 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.Including a study on how the US might be affected by a potential nuclear war from the Sino-Soviet split, specifically focusing 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.