This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (18 page)

“Rabbit” was part of the so-called Federal Relocation Arc. When Millison arrived at Front Royal, the Arc was still in the planning stages. By 1957, how
ever, the Arc was composed of more than 90 sites that stretched from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, encompassing Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, even Ohio. Some centers lay within an hour’s or so drive of Washington; others, as far as 300 miles away. Gettysburg and University Park, Pa.; Warrenton and Charlottesville, Va.; Durham, Greenville, and Greensboro, N.C.—these are a few of the small cities that secretly (and in some cases, not-so-secretly) hosted the Arc.
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In one account, the Arc is described as “a covert constella
tion of still-classified underground facilities,” but only a small segment of the Arc merits this description.
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Most Arc sites weren’t underground; they were located in preexisting buildings or developed sites, typically college campuses or government reservations such as Front Royal. The United States Information Agency planned to regroup at East Carolina College in Greenville; the GSA had an arrangement with Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.; the Bureau of Labor Statistics contracted with Hampden-Sydney College southwest of Richmond, Va.
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They were just three of the dozens of executive agencies slated to use college campuses, which were practically readymade for this role. Universities offered dormito
ries, cafeterias, and office equipment. More often than not, college adminis
trators welcomed (re)location scouts to their campuses. The president of Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Va., received a warm note of thanks from one scout, whose briefing noted the College’s many amenities, including space for helicopters to land.
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In addition to Site R, the military expected to use established bases. By 1960, for example, the Headquarters of the Marine Corps planned to relocate to Camp Lejuene, N.C.
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Some agencies planned to use a nearby field office. For a time, the Agriculture Department, which owned a massive reservation in Beltsville, Md., planned to relocate to its research center there.
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One government agency even arranged to use the basement of the American Legion building in Frostburg, Md., for relocation purposes that required computer punch card equipment.
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And there were the jewels of the Arc, facilities like Site R and a center carved out of a mineshaft in Mount Weather, Va., “hardened” sites built to withstand atomic detonations.

The origins of the Arc lay in the failure of dispersal. In November 1950, Budget Director Frederick J. Lawton asked the heads of executive departments and agencies to outline how they would operate if an attack destroyed Washington. He got no response, so he asked again in March 1951. The next month, after the Senate delivered its “knockout punch” to dispersal, GSA staff began visiting and cataloging buildings suitable for relocation within 8 to 60 miles of the zero milestone marker, focusing on college campuses, schools, and offices. For example, they inspected the library and the gymnasium at the University of Maryland at College Park.
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The surveys took almost a year to complete. The NSRB used the data to write an “Emergency Relocation Plan for the Executive Branch,” which des
ignated agencies’ essential functions and employees as well as their relocation sites. “Relocators” were supposed to receive emergency passes from DCD, the only instance in which the plan drew on local civil defense. Activation of the “Emergency Relocation Plan” would come from the president, a Warning Yellow, or following an attack itself. The sites included schools and college buildings as well as agency field offices within the aforementioned range. In April 1952, Truman issued Executive Order 10346, which required each executive agency and department to have at the ready plans for its operation during a civil defense emergency. Then on June 11, he approved the “Emergency Relocation Plan” and told the NSRB to “proceed at once with such steps as are necessary to place the plan in readiness for use in the event of an emergency.”
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Despite this apparent progress, the NSRB was again planning to plan. First of all, the NSRB designated the plan as short term only, to serve as an “immediate readiness measure” in case war came to Washington in the near future. Second, the plan didn’t include Defense, State, the CIA, FBI, FCDA, NSC, and White House staff. Truman entrusted oversight of their relocation to David Stowe, his erstwhile dispersal planner. Thus plans for State to relocate to Front Royal or the CIA to Warrenton, Va., weren’t included in the “Emergency Relocation Plan.” Third, actual preparation of the short-term relocation sites under the NSRB’s purview didn’t take place while Truman was President. Agencies hadn’t yet moved copies of essential records and office equipment to their relocation centers; indeed, most hadn’t even inspected their assigned spaces. Finally, the NSRB’s very existence was in jeopardy. A massive budget cut reduced its workforce from 155 to 50 after July 1.
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Still, the Arc’s foundation was laid, and it was up to the new president to build upon it. It was also his responsibility to decide how the city of Washington might better serve as a model of dispersal and civil defense.

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I guess what we really need in that situation [thermonuclear war] is bulldozers

to push the bodies off the streets and roads.

