I don't remember three minutes. I remember we had to get under those desks right away. I used to look at the large windows that almost covered a wall. I'd wonder, even as a child, how going under a desk would protect us with all the glass there. Even if radiation didn't get us, the shattered glass surely would.
I wonder what it did to the psyches of my generation (grade school--early fifties) to grow up looking at windows and waiting for the bomb to drop.
I suppose a sturdy desk might offer some protection from falling ceilings. Where else could children go in a very short time? I wonder how many children had your thoughts, that the desks were no protection at all? I don't remember what I thought, I just did it.
Population-wide victim mentalities make the populations easier to manage. Given the behavior we saw recently, how very easy it was to rob us of nearly everything in our lives outside of our homes, I'd say we have been systematically conditioned to obey obviously irrational directives from our governments for many years now, and that business under the desks was just one of them.
To be fair, I was a very serious child :))
Not surprising to me at all! I was clueless, as far as I can remember. Just trying to not make any adults mad at me, back in the day when it was OK for a teacher to rap a child's knuckles with a ruler. Or worse for some school children I'm sure, but I only suffered the ruler treatment.