Curl up in a ball as you hit the ground.

10. PROTECTION IS POSSIBLE

When the sky pales and the blinding light of a hundred suns is everywhere, you will have less than a second to protect yourself -- approximately the time it takes to say "Atomic Bomb" out loud.

Instinct will tell you to look. Conquering that instinct may mean the differences between life and death. If you turn to see the bomb, radiation may blind you permanently. The heat flash will catch you full in the face, burning horribly if you are within two miles of ground zero. Don't look. Drop.

Curl up in a ball as you hit the ground. Put your hands (and arms, if they are bare) against your stomach, and duck your face into your chest. If you can shade all exposed areas of your skin, you are far less liable to be burned.

In this position debris and broken glass will fall out beyond you.

Stay in a ball for ten seconds. Both the heat and the blast wave will pass over you in that time. Then, if you can, stand up. You will be among the survivors -- provided you can move fast enough to avoid falling rubble and fire.

If the explosion catches you one step from a tree-trunk or doorway, you can take that step and crouch with your back to the light. But if a possible shelter is two or three or four steps away, don't try to make it. You won't have time.

After the crucial ten seconds, the fronts of brick buildings may be crashing into the street. Your safest move will be to press yourself tightly against the nearest wall -- preferably the wall of a concrete building, for concrete will not strip away like brick. In this position, also, cornices and broken glass from above will fall out beyond you.

The safest place inside any building will be near the interior partition.

Should the giant flash come when you are indoors, dive for the floor with your back to the window and crawl beneath or behind the nearest table, desk or counter. Anything between you and the window will stop not only the heat rays but also the jagged bullets of broken glass. The blast will be followed by wind of hurricane force; stay away from all windows for at least a minute. The safest place inside any building will be near the interior partitions. Keep as close to these as possible.

An unexpected atom bomb is a terrible possibility. There may be warnings of impending attack or even of approaching bombers, however. You may have time to reach shelter. There is such a thing against the atom bomb. Atomic shelters will be a vital part of civilian defense. Properly built, they would save thousands of lives.

SIMPLE SHELTERS

A small backyard shelter.

In your own home, your best chance will be in the cellar, particularly if there is an extension of the basement built out beyond the main structure of the house. It should have an escape hatch, perhaps through a ventilation shaft, in case the house above you catches fire or collapses. The walls, plus several feet of earth over the top, would offer an effective barrier against blast and heat and act as a sponge to soak up penetrating gamma radiation. A shallow rampart of earth or sandbags outside the house would add to your protection in the cellar, should the bomb go off high in the air. And it is in the air that the A-bomb is calculated to do the greatest damage.

A buried or semi-buried shelter outdoors also would offer worthwhile protection for your family. The English built these by the thousands during the Battle of Britain. World War II brought them to many parts of Europe. Danger of tornados has already brought similar storm cellars to many parts of the American mid-West.

Ideally, your shelter should be completely underground, braced by foot-thick reinforced concrete walls and ceiling, with forced-draft ventilation piped through special filters which can eliminate radioactive dust or water droplets. But simple semi-buried earth-and-pole shelters, caves or tunnels dug into hillsides can give protection against blast, heat and radiation very close to ground zero. Outdoor blast bomb shelters of the type used in World War II, if covered with at least 20 inches of packed soil, would reduce nuclear radiation below the death level at distances greater than 3,000 feet from the explosion. The same effect would be achieved by roughly 12 inches of concrete, four inches of iron or about two inches of solid lead.

Japanese survived in shelters as close as 900 feet to ground zero. Doors are not needed, if a baffle or turn in the entrance passage is provided to stop the heat flash and much of the radiation. It is essential to have at least two ways of getting out of the shelter. Emergency equipment, such as a shovel, lantern, crowbar, hammer, saw, axe, screwdriver and pliers, should be greased and stored permanently in the shelter for the possibility that all exits are blocked by after the blast.

Emergency equipment stored permanently in the shelter.

Plans for an 8 to 10 foot concrete tornado cellar are available at fifteen cents each from the Extension Agricultural Engineer, Oklahoma A. & M. College, Stillwater, Oklahoma. This shelter has been recommended by the American Red Cross for home construction in the mid-Western tornado belt. The National Security Resources Board, responsible for atomic defense planning, believes the shelter is one of the best for family protection against atomic attack.

For shelters near the place you work, the Atomic Energy Commission and Department of Defense recommend the lower floors of fireproof, reinforced-concrete or steel frame buildings. These buildings will offer greatest resistance to collapse. A 12-inch reinforced-concrete wall, well tied into such a structure, would provide adequate protection against blast and nuclear radiation at distances over half a mile from ground zero. To guard against inhaling the radioactive dust of a surface or underground explosion, ventilating systems must be shut down and all doors and windows closed in an emergency. But air conditioning systems can be left in operation, provided there is no leakage from outside.

THE CENTRAL CONTROL STATION

It will be in such a shelter as this that your city's central disaster station will be located. Here the vital orders for firefighting and rescue operations will be prepared and sent out. Teams of doctors and nurses, radiation monitoring crews, decontamination squads and the heavy equipment for clearing rubble must have a headquarters to ensure coordinated effort.

