviet format, so it'll become mandatory for all high schoolers again, beginning with the next school year (starting in September, 2023).

[CamperBob2]

Do the math. There's a damned good chance that you are, in fact, in the zone where duck-and-cover survival measures are effective.

[dsfyu404ed]

Everyone, especially in pseudo-intellectual circles like HN sneers at the whole "duck and cover" thing but any grade schooler can look a the concentric circles on a map and tell you that the area in which you'd best protect your noggin from the drop ceiling dropping a little more than designed is far greater than the area in which burns are a problem.

[michaelcampbell]

I went to school in the 70's and _we_ had no such drills, but being in tornado alley, plenty of those.

That said, I suspect these drills were more for theatre, like most of the TSA is now - put up a big visible show that you're doing _something_.

Reasonable people can disagree.