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Name: Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself-While the Rest of Us Die: Graff, Garrett M.: 9781476735405: Amazon.com: Books
Rating: 4.6 (1479 reviews)

Garrett M. Graff

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Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die Hardcover – May 2, 2017

by Garrett M. Graff (Author)

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The eye-opening true story of the government’s secret plans to survive and rebuild after a catastrophic attack on US soil—a narrative that spans from the dawn of the nuclear age to today.

Every day in Washington, DC, the blue-and-gold 1st Helicopter Squadron, code-named “MUSSEL,” flies over the Potomac River. As obvious as the presidential motorcade, the squadron is assumed by most people to be a travel perk for VIPs. They’re only half right: while the helicopters do provide transport, the unit exists to evacuate high-ranking officials in the event of a terrorist or nuclear attack on the capital. In the event of an attack, select officials would be whisked by helicopters to a ring of secret bunkers around Washington, even as ordinary citizens are left to fend for themselves.

For sixty years, the US government has been developing secret Doomsday plans to protect itself, and the multibillion-dollar Continuity of Government (COG) program takes numerous forms—from its plans to evacuate the Liberty Bell from Philadelphia and our most precious documents from the National Archives to the plans to launch nuclear missiles from a Boeing 747 jet flying high over Nebraska.

In Raven Rock, Garrett Graff sheds light on the inner workings of the 650-acre compound (called Raven Rock) just miles from Camp David, as well as dozens of other bunkers the government built its top leaders during the Cold War, from the White House lawn to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado to Palm Beach, Florida, and the secret plans that would have kicked in after a Cold War nuclear attack to round up foreigners and dissidents, and nationalize industries.

Equal parts a presidential, military, and political history, Raven Rock tracks the evolution of the government’s plans and the threats of global war from the dawn of the nuclear era through the present day. Relying upon thousands of pages of once-classified documents, as well as original interviews and visits to former and current COG facilities, Graff brings readers through the back channels of government to understand exactly what is at stake if our nation is attacked, and how we’re prepared to respond if it is.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Comically macabre . . . A thorough investigation of Washington’s longstanding efforts to maintain order in the face of catastrophe. In exploring the incredible lengths (and depths) that successive administrations have gone to in planning for the aftermath of a nuclear assault, Graff deftly weaves a tale of secrecy and paranoia. . . . Raven Rock is at heart a history of the Cold War and an exploration of its lasting effects on American politics. Graff’s portrait of that era is more Dr. Strangelove than James Bond.” —New York Times Book Review

“Raven Rock is gripping from page one. Brilliantly sourced and reported with exquisite detail, Garrett Graff’s new book is terrifying, outrageous, and illuminating.” —Annie Jacobsen, author of Area 51 and Phenomena

“You may think you have some idea of how the United States prepared for nuclear war, but you will be shocked, appalled, amazed, fascinated, darkly amused, and just plain gob-smacked by what Garrett Graff has dug up. Deeply researched and lucidly written, Raven Rock is a haunting, compelling journey into the past—with disturbing meaning for the future.” —Evan Thomas, author of Ike’s Bluff and Being Nixon

“In this spellbinding narrative, Graff reveals the top secret plans the government has for its own survival and asks the reader to consider a nightmarish scenario. Crammed with new revelations—from the locations of secret bunkers hidden in the nation’s small towns and dense woods to the ever-changing presidential evacuation plan—Graff carefully considers what would happen if the unthinkable occurred. I could not put it down.” —Kate Andersen Brower, author of The Residence and First Women

“Garrett Graff has given us a colorful and frightening account of the American government’s plans for doomsday, and the secret bunkers where official could go to save themselves. These early plans still have their counterparts today, and they reveal a lot about how warfighting doctrine evolved. Read it and be fascinated—and a little scared.” —Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Einstein

“Equal parts thriller, sober history, and tragic comedy, Garrett Graff’s Raven Rock is an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand how the Cold War and the specter of nuclear annihilation shaped the world. Graff is a meticulous researcher and truly gifted storyteller. Readers will find themselves mesmerized by his careful and fast-paced examination of our government’s top-secret plans to survive a nuclear attack while the rest of us are turned to ash.” —Del Quentin Wilber, author of Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan

“A detailed exploration of the United States’ doomsday prepping during the Cold War . . . Graff, a former editor of Washingtonian and Politico magazines, covers every technicality of the construction of underground bunkers and secret command posts, every war game and exercise, every debate over presidential succession planning and continuity of government, every accident that left us verging on nuclear war. . . . But if there is anything that Raven Rock proves with grim certitude, it is that we have little idea how events would have unfolded in a superpower nuclear conflict, and that technological limits, human emotion and enemy tactics can render the most painstaking and complex arrangements irrelevant, obsolete, or simply obscene.” —Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post

“In a new book exploring United States officials’ detailed doomsday plans during the Cold War, writer and historian Garrett Graff presents a look at how nuclear disaster preparation shaped the modern world. . . . Through his research, Graff reveals how ineffective plans for nuclear disaster actually are when put into action. The problem with org charts and instructions? Humans.” —Time magazine

“An encyclopedic chronicle of how the American government, for more than sixty years, has prepared for nuclear attack, most notably with bunkers underground and inside mountains to shelter government officials and other personnel—men and women who could retaliate against the enemy with nuclear weapons and begin to rebuild society. Raven Rock contains everything one could possibly want to know about these seemingly still-continuing measures to confront Armageddon.” —The Wall Street Journal

“There are details in Raven Rock that read like they’ve been ripped from the pages of a pulp spy novel. The book, written by national security expert Garrett M. Graff, takes us inside the bunkers cut into granite mountainsides and dug under an elite country club. He brings us deep beneath the White House on 9/11 and into the cockpit of an airplane that doesn’t officially exist. As you make your way through Raven Rock, it’s easy to forget that all this elaborate high-tech doomsday infrastructure is actually real. . . . Raven Rock, which should have been a Cold War history, now feels especially timely, hitting bookstores right as a President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un’s on-again, off-again relationship pushes us ever closer to nuclear holocaust.” —Vice

