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As we huddled under our desks, hands over heads, “ducking and covering” like Bert the Turtle while a radio on the teacher’s desk blared Conelrad warnings, we knew enough, however, to realize that those desks and hands were unlikely to save us from the world's most powerful weaponry.

“Whatever we developed,” he told writer Bill Geerhart for a 2011 post on the Cold War blog Conelrad Adjacent, “it would have to be usable in downtown New York City, Manhattan, when all the lights are out and people are on the street and don’t know where to go.”

When his children were young, he told Conelrad Adjacent, “we’d go down the street, and one of the kids would say, ‘Hey, Dad, there’s one of your signs.’

The “Olympus Has Fallen” case is one of several actions that the F.C.C. has taken recently involving improper use of the Emergency Alert System, the successor to the Emergency Broadcast System and Conelrad, the Cold War communications programs meant to alert Americans to a pending nuclear attack.

It was first intended to inform Americans about an impending nuclear attack and was called CONELRAD, short for “Control of Electromagnetic Radiation.”