This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (12 page)

The Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs believed an emergency headquarters, not dispersal, best served the military’s needs. In June 1947, the Munitions Board had started studying the feasibility of using under
ground space for industrial production and storage. In May 1948, James Forrestal told Munitions to fold this project into the NSRB’s work on dis
persal and the emergency relocation of wartime essential government offices. Munitions and the Joint Chiefs had already begun planning an alternate headquarters for the military, however, and neither body intended to accept the NSRB’s supervision. Munitions identified more than 3,300 staff (492 military, 2,861 civilian) who would carry out emergency operations, and the Joint Chiefs defined the functions of an alternate command post, including oversight of the services’ operational elements and coordination with war mobilization efforts. Throughout the second half of 1948, the Army conducted explosives tests in Colorado and Utah to aid in the design of blast-proof underground structures, and Munitions identified sites in Ohio,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland suitable for the construction of large underground facilities.
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Louis Johnson, Forrestal’s successor, expanded this planning. In July 1949, he asked the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force to prepare for continuity of their operations in case of an attack on Washington. After the Soviet atomic test, he told Sen. Alexander Wiley (R-Wisc.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, about the command post and advised him that Defense needed an unspecified amount of money to continue the project.
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In November, Johnson formed a committee on disaster planning. In addition to the service secretaries, it included the Joint Chiefs and staff from his own office. Johnson asked the committee to identify Defense’s essential tasks, to copy and store vital records in a secure location outside of the capital, and to prepare for the evacuation of top Defense officials following an attack warning. Johnson also wanted the committee to pick a site for the alternate command post.
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The Raven Rock site, which Truman approved in May 1950, was chosen for several reasons. The mountain was about 70 air miles northwest of Washington, in sparsely populated, wooded terrain. Just miles away, Camp Ritchie, now called Fort Ritchie, could serve as a base for the Army Corps of Engineers during construction. And most important, scientists and engineers believed an installation beneath Raven Rock could withstand an atomic explosion. The command post, officially known as the Alternate Joint Communications Center, informally as Site R, consisted of two tunnels, one facing northeast, the other facing northwest. The tunnels, which on a dia
gram resemble tuning forks, lay deep below Raven Rock’s peak. Each had two parallel entrances that converged after approximately 500 feet, forming wide corridors joining at a right angle deep inside the mountain. Both tun
nels provided access to a grid of passageways and chambers carved alongside the northwest corridor. Just like the Pentagon’s rings, the five primary chambers were lettered A–E; office space was built within them. Four additional chambers housed power plants and water reservoirs.
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The design and construction of Site R presented formidable and unique challenges. To envision design potentials and limits, an architect can usually visit a site and see its boundaries, grade of the land, and the height of neighboring structures. At Raven Rock, the creation of the site itself was an enormous undertaking. From
something
, tons of soil and dense, varied rock, had to come
nothing
: empty space and air. That space, dank and dark, also had to be made hospitable to humans. A water source was needed, but seep
ing water had to be pumped out; the moisture content of the air had to be lowered, fresh air channeled in, and the temperature controlled. Lighting called for generators, which required exhaust vents. Only then could foundations be laid, steel beams fitted together, walls and floors finished.

A secret military post burrowed inside a mountain might conjure images of dim bulbs strung along a wet rock ceiling, stacks of water drums, and spartan bunk beds. This, Site R wasn’t. The east and west access tunnels were paved and wide enough for vehicles. Within the grid of lettered chambers,
steel structures three stories high were built. Plans for the first building, under construction by June 1951, laid out office space for almost 1,400 persons, a cafeteria, an infirmary, utility space, and communications rooms. The plan for an adjacent building had office space for 1,500 people. Although the finished buildings were smaller than originally projected, they could still accommodate 2,200 persons.
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Just as the U.S. military had built the world’s largest office building on the banks of the Potomac, it carved out Raven Rock’s heart to create an underground city. Completed in June 1953, Site R had power plants that could produce 12 million BTUs of steam heat per hour and generate 2,500 kilovolts of electricity. Site R could dispose of up to three tons of trash, process a million gallons of sewage, and hold two million gallons of water in its vast water reservoirs—all in a single day. Four miles of road led into and through the facility, and more than 650 acres of land guarded by the Army surrounded it.
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Site R’s self-sufficiency mattered little, however, without reliable commu
nication links to Washington and military bases. Providing these links was the responsibility of the Army’s Signal Corps and the Bell System (AT&T). During 1951, Bell began building a land wire network to provide telephone and telegraphic transmissions between Site R and the military’s facilities in the capital region. The Signal Corps also built transmitting and receiving stations at Greencastle, Pa., and Sharpsburg, Md., to allow radio contact. More channels were needed, though, resulting in the construction of a microwave network. Microwaves offered an ideal alternative to both radio and telephone cables. Radio waves can measure more than 1,000 feet wide, require powerful transmitters to travel long distances, and are sensitive to atmospheric interference. The narrow width of microwaves, typically three inches, allowed point-to-point transmission for distances of 15–50 miles. Receiving antennas affixed to a tower channeled the waves through metal tubes to repeaters or amplifiers, which sustained the signal strength, and additional antennas sent the waves to the next tower. Oscillating at frequen
cies measured by the billions per second, microwaves could be subdivided into several channels; each channel, into hundreds or even thousands of circuits. This enabled the simultaneous transmission of voice signals, televi
sion programming, and data to teletypewriters. Unlike land lines, microwaves required no right-of-ways or poles and traveled close to the speed of light.
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In June 1951, the Signal Corps decided to hire the Bell System to build and help operate Site R’s microwave network. Bell had installed its first microwave relay just four years before but already had established itself as an innovator in the field. Although the Army considered building the network itself, it believed Bell, given its resources, could do the work at less cost and “since this was a test case, the telephone company would make an all-out effort to maintain or exceed its high standards of service for this system.” And as one Signal Corps officer observed, existing law would permit the military to seize control of the network during war or national emergency.
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Two buried cables provided the first leg of the network, stretching six miles from Site R to Quirauk Mountain in Washington County, Md. (A cable link
was necessary because a bomb detonated on Raven Rock would obliterate transmitting towers built there.) Over 2,000 feet high, Quirauk is one of Maryland’s tallest mountains and offered unobstructed signal lines to a repeater station in Damascus, Md. The next “hop”—the distance between repeater stations—extended to a tower erected in Tysons Corner in Fairfax County, Va. From there, the microwave network branched to several points, including Fort Meade, Md., Andrews Air Force Base, and La Plata, Md., which provided a link to the Pentagon.
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Meanwhile the military drafted interim continuity of operation plans. Although Johnson had first asked the secretaries of the military services to write such plans in July 1949, they had accomplished little, and Johnson himself was gone. Angered by his clumsy efforts to force out Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Truman demanded his resignation on September 11, 1950. Stunned, Johnson implored the President to reconsider; Truman refused, and Johnson resigned the next day. Then, in front of the President, he started weeping.
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The new secretary of defense, George Marshall, was unlikely to cry in anyone’s presence. A career military officer and Army Chief of Staff during World War II, Marshall had preceded Acheson as secretary of state and commanded bipartisan respect. Acheson, who wasn’t easily impressed, wrote of him: “His figure conveyed intensity, which his voice, low, staccato, and incisive, reinforced. It compelled respect.”
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In March 1951, Marshall formed a new committee on disaster planning and made it clear he wanted results concerning protective facilities at the Pentagon, evacuation procedures, and alternate headquarters. He got them.

