Radiological Defense Exercise
1967
This is the story of Dan Carter,
high school physics teacher and chief radiological monitoring officer for
the fictional metropolis of Central City. The film opens on a golf course, where Carter and his colleagues tee off. Before they can complete their round, however, Carter is summoned to the local Emergency Operating Center due to a sudden international crisis. Resentful at being pulled away from his game, Carter grouses that he has grown skeptical
of the continuous scare headlines boldly printed across the front page of the evening paper. "Everyone in town felt this
was not another Cuba, it was business as usual like in '65 when they started
bombing North Vietnam!" Yet the thought of a shooting war with
the Soviets permeates Carter's conscience. Descending into the local
emergency operations center as the sirens sound at the end of the film,
he is left wondering whether his family has made the proper preparations.
As the second in a line of productions created
by the Office of Civil Defense in 1967 to train volunteers in fallout
detection, Introduction to a Radiological Defense Exercise serves only to
introduce characters and an attack narrative which are explored in subsequent
installments of the series. The setting for each film is Central City,
described in Emergency
Operating Centers: The Basic Concepts as "a bustling metropolis of
around 80,000." Moments after this film ends, the actions picks up
again in Emergency Operation Centers: Radiological Defense Operations, which
continues to follow Dan Carter and his team as they chart fallout patterns when
the nearby Cobb Air Force Base is hit. The remaining films explore topics
such as fallout contamination of personnel and food, as well as radiological
monitoring over large areas and in key municipal facilities. Concluding
with Planning for Emergence from Public Shelters, a promise of a restoration to
pre-attack life is promised.
The zeal expressed in these productions masks a general
decline in support and funding for civil defense programs in America which had
taken hold by 1967. Still a year away from the In Time of Emergency campaign which would
inject new life into federally guided nuclear preparedness, the Office of Civil
Defense was chronically underfunded and lapsing in credibility. As many
large cities, most notably New York, did away with local civil defense
structures, it became more difficult to maintain an image of a cohesive
national program. Films such as these then, were ostensibly training
devices but on a deeper level they worked to show the increasingly
skeptical public that not only was civil defense alive and well, but that it
was morphing into an organized and well coordinated system and not
stagnating, as one New York Times critic suggested, "back into the days of
armbands, tin helmets, and binoculars".