A Guide to Archival Collections Relating To
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__ ~~___ AIR1.950414.010 A GUIDE TO ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS RELATING TO RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT FROM NUCLEAR WEAPON TESTING OCTOBER 1989 EIGHTH EDITION HISTORY ASSOCIATES INCORPORATED The Historic Montrose School 5721 Randolph Road Rockville, Maryland 20852 Prepared for U. S. Department of Energy, Nevada Operations Offi ce Under Contract No. DE-AC08-87NV10594 A GUIDE TO ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS RELATING TO RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT FROM NUCLEAR WEAPON TESTING OCTOBER 1989 EIGHTH EDITION HISTORY ASSOCIATES INCORPORATED The Historic Montrose School 5721 Randolph Road Rockville, Maryland 20852 Prepared for U.S. Department of Energy, Nevada Operations Office Under Contract No. DE-AC08-87NV10594 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Argonne National Laboratory 5 Bancroft Library, University of California 6 Boeing Aircraft Company 7 Brookhaven National Laboratory 8 Coordination and Information Center (CIC) 10 Eastman Kodak 12 EG&G, Energy Measurements 13 Holmes and Narver 15 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 16 Los Alamos National Laboratory 18 Manuscript Division, Library of Congress 22 National Academy of Sciences Archives 23 Oak Ridge National Laboratory 24 Pacific Northwest Laboratory 26 Sandia National Laboratories 21 Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives 28 Smithsonian Institution Archives 2-9 U.S. Air Force Brooks Air Force Base 30 Kirtland Air Force Base 31 USAF Historical Research Center 34 U.S. Army Chemical Corps (Aberdeen Proving Ground) 35 Walter Reed Army Institute of Research 36 U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service 37 U.S. Department of Defense Defense Nuclear Agency 38 U.S. Department of Energy A1 buquerque Operations Office 39 Environmental Measurements Laboratory 40 Headquarters Records Center 42 History Division 43 Nevada Operations Office 45 Oak Ridge Operations Office 47 Office of Scientific and Technical Information 48 Richland Operations Office Records Center 49 U.S. Department of State 50 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 51 U.S. Food and Drug Administration 52 U.S. National Archives and Records Administration Bayonne Federal Records Center 54 Dwight D. Eisenhower Library 55 Harry S Truman Library 56 National Archives and Records ..Jministration, Washinc )n, DC 57 Herbert Hoover Library 60 John F. Kennedy Library 61 Los Angeles Federal Records Center 62 Lyndon B. Johnson Library 63 Pacific Sierra Region 65 Pacific Southwest Region 66 San Bruno Federal Records Center 67 Seattle Federal Archives and Records Center 69 Southeastern Region Federal Archives and Records Center 70 St. Louis National Personnel Records Center 72 Suitland Reference Branch 73 Washington National Records Center 74 U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climatic Data Center 17 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 78 U.S. Navy Naval Construction Battalion Center 79 Naval Historical Center 80 U.S. Public Health Service 81 University of California at Los Angeles 82 University of Washington 84 Index 86 INTRODUCTION The Department of Energy (DOE) Off-Site Radiation Exposure Review Project (ORERP) can be traced to a November 27, 1978, commitment by President Jimmy Carter to the people of Utah. Following meetings with Governor Scott Matheson and Mormon Church leaders, Carter ordered a review of earlier federal studies of leukemia and thyroid incidence in Utah. Carter made his announcement in Salt Lake City, in the heart of the state where numerous personal damage claims had been filed against the federal government for illnesses and deaths allegedly related to the radioactive fallout from United States atmospheric nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). At first Carter's orders applied only to Utah and to the Departments of Defense and Health, Education, and Welfare, but by January 1979 the President added the state of Nevada and the Department of Energy to his request. Carter directed the Departments of Energy and Health, Education, and Welfare to prepare an analysis of available statistics to determine whether any cancer patterns existed in Utah and Nevada as a result of the radioactive fallout from the NTS atmospheric testing. President Carter also established in May 1979 an Interagency Task Force on the Health Effects of Ionizing Radiation to examine various aspects of the radiation issue, including the recommendation of how to compensate those exposed to radiation. Because the initial task force report contained little information on the problems of civilians living downwind from nuclear test sites. Stuart Eizenstat of the White House staff directed the task force to "pay particular attention" to the needs of those civilians. Eizenstat