The 160 local employees and 32 Americans who worked there regularly practiced duck-and-cover drills.

And if American kids have to go back to duck-and-cover drills, well, same deal.

But growing up in an America of bomb shelters and duck-and-cover drills, I found Godzilla comforting.

Mr. Carroll describes the duck-and-cover drills that terrified millions of schoolchildren, the days of dead certainty that nuclear fire would rain from the skies.

Instead of fire drills, his school held duck-and-cover drills.

As a rule, the duck-and-cover drills and other programs are sparsely attended, but this year has been different because of those 15 terrifying seconds in October.

For a generation of baby boomers, Mr. Wexler's films were as dependable a classroom ritual as the duck-and-cover drill.

But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal.

Yet the cold war is still a vivid memory for nostalgia-prone baby boomers who participated in duck-and-cover drills at school and monitored the space race, he said.

These are what the Pentagon calls "homeland threats," a phrase echoing from the 1950's and 1960's, when fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills were the rage.