Duck and Cover (1951)

1951

The civil defence film made by Archer Productions and shown in American schools, in which Bert the Turtle teaches children to drop and shelter at the flash of a bomb. The technique is domestication of terror: a cartoon mascot, a jingle and a rehearsable drill turn an unmanageable threat into a routine a child can perform. Its real product was composure rather than survival, and it taught a generation to treat nuclear attack as a civic habit.