By May, the Air Force had surveyed the Pentagon for space where a fortified shelter for 150 key officials might be built. It picked an area in the sub-basement near a stairway in the D-Ring. The shelter would require blast doors, reinforced concrete walls, its own power, and air purification filters. The surveyors believed such a shelter could withstand the detonation of an atomic bomb above the White House, one mile northeast, but not directly above the Pentagon. According to the disaster committee, “[it] would be ideal if we could construct bomb-proof shelters for use by all Defense employees or at least by all key employees,” but construction challenges and cost made that impractical.
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Instead of building shelters for everyone, Marshall authorized the Military District of Washington (MDW), a unit of the Army, to set up an “Air Raid Precaution Organization.” Established in 1942, the MDW was responsible for the capital’s defense and provided security at the Pentagon, among other duties. By November 1951, the MDW had charted a detailed shelter and evac
uation plan. The MDW divided the Pentagon by floors, seven total including the basement and mezzanine, then grouped the floors into five sectors, one for each side of the Pentagon; each sector split into rings, which were lettered to match the building’s five rings. The wardens designated for these various divisions were as proliferate as rabbits in a warren. Floor wardens appointed sector wardens, who named ring wardens; they designated room wardens as well as floor, elevator, and washroom monitors. Every warden had an assistant,
too. Should the air-raid sirens wail the take-cover signal, movement to shelter areas, which simply consisted of hallways and windowless rooms on the lower levels, proceeded from the top down, beginning with the fifth floor. This choreography was as unrealistic as it was elaborate. (Perhaps not coinciden
tally, the MDW also commanded the Arlington Cemetery Burial Guard and led military parades in Washington.) By the MDW’s own admission, the plan assumed that “sufficient advance warning of an aerial attack will be received to permit the movement of all personnel to those areas affording the maximum protection.”
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Recognizing the limits of the proposed D-ring shelter and the MDW’s planning, the disaster committee designated Fort Meade as an alternate headquarters pending completion of Site R. Fort Meade, a sprawling base constructed in 1917, lay 20 miles northeast of Washington and had recently been designated the headquarters of the Second U.S. Army. The disaster committee instructed the Army to arrange quarters for 1,000 employees at Fort Meade and to install a mobile radio teletype and power generators. The Army was also responsible for transporting the deputy secretary of defense, the undersecretaries of the three services, the vice chiefs of staff of the Army and Air Force, and the vice chief of Naval Operations to Fort Meade immediately following an attack warning. The disaster committee told these men to “be prepared to take over operations of the Department of Defense upon receipt of information of the unavailability of their principals to do so.” Each service and the Office of the Secretary of Defense also dupli
cated documents needed to wage war and stored them at facilities outside Washington. The Navy put its papers in Norfolk, Va.; the Air Force, at its Langley base near Hampton, Va. With these preparations, the services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense considered themselves ready to continue operations even if their worst-case scenario, Condition ABLE, came true before Site R was ready: a Soviet atomic attack left “the entire Defense organization at the Seat of Government . . . totally destroyed or totally inoperative; existing physical facilities and communications are rendered useless for any effective direction of the Department of Defense; some person
nel may survive, but casualties among Defense officials are so extensive as to preclude any effective continuation of control at the Seat of Government.”
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The interim alternate headquarters at Fort Meade and the construction beneath Raven Rock Mountain showed the military’s confidence and certainty of its mission in Cold War America. Just ten years before, Franklin Roosevelt had imagined the Pentagon as a windowless structure converted into a warehouse after World War II. Not only had the military kept its gigantic building, now it was constructing a secret alternate headquarters. That this structure needed no windows only underscored how very different was the postwar world than the one Roosevelt had fancied.