Miami Railway Station Museum

THE THERMONUCLEAR CRISIS

Early in the Cold War, Canada's Civil Defense strategy remained little changed from the Second World War. At the time, military planners saw nuclear weapons as little different from conventional bombs - only much, much bigger. Thus, special teams of militia volunteers were trained to rush into bombed-out cities to put out fires and rescue survivors from the rubble. Unlike many countries, Canada lacked the resources to build large communal fallout shelters for its citizens. Instead, the government distributed pamphlets instructing homeowners how to build their own basement shelters for around $500. However, as this was equivalent to around 10% of the average household income at the time, few such shelters were ever built.

All this changed on March 1, 1954, when the United States detonated Castle Bravo, the first practical thermonuclear or "hydrogen" bomb, at Bikini Atoll in the South pacific. Unlike older, kiloton-range nuclear weapons which could destroy a few city blocks, megaton-range thermonuclear weapons could completely obliterate all but the largest cities, rendering all rescue and fallout shelter-in-place strategies obsolete overnight.

In response, major Canadian cities drew up plans to evacuate their residents into the countryside within hours of receiving an attack warning. But even if citizens managed to escape in time, they were still not safe thanks to an insidious danger: radioactive fallout. Composed of sand, soil, and other material sucked up into the nuclear fireball and irradiated, fallout could drift for hundreds of kilometers and fall to the ground as snow, contaminating everything it touched. Without some means of tracking this fallout, millions of Canadians would escape a fiery death in the cities only to face a slow, horrible death from radiation poisoning in the countryside.

The British Solution

But what form should such a fallout tracking system take? In 1956, the United States built the Radiation Alert Network (RAN; today RadNet), a system of 68 automatic radiation sensors mounted on federal buildings across the country. But while the Canadian government closely examined RAN, it ultimately deemed the system too technologically complex and resource-intensive to implement in Canada.

Instead, Canadian civil defence planners turned to a simpler system used by the United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organization (UKWMO). Established in 1957, this comprised a network of 1,564 concrete monitoring posts buried across the British Isles, manned by volunteers from the Royal Observer Corps (ROC). On receiving an attack warning, these volunteers would descend into the monitoring posts and use a variety of instruments to measure the location and yield of nuclear detonations and track the drift of fallout across the country. This data would then be transmitted via telephone, teletype, or radio to various Sector Headquarters, where it would be processed by analysts and used to broadcast attack and fallout warnings across the country. UKWMO remained in service until 1992 and proved remarkably effective and cost-effective to operate. As a result, Canada chose to copy the British model for its own fallout tracking network, which was officially approved in 1959 as the Nuclear Detonation and Fallout Reporting System (NDFRS).

A National Network

Like the British UKWMO system, NDFRS was based on a network of small manned monitoring stations known as Fallout Reporting Posts or FRPs. Initial plans called for some 2,000 FRPs to be built coast-to-coast - around 200 in each province. These were arranged in a rough grid spaced 72 kilometres north-south and 24 kilometres east-west, though actual spacing was dictated by the location of the nearest town. Originally, several FRPs were planned for the Territories, but for cost-saving reasons none were ultimately built north of the 55th Parallel.

To simplify administration and avoid inconvenient negotiations with private landowners, FRPs were, wherever possible, sited on Federal and Provincial government property. Among the many organizations and corporations who hosted these structures were:

Canadian Army
Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF)
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)
Mines and Renewable Resources (MRR; today Conservation)
Department of Public Works (DPW)
Ministry of Transportation (MOT; today Transport Canada)
Canada Post
Hydro
Customs (today Canada Border Services Agency)
Department of Indian Affairs
Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR)
Canadian National Railroad (CNR)

On receiving warning of an incoming nuclear attack, volunteers for these organizations would descend into their FRPs, most of which were equipped to sustain two people for up to two weeks. There, they would use various instruments to measure the location and yield of nuclear detonations as well as outside radiation levels. This data would then be transmitted every hour to Filter Centres, where it would be processed and relayed to the Emergency Government Headquarters (AKA the ‘Diefenbunker’) in Carp, just outside Ottawa. From here, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) would broadcast fallout patterns across the nation, allowing evacuees from the cities to avoid the most heavily contaminated areas.

THE end of Ndfrs

By 1963 construction of NDRFS was well underway, with some 1,200 of the planned 2,000 FRPs having been installed. Then, abruptly, the Canadian government cancelled the entire project. The completed shelters were abandoned in place and left to decay, having never been been brought online.

So what happened? There were three main factors behind the sudden abandonment of NDFRS:

#1. Spiralling Costs: by 1962, even before all the FRPs had been installed, equipped, and connected to the electrical and telephone networks, the price tag of NDFRS had ballooned far beyond initial estimates. As a result, the government began cancelling hundreds of planned FRPs in a bid to rein in costs. However, these austerity measures proved insufficient, and it eventually realized that NDFRS would be far too expensive to maintain.

#2: Technical Flaws: as construction got underway, it soon became clear that the NDFRS concept was fundamentally flawed. For example, most FRPs would have been connected to Filter Centres via the regular telephone network. However, the central telephone exchanges were located in major cities - the very same cities likely to be targeted in a nuclear attack. Much of the NDFRS network would thus be rendered useless within minutes. Meanwhile, the Canadian Army did not have enough remote radiation detectors to equip every FRP. Most NDFRS volunteers would thus have been issued portable radiation meters, forcing them to venture outside their FRPs every hour to take a reading and expose themselves to deadly fallout. In short, it would have been a death sentence.

#3: Shifting Geopolitics: for the first two decades of the Cold War, it was widely believed that any confrontation between NATO and the Soviet Bloc would inevitably trigger a nuclear exchange. However, the peaceful resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis - the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war - showed that this was not the case This prompted the Canadian government to shift its focus from National Survival measures to a more diplomatic approach to international conflict resolution. At the same time, compared to their southern neighbours the Canadian public were extremely fatalistic about the prospect of surviving a nuclear war and never took enthusiastically to Civil Defence efforts (and for more on this fascinating topic, please check out Dr. Andrew Burtch’s excellent book Give Me Shelter: the Failure of Canada’s Cold War Civil Defence (UBC Press 2012)).

Today, all that remains of NDFRS are several hundred FRPs scattered across the Canadian countryside, empty, abandoned, and rusting away. But a glimpse of what the network might have looked like had it become operational is preserved at the Miami Railway Station Museum. To learn more about what it would have been like to carry out the grim duty of manning a Fallout Reporting Post, please explore the rest of this site!