Duck and Cover is a 1952 American civil defense animated and live action social guidance film[1] that is often characterized[2][3] as propaganda.

It was screened on Turner Classic Movies' Saturday night–Sunday morning film showcase series, TCM Underground.

"[8][9] The film starts with an animated sequence, showing Bert, an anthropomorphic turtle walking down a road while picking up a flower and smelling it.

[7] The last scene of the film returns to animation, in which Bert the Turtle (voiced by Carl Ritchie) summarily asks what everybody should do in the event of an atomic bomb flash, before being given the correct answer by a group of unseen children.

Fallout shelters, both private and public, were built, but the government deemed it necessary to teach citizens about the danger of atomic and hydrogen bombs and give them training to prepare them to act in the event of a nuclear strike.

"[8] Detailed scientific research programs lay behind the UK government civil defense pamphlets of the 1950s and 1960s, including the advice to duck and cover,[12] which has made a resurgence in recent years[when?]

[3] While these kinds of tactics would be useless for those at ground zero during a surface burst nuclear explosion, it would be beneficial to most people, who are positioned away from the blast hypocenter.

Duck-and-cover exercises quickly became a part of Civil Defense drills that every American citizen, from children to the elderly, practiced to be ready in the event of nuclear war.

As the Soviets were believed to be rapidly increasing their nuclear stockpile, the efficacy of both would begin to enter a diminishing returns trend.

[17] When more became known about the cost and limitations of the Nike Zeus system, in the early 1960s the head of the Department of Defense determined once more that fallout shelters would save more Americans for less money.

It was feared that a resolution to the Korean War might require the theater of operations to first expand across the border into the People's Republic of China and nuclear weapons to end it.

[8][20] The video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1986 song "Christmas at Ground Zero" features footage from the film, mostly during an instrumental break.