Fallout on the Farm: Blueprint for Survival No. 3

Several years ago I came across this thin, yellow booklet on the shelf of a combination antique store/swap shop in Dunnville, Ontario, a small farming community on the banks of the Grand River where my father grew up. Crammed between thick coffee table books on gardening and brightly coloured romance novels, I almost didn't see it. What a shame that would have been! A few minutes later and $2.00 poorer, I was the proud owner of Blueprint for Survival No. 3: Fallout on the Farm (as opposed to Blueprint for Survival No. 1: Your Basement Fallout Shelter and Blueprint for Survival No. 2: Basement Fallout Shelter, a guide for use in the design of new homes).

Produced by the Canada Department of Agriculture at the request of the Emergency Measures Organization in 1961, this booklet is a wonderful encapsulation of early 1960s nuclear knowledge and fears. The book aims to answer several questions about how nuclear fallout will affect Canada's farming communities, including why farmers need to know about the dangers of nuclear fallout, how their crops and livestock may be affected by it, who will warn farmers of an impending nuclear attack, where they should find shelter and lastly, if it will be safe outside after fallout.

Reading it now, the whole document comes across as simplistic and naive. The general consensus of the pamphlet seems to be that in as little as 14 days after fallout, it will be safe to leave your shelter. But, if you have to leave your shelter before that to milk your cows or take care of your livestock, you can safely do so as long as they are in a barn. Just don't forget to wash all that nasty fallout off of your skin afterwards with soap and water! Also, don't worry, it's totally safe to slaughter and eat animals that were left outside during the fallout just as long as you don't use the bones or offal (because that's the only part of them that will retain radioactive materials, you know). And, even though you should be shielded by 12 inches of concrete (or 15 inches of brick or 18 inches of earth) during fallout, peas and beans will be safe to eat because only their pods will be contaminated. Riiiiiiiight.

Reading this booklet, I'm alternately amused and horrified. Knowing what we do now about the outcome of the Cold War and the effects of nuclear radiation and fallout, it's funny to look back and see how "quaint" the understanding of our parent's generation was. On the other hand, it's also incredibly frightening to think about how little they knew about a weapon that had such deadly potential.

I've never come across a booklet like this before or since and I'm constantly thankful for the stroke of luck that helped me find Fallout on the Farm that day in the swap shop. It never ceases to amaze me the kinds of insights an historian can gather when they are able to look firsthand at documents from the past.

Since I'm currently working on an essay for my Understanding Archives course about the Baker-Cox debates of 2001-2002, I found myself considering Fallout in a completely new way: What if I had never encountered the physical copy of this book? What if, to save shelf space, some librarian somewhere had microfilmed this booklet, destroying and discarding the original in the process? Would my experience with the document have been the same?

I'm not convinced that it would have. On the surface the material would have remained ostensibly the same as the physical copy. That is, unless the person doing the microfiliming had carelessly skipped a page or misaligned one so that it cut off the beginnings of each line. Sadly this is a common microfilming error and one that is usually not caught until several years later when some intrepid researcher needs that exact page. By then, the originals have often been destroyed or lost and there is little or no way to rectify the error.

Then there's the fact that microfilm is largely a black and white medium. Many tones of grey and all colour are lost during the microfilming process. In the case of Fallout, much of the greyscale in the sketches would probably have been lost, and thus their effectiveness as visual aids would have been irrevocably diminished.

Also, on a good day microfilm machines tend to make me feel slightly nauseous (something about the text whipping across the screen at high speeds). On a bad day, using the machine gives me a monster headache and makes me feel like I'm on the verge of a seizure. Also, the forward/reverse button on most of the machines are ridiculously finicky - I want to be able to spend my time researching the material I need, not fiddling with making it aligned, focused and readable.

I think, with all of these extraneous things going on, I'd have a more difficult time focusing on the actual document itself than if I were reading the original paper copy. This could potentially affect my observations and thus my conclusions about the source. It would most definitely affect the overall pleasure that I get from reading a primary document like Fallout on the Farm.

Admittedly I have yet to research the Cox half of the Baker-Cox debate, but right now, Baker has me sold. Saving shelf space is not worth the loss of history and aggravation that goes with microfilm.


[Update: While I continue to sympathize with Baker, my own views on the Baker-Cox debate have definitely become more firmly aligned with Cox after completing additional research on the topic.]