One of the most ticklish questions your city must decide is where to put these control centers, and how strongly they should be built. First, no one knows where ground zero will be. Second, the gigantic force of the atom bomb, even of the "obsolete" types we used on Japan, makes it impractical to design a building which would stand up under an atomic explosion directly overhead. What is the distance, then, at which protection becomes practical? How far away will construction engineers assume the atomic bomb goes off in building shelters and strengthening buildings?

Any decision here is a calculated risk. But from science's knowledge of the destructive effects of the bomb, through blast, heat and nuclear radiation, present planning is based upon a distance of half a mile from ground zero. Inside that circle, destruction and death will be virtually complete. In atomic attack, this mile-wide area must be written off as doomed. Your chances of surviving there, to put it mildly, range from poor to nil.

But beyond 3,000 feet, slightly more than half a mile, the ratio of deaths to survivors begins to fall off rapidly. Protection becomes practical. Buildings can be strengthened enough to withstand the blow. In fact, at Nagasaki, there were no earthquake-resistant, reinforced-concrete buildings which suffered serious damage to their frames at distances greater than 2,000 feet from ground zero.

Remove heavy indoor lighting fixtures which might fall.

Contrary to popular belief, U.S. buildings are not much stronger than those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many are weaker, for after the disaster of 1923 the Japanese wrote earthquake protection into their building codes. Only in the eleven Western states are similar earthquake-proof buildings required in the United States.

American skyscrapers, much higher than any buildings in the Japanese bombings, are built on heavy steel frames. Buildings such as these, which include office buildings and many hospitals, would withstand the blast of an atomic bomb quite well. But brick buildings, small or large, almost surely would crack and crumble up to a mile from ground zero, and suffer severe damage if within a mile and a half. Individual homes, whether of brick or wood, would not fare much better than Japan's "paper homes." Within 7,500 feet, nearly all would suffer severe structural damage.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR HOME SAFER

There are a number of things you can do to make your own home safer. Few will go to the extreme of building a two-foot-thick, reinforced-concrete wall around the house, although this would provide almost complete protection. But you can remove overhanging cornices, heavy indoor light fixtures which might fall, false ceilings and the like. Light, combustile curtains and draperies are a serious fire hazard at your windows. Such ornamental fabrics should be fireproof -- or removed completely.

Wire glass and half-inch wire screening will make your windows safer.

If your home is within three miles of a possible A-bomb target and you have a picture window in the living room, you might substitute plastic for plate glass. Wired glass would also make your windows safer. Half-inch wire screening stretched over the wired glass and nailed to the window frames would make them safer yet. But muslin or paper glued over the glass would do no good at all. The massive blast of the atomic bomb would blow in the window anyway.

If your home is within five miles of water, remember that brick, concrete, stucco and unfinished wood can absorb the radioactive rain and mist thrown out by an underwater explosion. A coat of paint makes decontamination much simpler.

If you cook or heat with gas, make certain there is a cut-off valve in the basement -- and that you know how to use it.

Larger buildings in a possible target city can be strengthened by added bracing and shoring or new transverse reinforced concrete walls. They can be made safer for the man in the street by stripping them of all outside ornamental brick or stone and overhanging cornices.

Factory buildings with light, saw-toothed roof trusses are among the most vulnerable structures.

Factory buildings, with light, saw-tooth roof trusses and little more than a corrugated shell over a steel skeleton, are among the most vulnerable structures in atomic blast. To make them safer, asbestos siding can be substituted for metal. The corrugated asbestos breaks up readily and thereby lessens the shock on the framework of the plant. Blast walls of reinforced concrete twelve inches thick can be built to protect equipment such as generators, boilers and vital machine tools.

NEW BUILDINGS

In the construction of new buildings in a possible atomic target area, factory, office building or home, the Atomic Energy Commission makes a few common sense suggestions.

If possible build at least three miles from the most probable target.

If not, avoid extensive use of brick or other loose facings. These become deadly missiles when torn loose by blast.

Keep windows areas to a minimum. People who live in glass houses, shouldn't.

Instead of designing for a wind load of 15 pounds per square foot, as is generally the case in multi-storied buildings today, the building should be made strong enough to stand up to 90 pounds per square foot horizontal push. Details of earthquake-resistant construction should be used, wherever possible. Bridges can likewise be strengthened against sideways push.

If you build in a depression or ravine, it is better if it runs at right angles to the most likely explosion area. The hill behind your home will then shield it to a certain extent.

Build your buildings as resistant to fire as possible.

At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fifty percent of the deaths and nearly three-quarters of the injuries were caused by burns. Burns from secondary sources -- fires which followed the atomic explosions -- were even more hazardous in many cases than the initial flash of pure heat. But something can be done to protect you from atomic heat and fire.

At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, falling rubble and flying glass caused more casualties than direct blast pressure. Something can be done to protect you against being crushed.

At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not more than fifteen percent of the fatalities died from radiation sickness. And something can be done to protect you against radiation.

Living with the grim possibility of atomic attack does not mean laughing it off, nor forgetting about it, nor resigning to fatalism. "If it comes, we'll all be dead, so why worry about it" philosophy is just as unrealistic as not having a fire department in your town. Preparing for fire is a hard job. Preparing for the atom bomb is even harder, and it may seem far less necessary. Yet proper preparation can mean thousands of lives. Among them may be your own.