Who is old enough to remember the "under the desk"

[Vox Moi]

43. Sometime in the mid-fifties in Connecticut ....

Second grade ... maybe third ... we were under our desks but were too young to understand how futile the exercise was or even the nature of an atomic bomb.
There were no ICBMs then. The Nike Anti-Aircraft missile battery in the town next door was operational and my Cub Scout troop made a visit to the place.
By the early 60's, the bombs had gotten bigger, the missiles were too fast to shot down and the home-based fallout shelter had come into fashion.
They made it all seem so normal: the prospect of being vaporized without warning, the idea that we might have to hide in the basement for weeks and weeks, the idea that we'd have to protect ourselves from desperate neighbors. It wasn't just me or my family or my school: everyone and everything I knew was in danger, all the time. At any given moment you could look around you and know that it could all be ashes in 20 minutes.
NOBODY COMPLAINED! No adults stood up to tell us kids that the situation was totally fucked up and that people should not have to live that way.