“A chilling portrait of how the government planned to continue to function during and after a nuclear holocaust is brilliantly told in this new valuable addition to Cold War literature that goes beyond policy and delves into logistical plans. Graff mines classified and unclassified material to create this highly informative work.” —Library Journal (starred review)

About the Author

Garrett M. Graff, a distinguished journalist and bestselling historian, has spent more than a dozen years covering politics, technology, and national security—helping to explain where we’ve been and where we’re headed. Today, he serves as the director of cyber initiatives for The Aspen Institute and is a contributor to WIRED, CNN, and POLITICO. He’s written for publications from Esquire to Rolling Stone to The New York Times, and edited two of Washington’s most prestigious magazines, Washingtonian and POLITICO Magazine. Graff is the author of multiple books, including The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI, the national bestseller Raven Rock: The Story of the US Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die, and the New York Times bestseller The Only Plane in the Sky.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Raven Rock

INTRODUCTION

For Richard Nixon, August 9, 1974, may have marked the end of his presidency, but for Dexter McIntyre, it was just another workday—a Friday like any other in a workplace unlike almost any other. He arrived early in the morning at the secret AT&T facility in Stanfield, North Carolina, entered the access code at the outer fence, parked his car in the small aboveground lot, and walked through a small door built into the hillside.

The complex had existed since 1965, when AT&T began to dig a big hole about two miles from McIntyre’s childhood home in Locust, North Carolina, about thirty miles east of Charlotte. He had been nineteen when construction started, and recalls, “There was a lot of curiosity about what was going on there.” No one really knew what the hole was for—or even really who was digging. Some locals swore it was a secret facility for communicating with aliens; others believed it was a secret submarine base—despite the fact that it was about 150 miles from the ocean. The truth, as it turned out, was almost as strange as the fiction.

In 1967, McIntyre found himself reporting to work at the newly completed facility as a technician. The big hole that had so fascinated the community now contained a nuclear-hardened, department-store-sized concrete bunker, protected by twin 20,000-pound blast doors, that helped run an AT&T “long line” cable from Miami to Boston, skirting major metropolitan areas that might be nuclear targets. It was one of dozens of specially built facilities that ran air-to-ground communications for VIP military aircraft like Air Force One and various airborne alert command posts—programs with code names like NIGHTWATCH and LOOKING GLASS—that ensured that in the event of a nuclear strike someone in America would be able to launch from the ashes a devastating retaliatory blow against the Soviet Union.

For a quarter century, one eight-hour shift at a time, McIntyre and his colleagues—all technically AT&T staff—tended this hidden mountaintop redoubt, maintaining the telecommunications gear that kept the government ready, a key link in the massive “Continuity of Government” machine.I In the event of an attack, food and rations inside could keep the staff functioning for at least thirty days. The whole facility was mounted on massive metal springs to cushion the impact of a nuclear blast. Communications gear and lights hung from springs—even the toilets were mounted on springs and linked with rubber plumbing. The staff worked closely with other “AT&T” technicians at another North Carolina bunker in Chatham, similarly about thirty miles west of Raleigh, which served as the southernmost link in the government’s massive “relocation arc,” a network of nearly 100 bunkers built into the mountains of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina. The Chatham facility had a special nuclear-hardened troposcatter microwave relay for post-Apocalypse communications and its own special Continuity of Government functions that not even the fellow Stanfield employees understood. Even though they all had special security clearances, the Chatham programs were, as the military said, “need to know.” None of the technicians even told their families what they really did. “You just didn’t talk about it,” McIntyre recalls. “What do you do? ‘I work on telephone circuits.’?” It wasn’t an answer that encouraged follow-up questions.

As McIntyre’s shift began on the morning of August 9, the Stanfield Klaxon sounded, signifying that an Air Force One flight was being readied at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington. McIntyre often served as the facility’s air-to-ground communications technician, and so he closeted himself in the radio room to listen as the plane took off. His first step was to open the office safe and look up his station’s daily call sign; each month, a courier delivered to Stanfield a sealed envelope with different call signs for each day of the month to make it impossible for any radio eavesdroppers to determine Air Force One’s flight path. He looked over the plane’s route, saw it was heading west, and knew that that day, he’d play only a minor role. With a westward flight path, he’d quickly hand over communications to the facility in Williamstown, Kentucky. As Air Force Colonel Ralph Albertazzie and his copilot readied for takeoff and as Air Force One passed through 10,000 feet, McIntyre in the Stanfield facility began to pick up a signal. He called in to the Waldorf, Maryland, ground communications station, “I’ve got acquisition of signal. I can take the flight.” He tuned in to listen.

As Air Force One began to bank west, each of its thirty-four passengers watched the advancing time. Richard Nixon, in his private compartment, interrogated Sergeant Lee Simmons: “Is that clock right?” He gestured to the three digital clocks lining the cabin wall, a legacy that remained from Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. LBJ had loved to summon staff to his cabin to tell him the time: What time was it in Washington? At their destination? Where we are right now? Finally, Air Force stewards installed a trio of clocks to provide constant answers. Now all three ticked down the final minutes of his successor’s presidency.

“I think I’d like a martini,” Nixon said.

Chief Steward Chuck Palmer knew exactly how the president liked it—a chilled glass filled with ice, just a hint of dry vermouth, a lemon peel twist lightly rubbed around the edge. Gin. Stirred quickly and served. Palmer had honed the technique during hundreds of hours of flight with the thirty-seventh commander-in-chief, who had visited twenty-eight countries, including the closed empire of China, traveling 137,500 miles internationally in his six years in office, more than any predecessor.

