In March of 2006, we made available portions of a 1980's textbook on nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare defense from the Marine Corps Institute. It's a fascinating manual, and while much of the data is still as accurate and relevant as it was a quarter-century ago, it's equally true that a lot has changed since then. The pace of technology marches onward, even in the fields of chemical and biological weapons, and their defenses.
We set out, earlier this year, to acquire a current copy of the course in question. Despite some early setbacks, we finally took receipt of the course materials we'd made a FOIA request for:
NBC INDIVIDUAL SURVIVAL MEASURES
COURSE #572
While the substance of the course hasn't changed much, the current presentation is much more impressive than it's predecessor.
The impressive presentation comes at a price, though - a severe price. Until we published it here on our website for the first time, this course has been available, even to Marines, only on CD-ROM, because it consumes a bandwidth-gobbling 230 megabytes of space, and is pretty well unusable on dialup. Truth be told, we're not even sure how well the videos are going to work on DSL and cable connections. Even compressing the html output isn't going to help much; it's very image- and video-heavy.
It's an enormous amount of data. It's also in a less-than-user-friendly format; it was pretty clearly designed for Windows machines running reasonably current versions of Internet Explorer; javascript abounds, and will try to do annoying things like open pop-up windows. You'll need a lot of multimedia plugins to view everything, on any browser - ActiveX, flash, and WMV, at minimum. We'll say it again below, but you, sadly, will most likely not experience the full functionality of this course on anything other than Internet Explorer. You have been warned.
We generally abhor websites that beg for money. The TCUEC site is a labor of love, created to (freely!) disseminate information. That said, we have a sneaking feeling hosting this course is going to consume some serious quantities of bandwidth - bandwidth for which we pay. Expensive European bandwidth, we might add. So it is with heavy hearts that we hold our hand out and ask for donations. If you find this online text interesting, informative, or useful, toss a buck our way; that's all we ask. Want something tangible in exchange for your kindness? Include a note with your donation, however small, and we'll send you a zipped file of the complete contents of the CD-ROM, in it's original, unedited glory, just like we received it from Uncle Sam.
If bandwidth usage gets to be too terribly excessive, we'll probably wind up removing the streaming videos, at least temporarily; that's where most of the space is - 184 megabytes of video, in fact - all in WMV format. Unfortunately, that's also where a lot of the content of the course is, without which one is less-than-likely to complete the periodic review tests. Tests? Yep, we left 'em in. Some you can bypass, some you can't, so suck it up and learn something, already. :)
If you encounter BLANK PAGES, it's either because you have ActiveX disabled, or your browser doesn't support ActiveX - or has no idea what to do with the WMV files. Just click the arrow and continue onward; you're probably not missing much.
You can access this two different ways - the "USMC-approved" way, which uses a popup window and iframes in a fixed-size window, or the "TCUEC-approved" way, in your regular browser window in all it's ful-screen, multi-tabbed glory. The frame version has a handy navigation menu at the bottom of the screen, though, while the boring vanilla fullscreen one... doesn't. If you're not using IE, "our" way will work better, though there are will still be some rendering issues, especially on Mac or Linux machines. Don't blame us for the USMC being Microsoft-centric; we just republish this stuff, not write it... and rewriting the hundred-plus, script-heavy pages is not something we're particularly eager to do.
Begin the course their way (popup window/frames)
Begin the course our way, in this window
Please note - the entire thing is reckoned, by the USMC, to take over ten hours to fully complete. Having worked our way partway thru it after several hours, that's probably a good guess. It's much easier to bookmark your progress in the non-popup version, if you're trying to work your way all the way thru. Oh, and if you've got any comments on this... We'd love to hear from you.