A Department of Energy engineer named Cresson Kearney wrote the well known prepper book Nuclear War Survival Skills. He developed such things as the Kearney fallout meter, which is a small DIY radiological meter that people could build at home after a nuclear exchange. It is a really great resource and a wonderfully ingenious set of work.
While most think of him as the author of this book, he was much more interesting in real life. To that end I will paraphrase Wikipedia:
Kearny attended Texas Military Institute in the 1930s. At TMI he became the commanding officer of the cadet corps, a champion runner and rifle shot, and valedictorian of his class. He attended Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania before earning a degree in civil engineering at Princeton University. There he graduated summa cum laude in 1937. He won a Rhodes Scholarship and went on to earn two degrees in geology at the University of Oxford. During the Sudeten Crisis he acted as a courier for an underground group helping anti-Nazis escape from Czechoslovakia.
Cresson Kearney invented Jungle Boots
Following graduation from Oxford, Kearny joined a Royal Geographical Society expedition in the Peruvian Andes. He then worked as an exploration geologist for Standard Oil in the Orinoco jungles of Venezuela. In Venezuela he became familiar with equipment and tools of the native inhabitants of the region. Later, he used the information gained from this experience to develop specialized jungle equipment for U.S. military forces.
In 1940, Kearny went on active duty as an infantry reserve lieutenant in the United States Army. Kearny was assigned to Panama as the Jungle Experiments Officer of the Panama Mobile Force, and was promoted to captain because of his knowledge of jungle travel and use of specialized tools and equipment, . In that capacity he was able to invent, improve, and/or field test much of the specialized jungle equipment and rations used by U.S. infantrymen in World War II. Kearny is credited for the addition of the jungle field ration and the jungle hammock as standard equipment by the US Army in World War II. He also made improvements to many other items of tropical gear. Including the Panama-soled jungle boot and the M1942 Machete. Cresson Kearney was promoted to major and awarded the Legion of Merit based upon his jungle service.
Kearney was a Spy
Kearny later volunteered for duty with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where he served as a demolition specialist in southern China in 1944. As Japanese forces threatened to overwhelm Chinese defenses in southeast China, he walked night and day to escape capture. After contracting a serious viral disease during that campaign. This caused him to be bedridden for many months and partially crippled for several years. After a long convalescence, he retired from active duty with the U.S. Army.
In 1961 he took a position doing civil defense research with the Hudson Institute. In 1964 he joined the Oak Ridge National Laboratory civil defense project. During the Vietnam War, Kearny served as a civilian advisor to the U.S. Army, making several trips to the theater of operations. Much of the supporting research that went into his most famous work, Nuclear War Survival Skills (NWSS), was conducted during the 1970s. Kearny conducted a study on how a nuclear war would impact the US. He focused on the question; what would be the severity and how might the US deal with contamination of CONUS milk supplies that might result from the “trans-pacific” nuclear fallout that would originate over China. Along with other more long-term survival publications such as “Maintaining nutritional adequacy during a prolonged food crisis [Basic foods for post-nuclear attack use]”.
Kearney’s Published work
Kearny’s most notable work is Nuclear War Survival Skills (NWSS). It describes civil defense research to determine the methods for ordinary citizens to build effective expedient shelters in a short period of time. It includes “MacGyver-like” plans for the Kearny air pump (KAP), Kearny fallout meter (KFM) and blast doors designed to be published in a newspaper prior to an attack. This book is in the public domain and is available for purchase, as well as free download online, from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.
His other works include Jungle Snafus … and Remedies, a book on the history of development of specialized equipment for use by military forces in jungle regions, and Will Civil Defense Work?
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