This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (31 page)

Answer: Another Arc.

Going Regional

In October, Flemming declared: “If we don’t have regional sites, we may fin
d
ourselves with nothing from which we can be based and get the country bac
k
on its feet.” He thus approved of an OCDM proposal to build eigh
t

protected sites across the nation at an estimated cost of $24 million. OCDM envisioned these sites as little Mount Weathers from which field employees of wartime essential federal agencies could administer recovery. Eisenhower also liked the idea and told Hoegh, “you get together a plan for these 8 sites— showing their cost, design, location (I think they should be on government-owned land as much as possible) and we shall review this.”
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As planned, each underground center was to provide space for 200 daily employees (100 OCDM, 100 from other federal agencies) and 500 employees during an emergency. Construction requirements included 30 p.s.i. blast pro
tection and a filter system to prevent fallout contamination. Communications would link each center to Mount Weather, state civil defense offices, and the other regions. Ideally, each center would operate independently and even act as a surrogate national center if Mount Weather was incapacitated. Locations were chosen according to the national civil defense regions. Region 5, based in Denton, Tex., was home to the first center. Congress approved $2.4 mil
lion for its construction, scheduled for January 1961, with an occupancy date of May 1962. The next two scheduled centers were Region 1, encompassing the northeastern seaboard, and Region 8, covering the northwestern states and Alaska. These three sites “would provide a protected Federal center in the central, eastern, and western portions of the country.”
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The Regional Arc was a long time in the making. By 1965, Sudbury, Mass., had been selected as the site for the Region 1 center, but construction hadn’t started.
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Region 8, in Bothell, Wash., wasn’t finished until December 1968. Initial construction of Region 2’s center began in 1966; it finally opened in the summer of 1971, beneath a former cow pasture north of Olney, Md. Olney was the home of the FCDA’s civil defense school (see chapter 8), but it had shut down in June 1958. The school’s “Rescue Street”— with its ladders, building fronts, and prepositioned rubble—could have been a relic from another century when compared to the new underground facility. Encased in cement and 16 gauge steel was a subterranean expanse, with 62,000 square feet of floor space on 2 levels. Four-ton blast doors sealed the two surface entrances. Above computer and radio consoles hung a wall map of the metropolitan target zone; to absorb a thermonuclear shock, a bed of springs rested beneath the generators. More than 150 clerks, technicians, and support staff worked here 9 a.m.–5 p.m., Monday through Friday.
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“Going regional” did not mean abandonment of the Federal Relocation Arc. The OCDM was also instructed to determine the “optimum number of sites” for the Arc and to recommend which sites should be upgraded. OCDM proposals included reducing the Arc from 90-plus sites to 22 fallout-proof centers, or even shrinking it to 4 sites “hardened” against blast, heat, and radiation.
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In September 1959, OCDM decided to seek $3.8 million for the hardening of 14 sites. Despite a presentation by Hoegh to the appropri
ations committees, Congress rejected the request. Eisenhower put it in the supplemental budget; the answer was still no. A December 1960 “Summary of Emergency Readiness Status” of 38 executive agencies revealed the Arc’s continuing fragility. Of the 30 agencies that had sites, only 6 had fallout
protection; OCDM classified the remainder as “interim.” These included the FCC’s site at its Chillicothe, Ohio, monitoring station and the GSA’s site at Washington and Lee University. The individual report for each interim site offered the same terse comment regarding fallout upgrades: “further action awaiting review of policy on hardened sites.” Many of the six protected agencies, which included Budget and Justice, shared the same site—Mount Weather. The “dismal prospects” for future site-hardening especially worried the State Department, which had spent a lot of money on its Front Royal site. During 1959 alone, its caretakers built a decontamination building, finished a new power plant, and installed an operating room in the hospital building. Without fallout protection, however, these improvements were wasted.
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That left just two places for State to find safe haven: Mount Weather or Site R. And State wasn’t the only department vying for space underground.

