Searching Foreign Vessel for Nuclear Material 1955

This is clipped from the 1955 film, Guard Against Sabotage, produced by the U.S. Coast Guard. The film describes the port security program of the Coast Guard. It shows New York harbor, ships being loaded with material, and different sabotage techniques and describes how the Coast Guard guards ports against sabotage. The entire film is available on the Internet Archive. Anticommunist sentiment in the United States in the early 1950s, already at a fever pitch after the communist victory in China, was only aggravated by the North Korean attack. As a result, the government reacted against domestic communist activity. President Harry Truman signed Presidential Executive Order 10173, thereby implementing the Magnuson Act, which authorized the Coast Guard to conduct duties it had carried out during both World Wars to insure the security of U. S. ports "from subversive or clandestine attacks." The Coast Guard established port security units to take charge of and secure the major ports of the United States. Their function was to prevent sabotage and insure the timely loading and sailing of merchant ships, especially those sailing to Japan and Korea to deliver ammunition needed by the United Nation forces. The most controversial power extended to the Coast Guard was the authority to check the backgrounds of merchant sailors, longshoremen, warehouse employees and harbor pilots, in order to determine their loyalty, or lack thereof, to the United States. Fears of a Eastern-bloc freighter sailing into a port, armed with a nuclear bomb, gave the service a unique Cold War task. Since the Soviet Union and its communist allies had no long-range bomber force and ballistic missiles were ten years in the future, delivery of a bomb by a vessel sailing into an unsuspecting port and then being detonated was the most likely form of nuclear attack on the United States. From August 1951 every vessel entering into a U. S. anchorage had to notify Customs of its intended destination and cargo 24 hours before it was to arrive. The names of these vessels were passed to the appropriate Captain of the Port and Coast Guard patrol boats identified and checked each, boarding and examining those that appeared suspicious. The boats patrolling harbor entrances in the major ports were occupied 24 hours a day and in New York, for example, there were two stations on continuous duty. For the next two years off the coast of New York, near the Ambrose lightship station, the Coast Guard inspected over 1,500 ships. Each of the two patrols inspected an average of 40 vessels per month with each inspection lasting four hours. Armed with Geiger counters, they searched for atomic weapons, general explosives, and bacteriological weapons. Fortunately, the patrols never encountered anything worth reporting. For more on the role of the Coast Guard in national security in the 1950s, go to http://www.uscg.mil/history/articles/Korean_War.asp .

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[albc1964]

To anyone watching this video; Do you know by chance if the Coast Guard is still conducting these type of inspections now ? With the threat of terrorisim; I would think this would still be in full force.