In the cockpit, copilot Les McClelland listened through headphones as a thousand miles away the chief justice and the vice president recited thirty-five words, phrase by phrase, concluding: “. . . preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The clock read three minutes and twenty-five seconds past noon. The Boeing 707, its blue-and-white paint job instantly recognizable around the world, was 39,000 feet above the Missouri plains, heading west at 600 miles an hour, still nearly three hours from its California destination.

Albertazzie keyed the radio: “Kansas City, this was Air Force One. Will you change our call sign to SAM 27000?”

“Roger, SAM 27000. Good luck to the president,” a controller at the Kansas City Air Route Traffic Control Center replied.

On the ground in Stanfield, McIntyre was puzzled by Albertazzie’s request. Why was the plane changing call signs in midair? It wasn’t until that night when he watched the evening news at home that he realized he had heard history being made. He had been present, without realizing it, for the last moments of the Nixon administration.

• • •

Even as he prepared to hand over the office, becoming the first person to resign the presidency, Richard Nixon had promised he’d be commander-in-chief until the very end. Governing in the midst of the Cold War, he believed it critical for the nation to understand who possessed nuclear launch authority. With Soviet missiles never more than fifteen minutes away, the president led the National Command Authorities, the command and control structure that governed the use of nuclear weapons in case of an attack.

“As I am winging my way back to California tomorrow, I will still have the black box aboard,” Nixon had said the day before at the White House. That black box was colloquially known as the Football—the briefcase, carried just a few steps from the president by a military aide, that contained the country’s nuclear attack plans. The Football was the key to this vast and ever-growing arsenal, the Nuclear Triad of bombers, ICBMs, and submarines that kept the Soviet Union at bay, and it was always at the president’s fingertips.

But not today. No one had told the president that, by one of the only measures that truly mattered, his presidency had already ended. The military aide never boarded the plane with the Football; the briefcase wasn’t in its normal place on Air Force One, secured in the communications center just behind the cockpit. Even before Gerald Ford took the oath, the White House military apparatus had already taken from Richard Nixon the very power that defined his office.

In fact, days before the administration’s dramatic denouement, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger had issued an unprecedented set of orders: If the president issued any nuclear launch order, military commanders should check with either him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before executing them. Schlesinger feared that the president, who seemed depressed and was drinking heavily, might order Armageddon. And on that August morning, the military and White House aides had left the nuclear codes with the incoming president.

In a country with no bejeweled crowns or royal thrones, the black Football briefcase is perhaps the only physical manifestation of our nation’s sovereign, the outward sign of presidential power. And on that day it had already abandoned Richard Nixon.

On its surface, presidential succession seems such a simple idea, but it’s what political scientist Ernst Kantorowicz called “a peculiar kind of scientific mysticism,” whereby as mortal as any single officeholder may be, the office itself never dies. The president may be replaceable, but the presidency is not—it represents the very idea of the democratic traditions of the United States. “For me personally, no one ever elected to the office of the presidency was worth dying for, yet the office of the presidency was,” recalled one Secret Service agent.

The King is dead, long live the King.

Nixon was gone, Ford was in.

The presidency always continues.

Gerald Ford’s accession to the presidency in August 1974 heralded one of the most dramatic chapters of U.S. history, but it was all the more remarkable for just how unremarkable the actual event was—power transferred via a short letter delivered to the secretary of state. It was the third time in just three decades that a vice president had taken over, each time amid exigent circumstances: the natural death of the commander-in-chief in the midst of global war in 1945, the violent assassination of the leader of the free world as his vice president watched in 1963, and now the passing of the torch one step ahead of a forced removal by Congress. In each instance, though, there was no question but that the vice president would step forward.

Ford took office—and received the world-ending nuclear Football—without ever being elected to the vice presidency or the presidency. He had stepped into the vice presidency, nominated by Nixon and confirmed by Congress, after Spiro Agnew’s resignation amid scandal. Ford’s ascension was a transition that literally couldn’t have occurred a decade before; until just a few years earlier, when the Twenty-fifth Amendment was ratified, the nation had had no system for filling a vacancy in the vice presidency. It was a solution created out of necessity by the Cold War as the country came to grips with the fragility of its leadership, just one of the ways nuclear weapons had—and would—reshape the presidency for years to come.

• • •

For much of its existence, the American presidency had been a rather slow-moving enterprise. Presidents might take weeks or months to travel outside the capital, barely in contact with the mechanics of government. In September 1935, Franklin Roosevelt’s car had become hopelessly lost in the canyons around the Hoover Dam, en route back to the train station in Las Vegas from the dam’s dedication, and been completely out of touch for nearly two hours. No one knew where the president was, nor when he might reappear. Even as late as 1945, Vice President Harry Truman didn’t receive Secret Service protection. Yet within a few short years, as Soviet missiles reduced monumental decisions to only fifteen-minute windows, such prolonged periods with the president incommunicado or the vice president’s whereabouts unknown would be an artifact of history.

In the months after World War II ended and the arrival of the atomic bomb, Washington columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop mused how the new weapons would complicate world relations and push America’s government in new directions. In an era where an entire city could disappear in an instant, they argued that it wasn’t going to be enough to just have a vice president on standby. “We shall have to organize a complete, specially trained emergency government as a sort of spare, and to keep it in a cavern until needed,” they wrote. Oddly enough, that was almost exactly what the government would end up doing.

The need to command such powerful weapons on a hair-trigger alert pushed the office of the president into a new era of technology and new procedures; the commander-in-chief required instant, reliable communications, powerful new transportation, and detailed instructions to ensure that there was never a leadership vacuum. The White House Communications Agency would know where both would be every minute of every day, arranging in advance sophisticated communication tools to ensure that those in the newly designated National Command Authorities were always reachable. The need to keep the president and executive branch leaders secure, alive, and in communication gave rise to a massive infrastructure: gleaming Marine helicopters, the majestic Air Force One, hulking armored limousines, and screaming motorcades.

