Read This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War Online
Authors: David F. Krugler
Tags: #aVe4EvA
This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (35 page)
This problem should probably receive appropriate immediate attention ...if we expect to have an adequate staff in the event of an actual emergency.”
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Declaration of martial law: more than once, Eisenhower had suggested that “rock-bottom” recovery, the most feasible expectation in D-Minus America, would require military administration and controls. He wasn’t the only one. On October 16, 1962, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Information Arthur Sylvester startled OEP officials when he bluntly stated, with reference to the White House Emergency Information Program, that in the event of an attack on the United States, martial law would definitely be imposed. (One observer said he was “utterly, completely flabbergasted that the DOD would express such a position openly in the White House.”)
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The satchel of EAPs contained proclamations enabling martial law. At the same time, a federal takeover of major corporations was a foregone conclusion to many emergency planners. The Justice Department “does have a procedural planning responsibility in preparing for the take-over of public service corpo
rations such as AT&T, General Motors, NBC, New York Central, etc.,” remarked an OEP planner in January 1961. Years later, when the OEP joined Standard Oil for a mobilization exercise at the company’s fortified relocation complex at Iron Mountain, close to Hudson, N.Y., “[c]oncern was expressed by some that the Government seemed to be intending to take complete control over the company and everything else.”
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The scenarios might be imagined, but such flights of fancy are tethered to facts.
Instead of a scenario that puts John McCormack in the presidency, we could imagine Kennedy alive and well. Say he reluctantly accepts the urging of his naval aide to immediately fly to Mount Weather after he authorizes the air strikes, while Johnson is spirited to Camp David. We might imagine that the crisis and its outcome have forged a leader capable of quelling panic, reconstituting Congress, and preserving constitutional government. But if we want to avoid the unrealistic optimism that dominated
OPAL
scenarios, perhaps we should shift our attention from the imagined effects of 3 nuclear weapons to those of 400. What if the Soviet Union implemented its version of SIOP? What if we replace one SS-4 missile with 50 ICBMs; add 250 bombs dropped from Soviet aircraft; increase the number of submarine bal
listic missiles from 3 to 100?
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What then is the future that never happened?
A
fter the Cuban Missile Crisis, numerous Federal Relocation Arc sites were phased out, mostly due to fallout and blast vulnerability. The Bureau of Labor Statistics abandoned its plan to relocate to the basement of the Johns Auditorium at Hampden-Sydney College, some 60 miles southwest of Richmond, Va., and donated its desks to the college.
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In the fall of 1963, the State Department began liquidating its Front Royal relocation facility. Despite the lack of fallout protection, the Department of Agriculture, which still owned the reservation, gladly took over State’s buildings to use as its new relocation site. (Its current site was in University Park, Pa.)
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The Federal Reserve Board, which had planned to relocate to its bank in Richmond, built a hardened site at Mount Pony, outside of Culpeper, Va. Constructed of rein
forced concrete, the underground facility was ready in December 1969. Its gigantic vault held billions of dollars to replace currency lost in a nuclear war.
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The Treasury Department also searched for new quarters. Until then, its various bureaus had planned to separately relocate to far-flung sites: Fort Knox, Ky.; Richmond; Wilmington and Greensboro, N.C.; and Parkersburg, W.Va. (Only the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury had space at Mount Weather.) In 1963, Treasury successfully negotiated with the Airlie Foundation to use its conference center in Warrenton, Va., as a consolidated relocation site. The United States Information Agency had no choice but to look for a new site: the building it used at East Carolina College in Greenville, N.C., was condemned and demolished.
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Mount Weather, Site R, and Camp David continued to serve as the anchors for the scaled-back Arc. Regular upgrades of computer and communications equipment, as well as new construction, especially on the surface of Mount Weather, kept these facilities up-to-date.
While the Arc shrunk, the presidential relocation infrastructure expanded. So-called Presidential Emergency Facilities (PEFs) were built across the country during the 1960s and 1970s. Congress disguised the funds for PEFs as appropriations for Army construction, and the White House Military Office (WHMO) oversaw their disbursement. According to Bill Gulley, who worked in the WHMO from 1966 to 1977, PEFs were first built in Washington, then around the country, until they numbered more than 75. On Peanut Island, close to the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, Fla., Navy Seabees built a fallout shelter ten feet underground.
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Many PEFs were hard
ened communication towers for the Arc. “Cartwheel” was located in Fort Reno Park in Northwest Washington, just blocks from the school that once
served as the city’s Key Point (see chapter 7). Surrounded by fields, Cartwheel’s cylindrical brick tower resembled a silo; a red corrugated shed added to the farm-like appearance. But Cartwheel’s two surface structures concealed a long underground bunker and sophisticated communications equipment.
