“It’s a dog and pony show,” Nick grumbles when he gets his assignment. “And we cover those, too,” says Jorgensen. Today’s the annual Operation Alert drill, a nationwide exercise in collectively engaging with the fiction that hiding under desks and avoiding elevators will do anything to help you survive a nuclear attack. That, and it’s a not-so-subtle reminder of the dangers of communists or Russians or not voting for Eisenhower—take your pick. Tomorrow, most papers will run the government’s accounting of how much death and destruction the fictional attack would have caused: millions dead,
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