The nuclear age also transformed the presidency from a single person working in the White House to a much broader idea. While most Americans thought of a “president” as the person they elected every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the “presidency” by the 1970s represented a long line of men and women, stretching through both houses of Congress and through every cabinet agency—each ready to step into the void left by the deaths or incapacity ahead of them in the line of succession. While the person was replaceable, the position was not. The presidency literally had an A team, a B Team, and even a C team. In the event of an emergency, each team—and its designated “president”—had a different role and a different evacuation destination. The Alpha team, which in most cases included the elected president, would remain in Washington and, by design, be sacrificed almost immediately in an attack. The Bravo team would head to Mount Weather, a sprawling secret bunker in the hills of Virginia built to withstand a nuclear attack; the Charlie team would head to any of the nearly 100 hidden facilities available within an hour of Washington that the government would activate in an emergency. All this was meant to preserve the National Command Authorities, which began with the president and the secretary of defense, and continued with, as the wonderfully ambiguous phrase stated: “or persons acting lawfully in their stead.”

Each of the nearly twenty offices in the presidential line of succession has its own unique hierarchy; dozens of civilian and military officials populate the succession line, for instance, for the defense secretary, which created possible paths to the presidency with potentially chaotic consequences. Under a truly horrific surprise attack that destroys the nation’s leaders, the U.S. attorney for Chicago and northern Illinois might claim to be the president. Under no circumstances, though, would the presidency itself ever be vacant.

Beginning during the Cold War and continuing up to the present day, the Central Locator System, a special office of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), tracks these officials and their whereabouts twenty-four hours a day, ready to whisk them away from their regular lives at a moment’s notice. While many people are familiar with the military’s DEFCON alerts—a system that tracks the U.S. military’s state of readiness (Defense Condition) from DEFCON 5, representing peacetime, to DEFCON 1, representing complete global war—the analogous COGCON alert matrix, which tracks the government’s “continuity condition readiness,” is more obscure. COGCON 4 represents normal peacetime operations, while COGCON 1 calls for all the government’s relocation bunkers and facilities to be fully staffed. Beginning at COGCON 3, personnel “warm up” the relocation facilities, and people like the head of the Department of Energy’s Savannah River operations office in South Carolina, who stands eighteenth in line for succession to be energy secretary, must begin notifying the Watch Office every day by 8 a.m. ET his or her entire day’s itinerary.

This nuclear world is filled with seemingly harmless gobbledygook, acronyms piled upon acronyms, that explains how the world would end in thermonuclear war. Under the MAD theory, if, for instance, BMEWS and NORAD confirmed a USSR BOOB attack on CONUS, the NCA—either POTUS, SECDEF, or the AEAO aboard the ABNCP—would see a PINNACLE/OP-REP3/NUCFLASH alert and turn to the NMCC, FEMA’s HPSF, the ANMCC, or NEACP to issue EAMs activating SIOP, move the nation to DEFCON 1, mobilize COG and COOP plans, and notify DOD and SAC to attack and launch ICBMs, ALCMs, and SLBMs, raining MIRVs down upon USSR DGZs preselected by NSTAP and JSTPS.

The result of the president launching the nation’s bombers, submarines, and missiles against Russia would almost surely destroy not only both countries but all human life on the entire planet. There were some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, the rough equivalent, one CIA director calculated, of 55 billion traditional 500-pound TNT bombs from World War II. Enough, as he said, to carpet each state in the union with a billion bombs—and still have five billion bombs left over.

From start to finish, the entire process would take under an hour.

Even as the nation lay in ruins at the end of that hour, the government would have already carefully considered how the United States itself—how the idea of the United States—would continue forward. During the Cold War, the government secretly invested billions of dollars in a complicated set of plans known as “Continuity of Government” (COG), “Continuity of Operations” (COOP), and its most secretive level, “Enduring Constitutional Government” (ECG). Through these programs, planners gave deep thought to what activities and processes would be needed following a nuclear attack—and even what totems of American culture should be saved. The World War II command bunkers in London eventually inspired a breathtakingly audacious and complex network of dozens of bunkers, ships at sea, scores of helicopters and planes overhead, even secret rail trains, and convoys of tractor-trailers in the United States.

Prewritten presidential executive orders sat in office safes across Washington, as did secret draft legislation known as the Defense Resources Act, ready to be filled in Mad Libs–style with dates and emergencies, that laid out an entirely new structure and entirely new roles for how the government would function during a national emergency—effectively suspending the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The presidential Football is well known, but less well known is how the attorney general was accompanied through the darkest days of the Cold War by an “Emergency Briefcase” outlining FBI plans to sweep up thousands of Americans deemed a security threat. Long before Barack Obama made the Washington title “czar” popular, Dwight Eisenhower had imagined an expansive set of secret powers, preselecting nine men—mostly private citizens—who would be real czars, stepping in during an emergency to remake the private sector, seize assets coast to coast, and create new bureaucracies that would control nearly every aspect of American life until peace could be restored.

The Post Office would be in charge of registering the nation’s dead; the National Park Service would run the refugee camps; the Department of Agriculture would distribute rationed food. Congress would retreat to a special bunker at a West Virginia resort; the Supreme Court would relocate to another resort in the North Carolina mountains; the Department of the Interior would move to the grounds of a former college in Harpers Ferry. The Federal Reserve kept an underground bunker stocked with a billion dollars cash inside Mount Pony, seventy miles south of Washington. FEMA would help the nation rebuild from regional bunkers in places like Denton, Texas, and Maynard, Massachusetts.