The Arc Underground

By the fall of 1959, Mount Weather had come a long way since
OPAL
55, when relocators slept in tents. Now, the surface facility resembled a campus with its own grid of roads. During the workday, a bus ferried workers between the cafeteria, offices, and the “ample bachelor type” housing. Those who lived offsite could drive in and park. Meals were served three times a day at the cafeteria; the same building also had a snack bar and convenience store. Ironically, on the surface Mount Weather was much like a dispersal site: self-contained and far from other federal offices.
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But underground was the “Protected Facility.” In September, the wartime essential cadres, which now totaled 100 employees representing 21 agencies and the OCDM, moved from the surface to the Protected Facility. The west entrance was for vehicles, the east for helicopters. Each entrance had a blast gate, a station with radioactive sensors, and a decontamination chamber. Inside the hollow heart of Mount Weather were more than two dozen build
ings. Building 15 was the cafeteria; the first meal served, on September 23, was a luncheon honoring the 17 individuals who had worked a full year at Mount Weather.
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During the next three years, the overseers of the Protected Facility installed or added to its amenities and necessities. Building 17 housed recreation equipment including rowing machines, ping pong tables, and a film library—even an indoor driving range was set up. Four dormitories (three male, one female) offered a total of 1,000 sleeping berths. The hospi
tal, in the west end of Building 16, featured a patient ward, operating room, and pharmacy; physicians and nurses from the U.S. Public Health Service staffed it round-the-clock. Six staff members learned how to cut hair. The Protected Facility’s operations wing included the NDAC and equipment for Weather Bureau personnel to calculate fallout patterns. The Interior Department kept a library of maps of oil refineries and coal mines. From the broadcast studios, television programming could be transmitted within Mount Weather via closed circuit (Channel 2) or linked to commercial networks. The War Room could also broadcast over Channel 2 and was
equipped with an Iconorama display system, screen projection of computer data, and film projectors.
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State desired at least 50, preferably 400 slots at the Protected Facility. The number didn’t seem so high; Budget wanted 432, OCDM even more. When State pressed its case, however, Hoegh suggested it ask for slots at Site R. According to him, the military had plenty of room.
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Like Mount Weather, Site R was an ongoing project. Its three buildings, each three stories, were long and narrow, with combined work space for 2,200 people. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had reserved 600 slots, and the three armed services each wanted between 300 and 400. The Office of the Secretary of Defense claimed a few dozen; the NSC, 21. The communications teams and other military units shared the remaining spots. Recent improvements included installation of a high-speed Stromberg-Carlson printer connected to the NDAC at Mount Weather and locked ducts for camera, video, and coaxial cable.
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The latter project improved the links between the site’s television studio, Joint War Room, and the services’ individual Situation Rooms. The communications net was kept in constant readiness—indeed, by 1959, Site R was transmitting much of the daily traffic originating at the Pentagon—but the Joint Chiefs decided not to station a permanent cadre of decisionmakers at the site. They anticipated sufficient warning time to permit relocation from Washington, though they recognized the decision would “require reappraisal when Soviet ballistic missiles become operational in any quantity.”
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Site R’s gravest deficiency was its vulnerability to thermonuclear detonations— it was completed two months prior to the Soviet’s first hydrogen test. In 1960, Defense requested $10 million to expand the air intake system, improve blast protection, and build two more offices underground, which would increase site capacity to 3,000. Congress approved the upgrades but rejected the new construction. This was bad news for State. A Pentagon source told State’s emergency planner that without the new buildings, the Joint Chiefs were strenuously opposed to assigning any space to “outsiders.” Irritated at this intransigence, Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates ordered the Joint Chiefs to make room. (In the end, State got more space at Mount Weather.)
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The tussle over space was a classic case of bureaucratic politics, but it also resulted from legislative parsimony. By refusing to harden even a few Arc sites, Congress forced this “survival of the fittest” competition upon emergency planners.