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The National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP or “kneecap”) provided yet another relocation option for the chief executive. Beginning in 1975, any one of several modified 747s stood ready to serve as the NEACP. (Prior to 1975, a 707 filled this role.) Andrews Air Force Base, just minutes from the White House by helicopter, kept one of the planes ready round-the-clock.
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Civil defense proved less durable than continuity of government. The DCD abandoned its volunteer programs but continued surveying for fallout shelters. By 1965, it claimed to have identified more than 2.9 million shelter spaces in the District and stocked some with “survival ration biscuits” and water drums.
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The Northern Virginia Regional Planning Commission also oversaw an ambitious shelter survey. Though the most densely populated areas fell within the blast and heat range of modern nuclear weapons, the sur
vey surmised that “the primary hazard to the populace of Northern Virginia will be from radioactive fallout.”
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Ironically, Congress, no great supporter of shelters, allowed the Architect of the Capitol to work with the DCD on the Capitol Hill Fallout Shelter Program. Its aim was to provide shelter for no less than 36,000 people within the Capitol Building Group. By 1965, almost 280,000 pounds of food had been cached in 11 different buildings. Stacked in the Old Subway Tunnel and basement beneath the Capitol, for example, were 259 cases of carbohydrate supplement (in lemon or cherry flavor) and 1,393 cases of biscuits (actually 75 calorie wafers made from bulgur wheat.)
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The shelter surveys and stocking capped off the fallout program begun in 1961, but it wasn’t enough to sustain civil defense in metropolitan Washington. By 1967, Montgomery County’s civil defense office had shifted its planning toward coping with natural disasters.
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The same was true of many other local offices, leaving DCD director George Rodericks to try to sustain faith in shelters. In 1971, he claimed there “really wouldn’t be much point” for the Soviets to attack Washington (he reasoned the president et al. would evacuate in advance), so fallout shelters, even in the center of Washington, were still needed. Few shared his optimism, and Rodericks him
self was preoccupied with antiwar marches. In most shelters, the provisions had become forgotten clutter.
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Soon the DCD was recast as the Office of Emergency Preparedness. Its major duties were now readiness for natural disasters and crowd control for parades and demonstrations.
In 1974, Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger revived the idea of evacuating the capital region. A Pentagon program called Crisis Relocation Planning (CRP) plotted the evacuation of all residents within 15 miles of the zero milestone marker to reception areas as far away as 200 miles. Similar evacuations were planned for other cities. CRP officials assumed that rising international tensions would precede a nuclear war, leaving enough time to order evacuations. Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wisc.), who later served as secretary of
defense under President Bill Clinton, called CRP “extremely dangerous non
sense,” and Alexandria’s civil defense coordinator noted that the reception areas hadn’t even been prepared.
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The history of civil defense in metropoli
tan Washington was repeating itself; Schlesinger might just as well have dusted off John Fondahl’s 1956 interim evacuation plan.
Unlike shelters and evacuation, dispersal didn’t get another look, yet Tracy Augur’s vision continued to fulfill itself in modest ways. One of the short-term dispersal sites, Greenbelt Area A, became home to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The new town trend set by Reston and Columbia continued with the development of St. Charles and Clarksburg, Md. Located a few miles north
east of Germantown, Clarksburg was planned to be a “pedestrian-oriented com
munity surrounded by open space.”
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Clarksburg is also part of the I-270 high-tech corridor that dispersal of the AEC and NBS helped make possible. The 1957 AEC building, once a solitary outpost, is now part of an expansive Department of Energy complex. Likewise, the NBS, now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has added numerous buildings to its Gaithersburg site, resulting in two adjoining campuses. Since the 1960s, technology and research firms have flocked to the Germantown/Gaithersburg area, further evidence of how the Cold War helped create “cities of knowl
edge.”
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In the mid-1960s, Tysons Corner, Va., ten miles west of the District, also began attracting research and technology companies, many with defense contracts. The completion of the Capital Beltway in 1964 and additional road improvements in northern Virginia fueled this development, as did Tysons Corner’s convenient access to the Pentagon, Dulles airport, and residential communities such as McLean, Va.
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In 1990, historian Kermit Parsons marveled at the number of new towns in the capital region and the presence of several federal buildings in Augur’s Dispersal Zone. Perhaps, Parsons suggested, echoing Daniel Burnham, the rejected dispersal plans had taken on lives of their own, “sliding silently into the minds of later planners.”