It was also carefully decided that at the National Archives, the Declaration of Independence would be saved before the Constitution, and at the National Gallery of Art, Leonardo da Vinci’s Florentine masterpiece Ginevra de’ Benci took priority over Rogier van der Weyden’s Renaissance masterpiece Saint George and the Dragon. The Library of Congress knew it would save the Gettysburg Address ahead of George Washington’s military commission, and in Philadelphia, a specially trained team of park rangers stood ready to evacuate the Liberty Bell into the mountains of Appalachia.

At every level, the COG system offered redundancy piled atop redundancy. It was a system that touched every state in the union—and nearly every state hosted a hidden COG facility. The scope of power involved was unlike anything our nation has ever experienced.

• • •

This book is a different type of Cold War history—it’s not a traditional account focused on the “who,” the great hawks and doves who shaped this momentous half century, nor is it really a story of the “why,” the ideological and political struggles that played out from Washington to Moscow to Berlin to London. It’s also not meant to be a comprehensive timeline; there are major events that merit barely a mention—Korea, McCarthyism, the Space Race, Vietnam—and major world figures, like Joseph Stalin, whose existence is only mentioned glancingly. Epochal domestic political issues—like civil rights and the 1960s—are discussed not at all. Instead, this book is meant to be the first definitive tour of the hidden architecture of the Cold War’s shadow government. It is a history of “how.” How nuclear war would have actually worked—the nuts and bolts of war plans, communication networks, weapons, and bunkers—and how imagining and planning for the impact of nuclear war actually changed the “why,” as leaders realized the horrors ahead and altered the course of the Cold War at several key points in response.

In writing this account, I have been granted access to many new sources, sites, and facilities known only since the end of the Cold War, people newly willing to speak for the first time about their roles in this secret state, and hundreds of pages of newly declassified documents never before available to researchers. Yet it remains a hard world to re-create after the fact. For one thing, it’s difficult to convey today just how dark the Cold War looked at key points. Though two generations of American leaders, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, genuinely saw the Soviet Union as an existential threat—one that would destroy Europe, the United States, and free people everywhere at the first chance it had—we know now that the U.S. and the free world triumphed over Communism, quite peacefully, in fact.

Moreover, this story is a challenge to tell because much of the COG machinery remains shrouded in secrecy. Many of my requests to declassify even fifty-year-old reports and memos were denied. The National Archives refused my request to release, for instance, four Kennedy-era memos from 1962 and 1963 dealing with civilian emergency planning—arguing that all four still remain so vital to national security that not a single word of them could be declassified. It’s hard—and troubling—to imagine what plans from an era where black-and-white television represented cutting-edge technology could still be relevant to our lives today.

For nearly fifty years, the inner workings of the nation’s COG protocols were some of the government’s best-kept secrets. These facilities and plans were huge surprises when they were unveiled in the 1990s by reporters like Ted Gup and William Arkin, as well as scholars and researchers like Bruce Blair and Tim Tyler. Even colleagues in the same office didn’t know the scope of COG plans. When Aaron Sorkin was researching what would become The American President and The West Wing, Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos pulled out of his wallet what the Hollywood director first thought was a bus pass—it actually was the little card explaining how Stephanopoulos would be evacuated in the event of a nuclear attack. Sorkin incorporated that card into a later West Wing episode, where character Josh Lyman received such a card from the National Security Council and felt guilt because his co-workers wouldn’t also be saved. While shooting the scene, set consultant Dee Dee Myers, the former press secretary to Bill Clinton, pulled Sorkin aside to tell him that the scene was unrealistic because those cards didn’t actually exist. Sorkin was shocked: Even as a top aide, she’d never realized that her co-workers had exactly those cards—and she never did.

• • •

The story of COG is also the story of an unfolding technology revolution—both in terms of military firepower and communications infrastructure—that fundamentally reshaped both the presidency and much of today’s world. The COG world developed the most elaborate communications apparatus ever designed. Nearly every person on the planet has seen their life altered by one of the most basic parts of this planning: It was, after all, the Defense Department’s investment in creating a decentralized network that could ensure communication after a nuclear attack that helped drive development of the modern internet. The world’s first online chat program—the forerunner of AOL Instant Messenger, Skype, Facebook Chat—was developed to help the main command bunker at Mount Weather respond to critical national shortages in an emergency. And the airline reservation system that every internet user accesses each time they use Orbitz, Expedia, or another travel site grew out of the air defense radar system built in the 1950s to prevent a surprise Soviet attack. As technology writer Frank Rose concluded, “The computerization of society, then, has essentially been a side effect of the computerization of war.”

Beyond the information superhighway, America’s concrete highways themselves grew out of the fear of attack—the 41,000 miles of interstates built under an Eisenhower program partly served to help the nation speed war matériel around the nation in case of a nuclear attack. The original name for the limited-access paved road network was the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, and children of the era may recall the signs that sprouted up along the major roads that warned “In case of enemy attack, this road will be closed to all but military vehicles.”

More broadly, though, the Cold War reshaped our nation’s thinking about defense—it’s where our national security state was created, where today’s obsessive secrecy culture began, and where our government first set the precedent for the disproportionate response that has guided so much of our response to the modern threat of terrorism. The vast secrecy that surrounded the government’s atomic weapons program—a culture of secret keeping that led to the development of the government’s first formal security clearances and the now familiar classification system of “Confidential,” “Secret,” and “Top Secret”—grew not out of strength, but out of weakness. The original secret of the atomic age was just how few nuclear weapons the United States actually had. That secret begat a culture of rampant government classification, a problem that increasingly affects even basic and mundane information—and today sees more than five million Americans with security clearances, a group larger than the entire population of Norway, and more than 1.5 million with “Top Secret” clearances, a group larger than the entire population of either Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, or any of ten other states.

