Hunker down in the Bunker

Brian Balogh: Now remember that nuclear bunker hidden behind the drapes of the luxury hotel? Earlier in the episode we heard about the Green Brier facility, hidden under a golf course in West Virginia. But who would have ended up in that bunker and what kind of plans do the government have in place if tensions between the US and Russia had boiled over during the Cold War? How was the nation going to pull itself back together and carry on?

Brian Balogh: Writer and historian Garrett Graff. Garrett Graff is the author of Ravenrock: The Story of the US government’s secret plan to save itself while the rest of us die.

Garrett Graff: The COG plans, which are still in effect today, the Continuity of Government Plans. They deal with how the US Governor would keep functioning after a catastrophic attack, which used to be primarily a nuclear attack. Today it encompasses a wider set of WMD and terror attack scenarios on the capital. And the goal of it is to effectively ensure that there is always someone left to run the government. So through the Cold War, even up to the present day, most government agencies have, basically, and A team, a B team, and a C team. And in an emergency each of those teams would be dispatched to a different relocation facility, different bunker, different evacuation site. And your A team would have been basically your existing office holders, your cabinet secretaries, your President, your Vice-President. And then your B Team would be their deputies. And then the C team would sort of be the deputies’ deputies. And the hope would be that at least one of those teams somewhere in the country would survive, and be able to emerge from the rubble and declare themselves the new leaders of the United States.

Garrett Graff: And we think of, for instance, presidential succession as this relatively straight foreword thing about the President, the Vice-President, the Speaker of the House, the President Pro-Tem of the Senate, Secretary of State on down. But what most people don’t understand is that each of those cabinet secretaries has their own line of succession. So when you talk about the presidency, when you talk about the President that’s one person. When you talk about the office of the presidency, that’s actually several hundred people.

Brian Balogh: Were there to be a nuclear attack, how many people could this Green Brier facility house? On a presumably pretty long period of time?

Garrett Graff: It was over a thousand people could have stayed in this facility, all of the members of Congress, their staffs, support staff, security team. And then part of what made so many of these relocation plans strange over the course of the Cold War, was they didn’t include families. You would sort of leave your family behind to fend for themselves as you were evacuated away. This was not a unknown problem, this was literally something that was spotted in the first ever US government evacuation drill, Operation Alert 1954. When Dwight Eisenhower and his cabinet, and all of their secretaries were evacuated out to Mount Weather, which is the big presidential bunker in Berryville, Virginia. And all of the wives of the cabinet stayed at home plying cards through the afternoon, and gave their husbands a very chilly reception when they came home at the end of the drill.

Garrett Graff: Then Congress tried to deal with this. They actually set aside some of the meeting areas at the Green Brier that were outside of the blast doors for members of Congress to bring their families, wives, children, spouses. And they would have sort of slept on cots in the main meeting facilities of the Green Brier. So I don’t know if that would have necessarily gone over any better. “Hey honey, you and the kids, you bunk down in these cots. Daddy’s gonna be just behind the blast door in the secure part of the bunker in case all of the rest of you are killed in an atomic blast.”

Brian Balogh: That’s just too much. Speaking of too much, you know that I have to ask you about Dr. Strangelove. And in Dr. Strangelove, perhaps the most famous scene, Dr. Strangelove is asked by the President in the film, “Well how do I decide who goes down into the bunker?” And Dr. Strangelove famously answers, “Well that would not be necessary, Mr. President. They could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principals of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously. There would be much time and little to do. Ah, but with proper breeding techniques and a ration of say 10 females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product in say, 20 years.”

Brian Balogh: How close did they come to actually describing the real plan?

Garrett Graff: So what’s so funny to me about these plans is that in almost every case, you actually can’t come up with satire that is stranger than what the truth of these plans with have actually been. So I’ll answer sort of your direct question and then sort of talk a little bit more about Dr. Strangelove.

Garrett Graff: That sort of whole idea of Dr. Strangelove was of course based on some of the theorists of the time, Herman Kahn, Thomas Schilling, some of the others from the Rand Corporation who were working on this. And it, in part, it was because of their calculations. And this is sort of dark to think about it even in these terms. But they were, even under the worst case scenarios that war planners come up with during the Cold War, about 60 million Americans would still survive the initial attacks. So there was never a scenario where they were sort of looking to get people into the bunkers for reproductive purposes, which is sort of for some reason the thing that every one’s minds always jumps to when we start talking about the subject.

Garrett Graff: So the goal was to basically get government officials, enough of a functioning government into these bunkers in order to ensure there was sort of some semblance of order for those 60 million Americans who would survive. But it did involve this incredible re-imagining of how the US government would function. That basically every US government agency has, many of them still today, sort of a post-apocalyptic analog of what their responsibilities would have been. So the post office was the agency that was in charge of registering the dead and figuring out who was still alive after an attack. The national park service was actually the agency that was in charge of running the refugee camps. Because the thinking was that the refugees from the cities would flee out into undisturbed national parks. And so you would be housed as a nuclear war survivor in Yosemite, or Yellowstone, or the Blue Ridge Mountains, would have survived on Peanut Island.

Brian Balogh: That is incredible. That is just incredible. What is the protocol today for evacuating a President?

Garrett Graff: So the protocol … So we’ve spent all of this time talking about underground bunkers, and actually the protocol by the end of the Cold War was not put the President underground at all. It was to put him aboard a converted 747, known as an E4B. An Air Force plan code named Nightwatch, that would have served as the Presidential, what was known as the national emergency airborne command post, the NEACP.

Brian Balogh: Hold, hold on. The Kneecap?

Garrett Graff: The NEACP. And one of these 747s, the Nightwatch planes, has shadowed the President every since the late 1970s. Wherever he goes they’re never very far away. When the President travels overseas, one of these planes travels to an adjacent airport and sort of waits there in case of an evacuation. And the President would have sort of been put aboard one of these E4B Nightwatch planes and could have led nuclear war from the sky for 3 days, while the plan sort of circled and flew wherever it needed to fly, to land the President at a secure location. And as we are sitting here talking today, one of these planes is sitting on a runway at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. And it’s fully staffed, and it’s engines are turning. And it could launch in less than 15 minutes to rendezvous with the President wherever he is. And 365 days a year there’s one of these 4 planes sitting on the runway ready to go in the event of a nuclear catastrophe.

Ed Ayers: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org. Or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian Balogh: Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from Ketza, Pottington Bear, and Gisar. Special thanks this week to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, William Jones, and Sam Blundstein. And as always the Johns Hopkins Studios in Baltimore.

Joanne Freeman: Backstory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 8: Brian Barlow is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Aires is professor of the humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Windham for Virginia Humanities.