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At the time, Parsons could only guess at the location of two sites in the Relocation Arc.
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But the days of secrecy were numbered; the end of the Cold War brought unprecedented revelations about continuity of government pro
grams. Ted Gup led the way, providing detailed accounts of Mount Weather and Greenbrier.
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Many “outed” facilities, including the latter, were moth
balled and became tourist attractions. In the late 1990s, the Library of Congress used donated funds to buy the Federal Reserve Board’s Mount Pony facility and convert it into storage for its collection of films, video, and sound recordings.
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(Franklin Roosevelt’s idea that a building designed for war could serve as a warehouse had finally come true.) The DCD’s command center at Lorton was abandoned and fell into disrepair. Though Mount Weather and Site R remained on “active duty,” continuity of government seemed like another Cold War relic. Touring the Greenbrier bunker, author Tom Vanderbilt felt it “difficult to escape the cultural connotations of Cold War kitsch.”
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If continuity of government and civil defense represented insurance, then it seemed time to let the policy lapse, or at least lower the coverage.
Until September 11, 2001.
Washington on 9/11
Looking back to that terrible day, we can glimpse continuity of government in action. The Secret Service rushed Vice President Cheney to the White House shelter, now called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), at 9:36 a.m., just before American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. He was soon joined by other high-ranking executive officials, including Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who made the decision to ground all U.S. air traffic (more than 4,500 aircraft) from the PEOC. The
D.C.
police quickly called in off-duty officers. Fires raged in the gaping hole punched into the Pentagon, yet its evacuation was orderly.
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Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and other Congressional leaders were taken to “a secure government facility 75 miles west of Washington.”
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(Probably Mount Weather—that afternoon, a reporter driving on Route 601, which leads to the site, encountered a sizable government motorcade escorted by the U.S. Park Police.
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If so, then the reported distance was wrong; Mount Weather is approximately 54 miles by road from Washington.) President Bush, in Sarasota, Fla., was airborne by 9:55 a.m., stopping briefly at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to record a message about the attacks before landing at Offutt Air Force Base outside Omaha. (A Cold War–era underground center at Offutt provided a secure environment and space for up to 50 people to stay several days, if needed.) Though the President wanted to return to Washington, he accepted the recommendations of the Secret Service and the Vice President that he wait until his security in the capital could be assured. The hours spent at Offutt later drew criticism, but the land
ing was a prudent measure consistent with continuity of government plans.
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Bush also ordered the emergency relocation of 100 executive branch officials. Just hours after the Pentagon attack, Military District of Washington helicopters, accompanied by F-16 fighters, took these officials to two undis
closed sites. It’s likely these cadres were their departments’ and agencies’ “B teams” or their present-day equivalent. (By 1980, the designation of wartime essential personnel with relocation assignments had evolved into a three-tiered system for vital agencies: the A team, which included the agency or department head, would remain in Washington; the B team would proceed to Mount Weather; and the C team would go to its agency’s relocation site in the Arc).
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Although press accounts didn’t identify the sites, they were said to date to the 1950s and to “make use of local geological features to render them highly secure,” evidence pointing to Mount Weather and Site R. Initially intended as a temporary precaution, activation of the cadres continued for months. Just like the teams that Leo Hoegh sent to Mount Weather in September 1958, the 9/11 cadres soon began rotating in and out of “bunker duty” at regular inter
vals. In March 2002, an executive official bluntly explained the reason for the indefinite use of this “administration-in-waiting”: should terrorists detonate a nuclear device in Washington, it “would be ‘game over.’ ”
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But amid the successes were many failures. At 10 a.m. on September 11, police emptied the Capitol and Congressional buildings, but evacuees
weren’t told where to go or what to do. Dozens of members of Congress found their way to the Capitol Police headquarters on D Street NE. The evacuation of Congressional leaders didn’t take place until the afternoon; by this time, House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.) had already gone home and had to return to the Hill. The Office of Personnel Management released 180,000 federal employees in the District from work at 10:30 but failed to tell the D.C. police, who learned of the decision from news reports. Vehicles trying to leave the city jammed roads for three hours. Calls over
whelmed landline and cell phone networks, impeding emergency and gov
ernmental communications. The President had trouble communicating with the Vice President and others; at one point, he even had to use a cell phone. The audio on televisions in the PEOC briefly went out.
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Such failures prompted the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution to form the Continuity of Government Commission, dedicated to ensuring the essential functioning of the three federal branches after a catastrophe. As the Commission observed in its first report, the “status quo [is] unacceptable.”
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