The stories and experiences told in this book are where men like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who practiced COG scenarios in bunkers in the 1970s and 1980s, first learned the instincts that would govern how they responded to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—and where many of today’s leading warriors started their careers. The Cold War was also where the president began asserting executive authority to lead the nation unilaterally into war, bypassing the traditional congressional declarations that had always guided such decision making, and laid the groundwork for presidential prerogatives used in Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, and so many other modern conflicts. Modern warfare necessitated quick action; in fact, as Dwight Eisenhower told a group of congressmen in 1954, nuclear war “will be a very quick thing,” and he wouldn’t have time to ask Congress’s opinion before launching a retaliatory strike. Presidents began to invoke spurious ties to “national emergencies” that allowed them to take extraordinary action. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy turned to Truman’s 1950 emergency declaration involving the invasion of South Korea as legal justification for his actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Half a century later, President Obama used a similar declaration from 9/11 to justify attacks in places like Yemen, Somalia, and Syria. In many ways, the Cold War mentality is alive and well today—especially as the world faces an emboldened Russia led by Vladimir Putin.

A generation before Ashton Carter took over the Pentagon as President Obama’s fourth defense secretary, he had helped design the E-4B “Doomsday plane” meant to help the commander-in-chief run a nuclear war from the sky—the same plane is still in use today to ferry defense secretaries around the world. It sits every day on a runway in Omaha, Nebraska, fully staffed, with its engines turning, ready to launch in just minutes and run a nuclear war from the sky.

The history of our government’s Doomsday planning is, as one historian wrote, “not a happy one.” Even as the government’s official outward appearance was optimistic—war would be (a) not that bad and (b) survivable—inside the corridors of power, leaders recognized that the public had virtually no hope of surviving. As Eisenhower said in one meeting, if war happened, the nation didn’t have “enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the street.” What began in the 1950s as an all-encompassing, nationwide push for civil defense, to ready every household and workplace, every village and city, for a Soviet attack, shrank decade by decade, until by 9/11, there was just one aspect of the grand plans left in operation: the evacuation of the nation’s leaders to bunkers hidden under mountains. That September day, when Vice President Cheney and other officials retreated to “undisclosed locations,” many went to Raven Rock, the bunker built near Camp David to house the military during the Cold War, and others flooded to Mount Weather, the government’s other primary mountaintop bunker in Virginia. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent anthrax attack on the U.S. Congress restarted a focus on COG and COOP planning that continues to this day. Today, this secret world still exists, just beneath the surface of our country. In many ways, it’s actually more expansive, powerful, and capable today than it ever was during the twentieth century.

Today, a third generation of Doomsday planners are settling into life inside these bunkers, which are still staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. While some new facilities have been built in the last two decades, the majority of the government’s plans to preserve itself and our nation during an attack in the twenty-first century still rely upon bunkers built with slide rules.

Today, those same blue-and-gold Air Force helicopters still practice evacuating officials from Washington each day in the skies over the capital.

Today, each time a major event like a presidential inauguration or State of the Union speech occurs, there’s still a “designated survivor” from the established line of succession, who skips the event and stays in a secure facility under guard until the event ends without incident. At the 2017 presidential inaugural, Senate President Pro Tem Orrin Hatch and outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson waited outside Washington until President Trump safely assumed power.

Today, the Postal Service does not prepare to register the dead from a nuclear strike, nor do its mail trucks stand ready to be converted into “emergency casualty carriers,” but it is the designated distributor of vaccines should a biological attack or health pandemic like smallpox or Ebola occur.

And, today, every day, there are still military aides who walk just steps behind the president and vice president toting a heavy black briefcase filled with all the instructions necessary to end the world as we know it.

Until that happens, of course, we’ll never know if any of the plans outlined on the following pages would have ever worked—but, as readers will see, it seems unlikely.

I. McIntyre would work there until it closed in 1991, a victim of advancing technologies and the end of the Cold War.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; First Edition (May 2, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1476735409
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1476735405
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.9 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #110,398 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #158 in Political Intelligence
- #162 in United States Executive Government
- #2,424 in United States History (Books)

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Garrett M. Graff

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Garrett M. Graff, a distinguished magazine journalist, bestselling historian, and regular TV commentator, has spent more than a dozen years covering politics, technology, and national security—helping to explain where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

Today, he serves as the director of the Aspen Institute’s cybersecurity and technology program, and is a contributor to WIRED, Longreads, and CNN. He’s written for publications from Esquire to the New York Times, and served as the editor of two of Washington’s most prestigious magazines, Washingtonian and POLITICO Magazine, which he helped lead to its first National Magazine Award, the industry’s highest honor.

Graff is the author of multiple books, including "The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House," which examined the role of technology in the 2008 presidential race, and "The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI," which traces the history of the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts. His book, "Raven Rock," a national bestseller, about the government’s Cold War Doomsday plans, was published in May 2017, and his most recent book, co-authored with John Carlin, examined the rise of cyber threats, "Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat."

Previously, he was the founding editor of mediaBistro.com’s FishbowlDC (www.FishbowlDC.com), a popular blog that covers the media and journalism in Washington, and co-founder of EchoDitto, Inc., a multi-million-dollar Washington, D.C.-based internet strategy consulting firm. During his time at FishbowlDC, he was the first blogger admitted to cover a White House press briefing in 2005, a moment considered significant enough that his reporter’s notebook from that first briefing is on display at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. A Vermont native, he served as deputy national press secretary on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and, beginning in 1997, was then-Governor Dean’s first webmaster.

He taught at Georgetown University for seven years, including courses on journalism and technology, and his writing and commentary has appeared in publications like the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, New York, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Rolling Stone, 5280, Politico, AARP Magazine, Eater, Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine, USA Today, GQ UK, NextCity, and he has appeared on CBS This Morning, The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBC, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, the History Channel, National Geographic, and various NPR programs, including “This American Life,” “Fresh Air,” and “All Things Considered.”

