Excerpt from “Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die” by Garrett M. Graff
This nuclear world is filled with seemingly harmless gobbledygook, acronyms piled upon acronyms, that explains how the world would end in thermonuclear war...
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, on 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.
-- Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself -- While the Rest of Us Die
By Garrett M. Graff
Simon & Schuster (BOOK | KINDLE)