an atomic bomb flash and is given the correct answer by a group of unseen children. Purpose After nuclear weapons were developed (the first having been developed during the Manhattan Project during World War II), it was realized what kind of danger they posed. The United States held a nuclear monopoly from the end of World War II until 1949, when the Soviets detonated their first nuclear device. This signaled the beginning of the nuclear stage of the Cold War, and as a result, strategies for survival were thought out. Fallout shelters, both private and public, were built, but the government still viewed it as necessary to explain to citizens both the danger of the atomic (and later, hydrogen) bombs, and to give them some sort of training so that they would be prepared to act in the event of a nuclear strike. The solution was the duck and cover campaign, of which Duck and Cover was an integral part. Shelters were built, drills were held in towns and schools, and the film was shown to schoolchildren. According to the United States Library of Congress (which declared the film "historically significant" and inducted it for preservation into the National Film Registry in 2004), it "was seen by millions of schoolchildren in the 1950s." Other media The song "Bert the Turtle (Duck and Cover)", performed by Dick Baker, was released as a commercial recording by Coral Records and accompanied by a color campaign pamphlet. It sold three million copies. Accuracy and usefulness Many historians and the nuclear disarmament public at large have generally sought to mock and dismiss civil defense advice as mere propaganda, including Amy Lutrell, who argues the film was made primarily as an American red scare political tool, to make children frightened of the Soviet Union and communism. Detailed scientific research programs lay behind the much-mocked UK government civil defense pamphlets of the 1950s and 1960s, including the advice to promptly duck and cover. The advice to duck and cover has made a resurgence in recent years with new scientific evidence to support it. While this (or any) tactic would be useless for someone at ground zero during a surface burst nuclear explosion, it would be beneficial to the vast majority of people who are positioned away from the blast hypocenter: both the thermal pulse of some weapons and the shrapnel from all weapons (particularly from shattered windows)