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Alice Friedemann

This means there are no plans for the permanent emergency of energy and resource decline

Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2018

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This book exposes the government’s plans to carry on government and democracy after a nuclear war with Russia that began in the Cold War and continues on today.

This is patently ridiculous because there won’t be anyone to save, as author Graff points out:

“The result of the president launching the nation’s bombers, submarines, and missiles against Russia would almost surely destroy not only both countries but all human life on the entire planet. There are some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, the rough equivalent, one CIA director calculated, of 55 billion traditional 500-pound TNT bombs from World War II. Enough, as he said, to carpet each state in the union with a billion bombs—and still have five billion bombs left over.”

In the initial plans that began during the Truman administration, civilians were to be saved, but as time went on it became clear this couldn’t be done (that will be the subject of a later post).

So if the government wasn’t planning on help the American people survive for two weeks after a nuclear war, then Homeland Security and FEMA sure as hell don’t have any plans to help us cope or survive the permanent emergency ahead of energy and resource decline, which they certainly know about as shown in my posts from the congressional record under menu item experts, government (and especially military).

After a nuclear war starts, only top government officials will be able to go to the deep mountain shelters built at hundreds of billions of taxpayer expense. Mostly from the executive branch, it was decided not to tell Congress anything since one of them was likely to spill the beans.

It’s known that tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on shelters, evacuation aircraft and helicopters, vehicles, keeping bomb shelters running, communications systems, and much more, but since so much of the money is in the top secret black budget, it may never be known how much has been spent.

And what a waste of money! Chapter 17 has an amazing recounting of what an utter fiasco ensued after 9-11, much of it new information to me. All these plans made for five decades fell apart. Anything that could go wrong did with evacuation plans, finding the 20 or so officials in the chain of the presidency in a decapitation event, miscommunication and being unable to communicate at all, confusion across all government and military agencies, no one who knew much about what the Continuity of Government (COG) plans were or how to activate them, all of the top FEMA employees were at a conference in Montana and unable to help out, and the inability of President Bush to speak to the people or anyone else for that matter from the airplane he was flying in – such a mess that we’d all be dead now if this had been a nuclear war.

But were these crazy plans scrapped after 9-11? Heck no, if anything the government is spending even more money on bomb shelters, airplanes to run a nuclear war from in the sky since the U.S. land will be ruined and devastated below,

Here’s how the author describes his book:

“This book is meant to be the first definitive tour of the hidden architecture of the Cold War’s shadow government. It is a history of “how.” How nuclear war would have actually worked—the nuts and bolts of war plans, communication networks, weapons, and bunkers—and how imagining and planning for the impact of nuclear war actually changed the “why,” as leaders realized the horrors ahead and altered the course of the Cold War at several key points in response.

Since the Truman administration and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the federal government’s basic plan hasn’t changed a bit from the initial plan of run and hide in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia.

This story is a challenge to tell because much of the COG machinery remains shrouded in secrecy. Many of my requests to declassify even 50-year-old reports and memos were denied. The National Archives refused my request to release, for instance, four Kennedy-era memos from 1962 and 1963 dealing with civilian emergency planning—arguing that all four still remain so vital to national security that not a single word of them could be declassified.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent anthrax attack on the U.S. Congress restarted a focus on COG and COOP planning that continues to this day. Today, this secret world still exists, just beneath the surface of our country. In many ways, it’s actually more expansive, powerful, and capable today than it ever was during the twentieth century.

A generation before Ashton Carter took over the Pentagon as President Obama’s fourth defense secretary, he had helped design the E-4B “Doomsday plane” meant to help the commander-in-chief run a nuclear war from the sky—the same plane is still in use today to ferry defense secretaries around the world. It sits every day on a runway in Omaha, Nebraska, fully staffed, with its engines turning, ready to launch in just minutes and run a nuclear war from the sky.

Today, blue-and-gold Air Force helicopters still practice evacuating officials from Washington each day in the skies over the capital. Today, each time a major event like a presidential inauguration or State of the Union speech occurs, there’s still a “designated survivor” from the established line of succession, who skips the event and stays in a secure facility under guard until the event ends without incident.

Throughout the 1970s the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—working with OEP’s computer facility in Olney, Maryland—devoted significant resources to calculating which natural resources and infrastructure would likely survive various attacks; it estimated, for example, that 136 of the nation’s 224 oil refineries would be destroyed in a widespread nuclear attack—most of the rest, though, would be inoperable due to the loss of electricity.”

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J. S

The US government doesn't care about you

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2024

Verified Purchase

I loved this book. Lots of great info and little nuggets of history not really taught us.

No matter what your political affiliation you should know, the US Goverment doesn't care about you. Nor have they ever. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you'll realize our differences are actually our biggest strengths.

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Green

A largely unknown history

Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2024

Verified Purchase

This book tells the story of the US government’s plans for existence after nuclear war, and how these have changed over time. It also talks about the practical, legal, and constitutional challenges related to continuity of government planning. But one of the most frightening aspects of this book is it’s exposure of how poorly continuity of government plans have functioned when implemented. This is an eye opening read.

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Walter W. Olson, Ph.D, P.E.

Continuity of Government (COG)

Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2017

Verified Purchase

Continuity of Government (COG)

The advent of nuclear weapons also brought concerns of how to maintain a government during and after a nuclear attack. For a lack of a better term, this is called “continuity of government” or COG. Before nuclear weapons, it was virtually impossible to destroy a complete government in one attack. After nuclear weapons, this is an all to possible scenario!

Ravenrock is an account of how the US Government planned for COG from President Truman to near present times. Much of the near term planning is classified and unavailable to the authors. But still there are clues of what exists.

