This is an opinion column.

There’s a joke from when the Cold War was still a thing — the first time, before it thawed and cooled again. It was about those duck-and-cover drills, in case the Soviets launched their nukes.

They tell you to get under your desk to protect yourself from the blast, right?

Well, if it’s safe under there, why don’t they make the whole school out of the same stuff?

As jokes go, it wasn’t that funny — only absurd.

No one would take such a thing seriously — back then.

Today? I’m not so sure.

Because this week, Alabama saw a demonstration of something way dumber than anything like that. It’s a proposed feint of protection against another, scarier foe — school shooters.

And Alabama officials seemed to take it seriously.

On Monday, Cullman City Schools demonstrated prototypes of a new mechanism they hope will keep school children safe in the unlikely event of a school shooting

The device, built and sold by KT Security Solutions, is basically a foldable bullet-proof box big enough for a class of kids to crowd inside.

When not in use, the box collapses and teachers can use the outside of these things as whiteboards.

The foldable boxes can also double as tornado shelters, they said.

And if they lined the thing with lead, perhaps it could protect from nuclear attack, too. As it was, the teacher who unfolded the contraption for media Monday seemed to struggle to get it in place.

But here’s where the real weight lands: These things cost $60,000 a piece.

And Cullman City Schools already bought two of them.

The school system is the first in the nation to test out the safety system, which is something the wider world is supposed to be impressed by.

That’s right. Cullman City Schools paid $120,000 to be somebody else’s guinea pig.

Scratch that — Cullman City Schools paid $120,000 to make Cullman City School students somebody’s guinea pigs.

For two classrooms.

As alarming as it might be that local school officials would take something like this seriously, state officials seemed to take this thing seriously, too.

At the unveiling, state Sen. Garlan Gudger, R-Cullman, touted “data-driven research to ensure it’s secure and safe,” but not so much how the heck such a solution would be practical, even if it works as advertised.

Since none of the folks at the event — including state and federal lawmakers and the state school superintendent — had the guts to tell these folks they were nuts, let me do the math for everybody else.

Alabama has about 727,000 public school students.

Generally, class sizes in Alabama are not supposed to exceed 25 students per teacher. Let’s assume Alabama schools aren’t breaking the rules.

That comes to 29,080 classes.

For each of those classes to have one of these folding whiteboard contraptions, 29,080 multiplied by $60,000 each is … a number so big I have to turn my iPhone calculator sideways to read it.

$1,744,800,000.

That’s right. This folding card table thingy is a $1.7 billion solution.

Just for Alabama.

“We can’t afford not to do anything” state Rep. Anthony Daniels, D-Huntsville, told my colleague Savannah Tryens-Fernandes.

True, but we can’t afford nearly 30,000 bulletproof safe rooms, either, and someone who serves in the Alabama Legislature should be able to figure that out, but that’s not where Daniels stopped.

“I serve on the Budget Committee and so for me, this is something that’s needed and it’s something that I’m certainly on board with,” he said.

That’s right. The cardtable bulletproof box thing might actually have bipartisan support.

It seems no one in power can look at this thing and question whether we’ve lost our minds. Life in Alabama is like the Onion, but real.

Two generations ago, at the outset of the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower warned that an arms race with the Soviets would cost the people of both sides.

“This world in arms is not spending money alone,” he said. “It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

That was true then.

And it’s true today without such a foe to compete with.

This is how you spend $60,000 in every classroom without spending $60,000 on education.

It’s a joke, but it isn’t funny.

Only absurd.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group, 2020 winner of the Walker Stone Award, winner of the 2021 SPJ award for opinion writing, and 2021 winner of the Molly Ivins prize for political commentary.