Of course, the "joke" was that hiding under your school desk, balled up with your arms protecting your head would never have saved you had a atomic bomb actually landed nearby. But, in our great wisdom, we missed the joke and thought the futility was because no bomb was likely to be launched toward our shores. We were foolish then and many are foolhardy now.
As PM Netanyahu warns to deaf ears among the left, Iran's intercontinental ballistic missile program is not required for Iran to attack Israel. This highly sophisticated and ever advancing program has only one target in mind, The Great Satan, the United States. President Obama's proudest achievement, even greater than "Obamacare" which has impoverished countless Americans with unreachable health costs, will now allow, actually mandate American businesses and local governments to substantially donate enormous American wealth to speed progress towards Iran developing weapons and weapons-systems whose purpose is to attack America and kill as many Americans as they can. (Israel, "The Little Satan", while an insult to Iran's jihadist dictators, is almost an afterthought in their military planning.)
All those years we laughed at our "Duck and Covers", we were no more than a hair's-breadth from wide-scale massacre. That we staved off nuclear attack had nothing to do with a beneficent USSR but because their leaders were rational actors who understood the MAD doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Less ideologues, as witness their lavish and corrupt personal lifestyles, their desire to survive far outweighed their desire to destroy us. It wasn't until we had a president with sufficient courage in Ronald Reagan (and in most areas I am no fan of his at all) who accelerated our arms development to a point that wrecked the Soviet economy in their attempt to keep up that (until a resurfaced Russia six years ago found they no longer had any opposition from the American administration) the Soviet nuclear threat was no more.
Today we lack the luxury of assuming safety and security from nuclear attack. Not only is Jihad-Iranian-Style not playing by our rules of rationality since they don't fear, but rather but rather welcome their own death if they can delude themselves into calling it martyrdom, but American leadership, rather than opposing their evil plans has been supporting and promoting them for six years.
This is just the threat to the US. The threat to Israel is much more frightening and much more immediate. I hope that Israel's leadership continues to refrain from the kool-aid and finds the courage which previously used to guide it before the last two Oslo-disaster decades. There is little, if any, room for error and hiding under our school desks is no shield at all.
As you know, I'm neither a diplomat nor a military strategist. I'm a rabbi. Defending Eretz Yisrael from authentic threats is an halachic imperative.
For more "rabbinic" thought, visit www.rabbizeitlin.wordpress.com