The sad fact is this: “Americans and their politicians believe hiding from a threat is cowardice.” The was seen during 9/11 when President Bush was at school in Florida, whisked away to Air Force One, forced to fly in holding patterns over the Caribbean, landing at Barksdale AFB, and the directed to Offutt AFB, despite his objects and his desire to return to the White House, while people in Washington tried to understand what had happened to the United States. Afterwards, a number of people accused him of cowardice. This greatly impairs the ability of planners for COG.

In Ravenrock, of the 1950’s we see plans to ferret key people in government away to various underground bunkers while leaving their families. This proved infeasible for politicians and their families alike. So plans were changed to provide for families. But even these did not provide satisfaction, to the point where key politicians would not evacuate. Rather, the would send subordinates during the exercises and in certain real situations to the bunkers.

Then, there was the issue of transportation. At first, the plan depended on traveling the roads about Washington, DC. But have you ever tried to get somewhere quickly in Washington, DC, particularly at 4:30 PM? In a nuclear attack, the thought initially was that you had 15 minutes!

After trying to move President Eisenhower to Camp David, it was quickly found a better solution was necessary. At first a “bubble dome” helicopter from the Army was used. But after the first flight, when the President suffer severe heat exhaustion and dehydration from the heat in the helicopter, this had to be changed. After some deliberation, a Marine helicopter proved satisfactory. This was how the Marines got the helicopter services for the President which they retain to the present day.

Clearly, the transportation difficulties still persist to this day for various other personages. Washington, DC, is not an easy place to escape from.

We see the development of Air Force One in its various forms and the alternate command posts, both aerial and bunker based. Communications posed special problems requiring the coalition of various communications corporations in the planning for COG. We see the development of NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain and the advent of NORAD tracking Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

And so, Ravenrock traces the billions of dollars spent on COG operations, the attempts to find feasible governmental operations, the exercise and failures of the plans, and what actually happened during several crises where the COG plans were potentially in effect.

So where does Ravenrock leave us?

Since there is security classification tied to most of the COG plans and operations, we can only surmise an answer from real events where COG operations were exercised, the most recent being 9/11. What we found was a reluctance of American Leaders to exercise their duties under the current plan. For example, the Secretary of Defense was assisting in immediate evacuations from the Pentagon and was incommunicado for a lengthy period of time rather than performing assigned duties! Despite movement orders for the principals, they sent subordinates. Most of the people did not know of the plans and those that did apparently with some exceptions did not follow their instructions!

Thus, we are left to conclude that in a real emergency, much of the COG planning would be for naught: ad hoc decisions would be made. If a real nuclear attack hit Washington, DC, regardless of warning times, be they short or be they long, the US Government would be effectively decapitated, mainly because plans have been insufficiently exercised and plans would not be executed in full.

No one knows what the future will bring but we are left with President Eisenhower’s words:

“The President said that, of course, his imagination as to the horrors of a third world war might be overdeveloped, but he believed that every single nation, including the United States, which entered into this war as a free nation would come out of it as a dictatorship,” wrote Deputy Executive Secretary Everett Gleason in the meeting minutes. “This would be the price of survival.”

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ROBERT L MORAN MD

We are screwed

Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2023

Verified Purchase

The history of bunker building by the US government to the present Raven Rock complex. All of which is doomed to fail due to the time it would take to get the politicians to the bunker in light of hypersonic missiles and offshore subs being able to launch within 15 minutes or less, even the white house with its bunker would not withstand 2- 20 megaton blasts. it would only serve as a burial site under tons of concrete. A great read to the futility of building these structures, including the Biltmore hotel's secret complex which was outed in the 90's. The rest of us are screwed in the event of a nuclear attack.
The only saving would be high energy laser weapons which can destroy incoming missiles which
I hope we are developing.

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Johnny Rocket

Where are ALL those Helicopters Going?

Reviewed in Canada on October 20, 2020

Verified Purchase

Great Book. Well researched and written.
Now...How do I get one of those Red Evac Cards?

One person found this helpful

Coombsy

Could this be *the* definitive book on preparedness for WW3 in the US?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 11, 2018

Verified Purchase

I've not finished this yet, but felt compelled to write a review.

I've been looking for a book that covers the political and practical aspects of the cold war. What the thoughts and policies were of the leaders, and how they turned that into preparedness for the horror that could come. I've always been particularly interested in the bunkers. the design, size, how they were equipped etc. This book does all of the above and more.

I'm amazed by the sheer collation of data that the writer must have gone through to pull out the meaningful information that he's put in here. He talks about the initial rush and cash injection to get the US prepared for Armageddon, to the 'back-burner' politics of the late 60's and 70's (Vietnam was the priority then). The book goes into detail about costs, conversations and attitudes toward preparedness and continuity of government and what that would really mean for the people of the nation. I'll give you a hint - what's the point of having a government if there's no people left...

Really great book, I'd recommend to anyone who's interested in the subject matter or wants to understand the history and possibly attitudes of the American leaders during the Cold War.

One person found this helpful

Duncan McKenzie

A fascinating book.

Reviewed in Australia on April 11, 2020

Verified Purchase

I really enjoyed reading this book. It is a fascinating look at how the US government plans to continue after nuclear devastation. It details not only the political and administrative processes that need to continue but also the communications structure that needs to remain intact in order to launch military retaliation and communicate with those citizens that may be left.

Stewart Murray

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on January 16, 2018

Verified Purchase

A great source of information on the era

Vincent Bezzina

Its a good read. The source material the author had to ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 13, 2017

Verified Purchase

Its a good read. The source material the author had to work with was probably quite boring but he has managed to weave a very informative and entertaining story which shows the impact nuclear weapons have had on our modern world. The ability to rain down apocalyptic destruction in a matter of minutes, turning cities into craters and destroying millions of lives is something that no sane person wants to live through and this lies at the heart of this book.

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Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die Hardcover – May 2, 2017

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