ordered the task force to report back to the White House by October 1, 1979, with a recommendation for resolving civilian injury claims. The DOE Off-Site Radiation Exposure Review Project officially started on March 28, 1979, when Maj. Gen. Joseph K. Bratton, Director, Office of Military Application, designated the Nevada Operations Office as the lead energy department field office for the project. The Nevada office's mission then was to collect, store, and disperse the relevant historical data and information related to health effects and radioactive fallout from the NTS atmospheric nuclear testing. By June 1979 the Nevada office had established a Coordination and Information Center (CIC) to house pertinent data and to prepare responses to inquiries and requests. Nevada office managers selected the Reynolds Electrical & Engineering Company, Inc. (REECo) to operate the CIC. On June 8, 1979, Ruth C. Clusen, DOE'S Assistant Secretary for Environ- ment, gave the Nevada Operations Office added responsibilities: assessing radiation exposures of offsite radiological conditions and planning and executing the project to reconstruct as much as possible both external and internal offsite public exposures from NTS testing. Clusen also directed the Nevada office to work with DOE headquarters to establish a dose assess- ment advisory steering group similar to one recommended earlier by the Nevada office. In July the office's managers met with representatives of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona (added in early 1979) to brief the state delegates on the new operation and to ask for cooperation. 2 The Dose Assessment Advisory Group (DAAG), successor to the steering committee, was officially established on July 8, 1980, by Charles W. Duncan, Jr., Secretary of the Department of Energy. The DAAG was limited to approx- imately 20 members, including representatives from the state governments of citizens claiming injuries and losses from the NTS fallout. The project‘s scope was again broadened when Secretary Duncan decided that Arizona and California would have representatives along with Nevada and Utah on the DAAG; any additional state with claimants against fallout effects could also be invited to send a representative to the DAAG. The work of the DAAG was completed in May 1987 with the issuance of its final reports. Meanwhile, in 1978 the DOE launched a comprehensive search for documents related to fallout outside the boundaries of the NTS. The History Division was designated the DOE Headquarters lead division to develop criteria and to guide the collection and processing of the documents related to testing, fallout, and radiation monitoring. In 1980 C&W Associates started working with the History Division as locator, selector, and processor of relevant documents to be deposited in the CIC. History Associates Incorporated (HAI), successor to C&W, took over the same duties in 1981 and in 1983 assumed declassification responsibilities. In 1983 the collection effort was expanded to include U.S. nuclear testing in the Pacific and NTS underground tests through 1972. Pertinent documents have been reproduced and assembled in the CIC in Las Vegas, Nevada. Those materials that have been organized and inventoried at the CIC are now open to the public. Although the documents collected in the CIC constitute a large collection of information on radioactive fallout, it became apparent in 1981 that the extraordinary volume of such materials still held in many government and private facilities in all parts of the nation would make it impossible to assemble in the CIC every document that might conceivably be of value in studying the complex relationships that may exist between fallout and heilth. The History Division therefore requested HA1 to prepare .a guide to the many valuable record collections that exist outside the CIC and to update it regularly. This guide has been prepared by professional historians who have a working knowledge of many of the record collections included in the following pages. In describing materials, they have tried to include enough information so that persons unfamiliar with the complexities of large record systems will be able to determine the nature of the information in, and the quality of, each record collection. The guide is organized alphabetically by the names of the record repositories, not by the organizations which have custody of the records. It should be noted that arrangement by location does not reveal at a single glance all of the materials that may have originated in a specific labora- tory, research center, or government agency. For example, records originated in .one of the Atomic Energy Commission’s national laboratories may, in some cases, be listed under the Federal Records Centers to which they have been retired. Thus, this guide includes an index of agencies originating documents and pages listing those agencies. 3 In presenting information