The White House, however, had plenty of space. In 1955, Eisenhower authorized the construction of a hardened, underground facility at Camp David, which was secluded and close to Site R. The Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks designed the facility, the ODM paid for it. In 1957, excavation began near the existing cabins. By January 1958, a portion of the vast, deep shelter was ready. It had work and living space for 50 people (the president, his family, and wartime essential White House staff) and could stay “buttoned-up” for ten days, sealed shut to the outside world. The commu
nications equipment remained on the surface until 1959, when additional construction permitted its placement underground. The completed shelter,
code-named “Citrus,” now had space for 350 people and a “buttoned-up” capacity of 30 days. Citrus had full shielding against fallout and could withstand thermonuclear blasts, though not direct hits. (According to Evan Aurand, Citrus was a “medium-hard” shelter while Mount Weather and Raven Rock were “hard.”)
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What about Congress? Since 1950, legislators had stymied dispersal and only grudgingly created the FCDA; they habitually slashed civil defense budgets; they sat out
OPAL
s and refused to pay for fallout protection for even a dozen Arc sites. At least they were consistent, for they hadn’t done much to ready themselves for nuclear war—until 1959. That year, construction finally began on a 112,544-square-feet relocation facility beneath a wing of the his
toric Greenbrier Hotel, in White Sulphur Springs, West Va., some 250 miles from Washington. Buried 20 feet under the surface, the facility, code-named “Casper,” had steel-reinforced concrete walls 2 feet thick and blast doors weighing more than 20 tons. Like Mount Weather, it had a medical clinic, cafeteria, and dormitory. The underground shelter was but part of the site; architects ingeniously designed the hotel’s West Virginia Wing to double as legislative chambers. The vast Exhibit Hall, with its towering 20-foot-high ceiling, hosted car and trade shows; but on D-Day, its disguised blast door would have swung shut. Two auditoriums, one rowed with 470 chairs with armrest desks, provided meeting space for the House and the Senate. A nearby corridor linked the Wing to the shelter underground. The $14 million facility was maintained by a company called Forsythe Associates, which posed as a television repair service. Hotel employees knew about Casper—many even helped test underground equipment during the slow season—as did most, if not all, of White Sulphur Springs’s 2,800 residents. (“It’s common knowl
edge here,” the former mayor told Ted Gup, who revealed Greenbrier’s secret in May 1992.)
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Eisenhower was partially responsible for the Greenbrier facility. At a January 1955 meeting, he exhorted Congressional leaders to begin planning a relocation site. In April, the Architect of the Capitol asked the Library of Congress’s Legislative Reference Service if Congress had the authority to convene outside of the District. (A 1794 statute empowers the president to convene Congress elsewhere in case of dangerous conditions at the seat of government, which is why the EAPs included a proclamation about the con
vening of Congress.) The next month, Goodpaster learned that Congressional leaders were considering authorizing $5 million to build a relocation facility. Meanwhile the ODM surveyed potential locations, identifying two northern and three southern sites, and in June presented the list to aides to Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn (D-Tex.), Rep. Joe Martin (R-Mass.), Sen. William Knowland (R-Calif.), and Sen. Lyndon Johnson (D-Tex.).
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However, the completion of the Greenbrier facility in the spring of 1962 didn’t guarantee survival or continuity for the legislative branch: only Congressional leaders were briefed about its existence. Furthermore, Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution requires state governors to call elections to fill vacancies in the House. (The 17th Amendment authorizes governors to
appoint senators to fill vacant seats until special elections can be held.) A nuclear strike on Washington would presumably kill hundreds of representatives, but they couldn’t be constitutionally replaced without an election, a dubious proposition in D-Minus America. This problem didn’t pass unnoticed— between 1951 and 1960, various senators and representatives introduced a total of 19 bills to amend Article I, Section 2—but none were passed.
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