A ballistic missile heading for Hawaii would be nuclear, the amount of additional loss of life that would incur from “damaging the public’s trust” in the early warning system would be pretty much negligible if the missile hits any major population center.
This is basically not an issue for nuclear missiles for something more like to the situation in southern Israel with conventional unguided munitions blindly shot at their general direction it might work but if a nuke could get you it would do it regardless if you duck and cover or not.
> but if a nuke could get you it would do it regardless if you duck and cover or not.
This is just not true. The area in which the nuke will get everyone regardless is less than a tenth of the area where taking precautions would save you.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. People widely laugh at "duck and cover" as if it was some huge joke. Even at the height of the cold war when the nuke stocks were at their largest, only a small portion of the population would be screwed regardless of what they did. While the majority of the population would be at a distance from the closest explosion where ducking and covering would save them.
> People widely laugh at "duck and cover" as if it was some huge joke. ... While the majority of the population would be at a distance from the closest explosion where ducking and covering would save them.
Having grown up during the cold war, I'd say that people thought "duck and cover" was ridiculous not because of some misunderstanding about its usefulness in protecting one from blast, though that misunderstanding might have existed. The reason everyone thought it was ridiculous was that everyone realized that surviving and having to deal with a completely smashed infrastructure and radioactive fallout was an extremely terrible, shitty outcome that you were not going to save yourself from by hiding under a desk or something.
Another thing that constantly astonishes me is how the immediate direct damage caused by any kind of intentional explosion is consistently overestimated by public at large. I largely blame action movies where C4 block of the size typically used for initiating industrial explosives in bore holes is often shown as leveling complete buildings.
Or war movies, where a round from a tank gun or small artillery piece completely wrecks a house. I have a handful of decommissioned 76mm tank destroyer rounds, probsbly from an M18 Hellcat - comparable to most WW2 tank guns. It's about the size of a one-liter soda bottle, and a significant portion of that is aerodynamic casing, propellant, and fuse.
It's interesting, too, to read historical accounts of sieges in the Napoleonic and earlier eras; it would take days or weeks of pounding by breaching batteries of heavy cannon to reduce masonry walls to effect a breach and allow an assault over the pile of broken rubble remaining, in a bloody, hand-to-hand melee. And often there would be so much time between firings that the defenders could rebuild new defenses in depth behind the breach. Unless a powder magazine was struck, massive damage was relatively rare.
People forget that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where no one ducked and covered, there were long-term survivors 200-300m from ground zero simply by virtue of where they were located when the bomb went off. A protective posture is at least somewhat effective much closer to ground zero than I think people realize, especially if you have a bit of warning.
Also, the area within by that large radius is going to be much bigger than from non-nuclear threats, so the number of people who could have reduced injuries via preparation might be much greater.
