The Bus Out of Ottawa and the Apocalypse
And new (old) documents about National Defence's EHQ, "TRIDENT."
If you were in Ottawa in the late 1950s or early 1960s and you saw a bus with the word “RUSTIC” on it, you would have been wise to get on that bus.
It meant nuclear war was coming, and perhaps very soon.
Don’t bend your identification card!
To make sure you could get on the bus, or inside one of the government’s secret emergency headquarters, you needed a Government of Canada Identification Card.
You could get one if you were a civilian nominated for duty in any government emergency relocation site. (Military and RCMP folks had their own cards).
The 1959 instructions for getting the card are a mix of bureaucratic form and pedantry.
The card had to be laminated, and “care should be taken … not to bend or fold the card before it has been laminated.”
You should not lose the card, and if you do, a “charge of $2.00 will be made for loss of a card”.
Also, if you lost your role in emergency plans, you had to surrender the card.
Practicing for the End of the World
Remember that “RUSTIC” would be the word on the bus you were looking for.
“Operation RUSTIC” and the “RUSTIC plan” were continuity of government plans. “Continuity of government” is one of those pleasant if banal phrases that means, essentially, plans to try and ensure the Government of Canada can operate in case of nuclear war.
I’ve previously written about a few of the challenges connected with maintaining continuity of government here:
“RUSTIC” was also the name of a site, at Petawawa, where the government might relocate in a crisis. (This was before the Diefenbunker days.)
In late 1959, Exercise ARCADIA offered a chance to practice the RUSTIC plan. If you were a member of the “intermediate party” — i.e., not the advanced party, who were the first to the site, nor the final party, which was the Ministers — all you had to do was get on the correct bus at either Centre Block or the Simpson’s Sears at Carlingwood Shopping Centre.
After three hours, you would be at RUSTIC. There, you would listen to lectures on the “Purpose and Scope of Civil Emergency Planning,” “Effects of Large Yield Nuclear Weapons,” and “Problems Likely to be Faced by Government Immediately Before and After a War Emergency.”
Everyone would have lunch. But you’d be paying for it: The ARCADIA information package notes that “Lunch will be served at the site at a nominal cost, to be charged on an individual basis.”
Getting Real
These continuity of government planning efforts got very serious on October 23, 1962, when the Cabinet agreed that “all key personnel required for dealing with an emergency” were to remain available “in or near Ottawa” in case the plans needed to be put in place.
These were the most dangerous days of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The day after the Cabinet’s decision, on the 24th, the Department of External Affairs re-issued its own readiness plans, identifying all of the key individuals of the advance and intermediate parties who would proceed to other places, as necessary. (By this time, EASE, or the Diefenbunker, was operational.)
External officers were expected to drive themselves to a destination outside of Ottawa, to either Kemptville or Carleton Place.
Kemptville was the main site for External’s “Readiness Unit.” If you drove your own car, you’d find the right spot when you noticed a two-story building, “painted in horizontal stripes of white and pale blue” with a small, I think intentionally misleading sign, “War Supplies Agency Centre.”
The tall radio transmission aerial behind the building might have given away that it was not a war supplies depot.
But for those without a car or who otherwise could not drive, they were to catch a Colonial Coach Lines Limited bus.
There were several bus routes out of Ottawa, with plans in case certain bridges were knocked down. External officers on the list knew the route, and they did not have to go to a particular bus stop.
Instead, the bus “MAY BE FLAGGED DOWN AT ANY POINT EN ROUTE.”
If it was dark, you were to wave your flashlight at the bus.
How did you know it was the right bus? The bus would be marked with the word “RUSTIC.”
As part of the larger plans for continuity of government, there was also a single helicopter and a “special train” that would help transport officials from Ottawa’s Union Station, making six more stops on its way out of town. Sean Maloney notes that the helicopter would have landed on the grass in front of the Peace Tower, with room for a maximum of ten officials.
External Affairs officers who were not on the list, and who had no billet in an emergency headquarters, were issued the next best thing: A “Check List for Personal Survival.”
This was really just a set of notes taken from a document already distributed to the general public by the Emergency Measures Organization.
It’s first point:
(a) Know and instruct your family on the effects of nuclear explosions and the facts about fallout
As we learned in G.I. Cartoons from the 1980s: “Knowing is half the battle.”
New documents: TRIDENT
Thanks to the work of Piper Hays, a rising fourth-year History student at the University of Toronto, we now know a lot more about plans to relocate Canada’s National Defence leadership in case of an atomic or nuclear war.
Piper’s new briefing book, “A Noah's Ark for Canada: Emergency Military Headquarters for Nuclear War, 1952-63,” is now available on Canada Declassified.
The documents Piper has prepared detail thinking in the early 1950s within DND about the “Control of the Armed Forces in Event of Disaster in Ottawa,” and the sub-committees, plans, and provisions for a DND Emergency Headquarters that resulted.
The problem facing National Defence was summed up succinctly in this undated document from perhaps 1952:
The DND Emergency Headquarters established at Petawawa was called “TRIDENT,” and it had three main responsibilities:
It is true that someone really did suggest that the concept for thinking about EASE (The Diefenbunker) was as a “Noah’s Ark.”
The more one thinks about idea of “Noah’s Ark,” the more questions arise…
Notes and Other Goings-On
My notes on RUSTIC, above, come from the Albert Edgar Ritchie Fonds (MG 31, E 44), at Library and Archives Canada, and particularly vol. 2, file 19, “Operation Rustic. — memoranda and other documents.” External Affair’s RUSTIC file is 50306-G-40, in RG25, and while the LAC website says the file is closed, it is in fact open.
For an excellent book on civil defence, with details of continuity of government operations, see Andrew Burtch’s Give Me Shelter. (I cannot think about this book without hearing the Rolling Stones in my head.)
Last week I mentioned NATO anniversary appearances. I also participated in the filming of a 90-minute documentary on NATO by the German public broadcaster, DW. During the filming, the production crew told me it would only be available in German, and they’d have to dub a German translation over my remarks. Fortunately, they produced an English-language version, available here: