General Information about CDV Instruments

Paul Frame, Oak Ridge Associated Universities (framep@orau.gov)

Comments and/or corrections are welcome

Administration of Civil Defense Activities

     Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA):  1951-1958

     Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM): 1958 - 1961 

     Office of Civil Defense (OCD) in the Department of Defense (DOD): 1961-1964

     Office of Civil Defense (OCD) in the Department of the Army: 1964-1972

     Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (DCPA) in the Department of Defense (DOD): 1972 - 1979

     Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA): 1979 - 

General

During the 1950s, following the development of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union, the U.S. federal government urged the states to obtain radiological instrumentation for use in the event of a possible nuclear attack. 

However, at the beginning of the decade there were no survey instruments specifically designed for civil defense purposes. What was available was a mix of commercial instruments and instruments developed for use at facilities operated by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). For example, the AEC Emergency Monitoring Kit used at Hanford contained, in addition to miscellaneous supplies (e.g., gloves, coveralls), a Nuclear Instrument and Chemical Corp. Model 2610 GM detector, a Juno ionization chamber, two Cambridge dosimeters, a Cambridge charging unit, and a film badge. There were also a few RADIAC instruments that had been developed for the military, and foremost among these was the AN/PDR T1 ion chamber.  The following quote comes from a January 1951 UP press story: "The Civil Defense Administration so far has given approval to only one radiation detector -  the "T one" developed for the army signal corps. The agency isn't completely satisfied with that. The agency repeatedly urged the public to leave the detection of radiation to trained civil defense units, who in turn will warn the public when danger exists." A decade later that view changed, and the Office of Civil Defense would encourage the development and sale of radiological instrumentation to the general public.

In the mid-fifties, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) wrote up the specifications and issued contracts for the production of the first CD V instrumentation. For the most part, this was done by Jack Greene who had joined the FCDA in 1951. Before then, he had been with the AEC's Radiation Instrument Branch. States could purchase this equipment and the Federal Government would provide matching funds. While some states, e.g., California and New York, purchased their own instrumentation, the majority did not.  Eventually, Congress and the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) recognized that it was necessary for the Federal government to take full responsibility, and in December of 1960 the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (OCDM) informed the states that the Federal government would provide such instrumentation. 

By the early 1960s,  the OCDM and then the Office of Civil Defense (OCD) began locating and stocking fallout shelters in existing buildings. They also began distributing large numbers of  “Shelter Radiation Kits” that contained survey meters and dosimeters to public shelters and monitoring stations. To a significant extent, the major instrument procurements of the early 1960s were sparked by the Berlin Crisis.

At various times, miscellaneous instruments were also developed to meet specialized needs e.g., the CD V-138 dosimeter for training, the CD V-700M survey meter for the evaluation of alpha contamination, the CD V-711 remote monitor for external readings around  emergency operations centers, and the CD V-717 for remote readings around monitoring stations. 

Instrument Procurement and Inventory

The following table, taken from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) publication Radiological Instruments: An Essential Resource for National Preparedness, indicates the federal funding for civil defense instrumentation and the number of items (including parts) that were procured. Note that these purchases only extended from 1955 to 1964 and that the bulk of the expenditures occurred in 1962 and 1963.  

Assigning dates is somewhat complicated because the fiscal year is quite different from the calendar year. For example, FY 1960 actually runs from the beginning of July 1959 through the end of June 1960. Unfortunately, most of the data concerning instrument procurement, etc., is provided on the basis of the fiscal year. Another problem associated with the procurement data is the fact that the years in which the equipment is ordered, delivered and distributed can be quite different. 

The following table indicates the details of the instrument procurement for Fiscal Year 1956. It comes from a presentation given by Jack Greene (Jack started the FCDA's Radiological Defense program, and from 1962 until 1974, he headed the Post-Attack Research Division).

The following table, taken from Radiological Instruments: An Essential Resource for National Preparedness (CPG 3-1, 1986) indicates how many of the various CDV instruments were purchased, how many were disposed of (or excessed), how many were lost or broken, and how many existed in the Federal and state inventories as of 1985.