Dwight D. Eisenhower to General Andrew J. Goodpaster
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H
e hailed from a small town in Kansas, one of five brothers. As a young Army officer, his duties took him from Paris to the Philippines, but during World War I he remained stateside to train other officers. “I suppose we’ll spend the rest of our lives explaining why we didn’t get into this war,” he grumbled to a fellow officer. He made the military his career well into his fifties, orchestrating the Allied invasion of Normandy in the war he did get into, and became president of an Ivy League university. He knew the biggest egos of his day—Patton and MacArthur—yet avoided showmanship and controversy. His convictions rarely wavered, but he knew the importance of compromise. His occasionally rambling utterances caused many to wonder about his intelligence, but the foggy phrases obscured a sharp mind, a quick study. The son of a mechanic, he spoke fondly of the small town America of his youth, but he also loved the company of urbane millionaires and his memberships in prestigious clubs.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower. A man of many talents, he handily won the 1952 election, beating Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson by a wide margin. Eisenhower’s moderate Republicanism and avoidance of problems such as civil rights led many contemporaries and historians to characterize the two-term presidency as bland, passive, detached. In this picture, Eisenhower appeared as an avuncular caretaker, a Coolidge who golfed rather than napped, letting the country run itself. By the early 1980s, a different view had emerged. Now Eisenhower wielded the “hidden hand,” working behind the scenes to secure desired outcomes in Congress, at home, and overseas. More recent scholar
ship, focusing on issues such as national security policy and nuclear test bans, reintroduces the “hands-off” Eisenhower who failed to exercise strong leader
ship at crucial points. Such vacillation shouldn’t surprise us. After all, he had two hands, and, like Franklin Roosevelt, who once said he never let the right hand know what the left was doing, Eisenhower used them differently.
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Eisenhower’s hidden hand went to work on the Federal Relocation Arc and continuity of government. Taking a keen interest in these areas,
Eisenhower set policies, monitored their execution, and even managed minute details. Eisenhower also insisted on testing the readiness of employees and the Arc, saying the plans were worthless unless tested.
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These exercises, known as Operation Alerts, became annual events. We might think of the con
tinuity preparations and exercises as insurance for the administration’s strategy of deterrence. Convinced that a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States would be “virtually suicidal for each society and many others as well,” Eisenhower concluded that deterrence, made possible by the capability for massive retaliation against the Soviet Union, was the best strategy for peace.
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Readiness to govern the nation after nuclear war provided a backstop and contributed, if only slightly, to deterrence. Although Eisenhower didn’t believe Operation Alerts would necessarily impress the Soviets, he expressed the hope that they would undertake their own tests and also realize that nuclear war could only be an “unmitigated catastrophe” for all sides.
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When it came to dispersal and civil defense, however, Eisenhower was often ambivalent and failed to provide firm leadership. Although he supported dispersal in theory, he did little to implement it in Washington. He believed states, communities, and individuals—not the federal government—should take the initiative in civil defense. As he told
Time
publisher Henry Luce, “unless the private citizen does become interested [in civil defense] and has a definite sense of responsibility for himself and family, there is little that the government, by itself, can do.”
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He rejected proposals for federally funded shelters and instead urged citizens to build their own shelters. Although Eisenhower expected continuity preparations to adapt to evolving weapons and delivery systems, he wasn’t as diligent in ensuring that civil defense information and policies did the same.

The men to whom the President entrusted relocation and continuity of government were accomplished and capable. Captain Edward Beach, a much-decorated submarine commander, served as Eisenhower’s naval aide until 1957. He oversaw the White House bomb shelters, plotted emergency evacuation for the President, and assembled the President’s Emergency Action Papers. Colonel (later General) Andrew J. Goodpaster worked closely with Beach. Goodpaster served as staff secretary, a position Eisenhower modeled after the Army position of secretary to the general staff. Among his many duties, Goodpaster made sure the President’s decisions concerning the Arc were carried out. Like Beach, Goodpaster had a distinguished service record, and the tall, well-liked Colonel efficiently completed his tasks. When asked what he thought of Goodpaster, Eisenhower replied, “I would ask nothing more than for my son to grow up to be as good a man as he is.”
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Robert Cutler was the President’s special assistant for national security. Cutler was Boston blue blood and his Harvard class poet. Cutler could be blunt, some thought rude, but his direct approach helped him streamline the NSC’s policymaking process.
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Eisenhower expected him to align continuity of government preparations with national security policies. Arthur S. Flemming served as the first director of the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM), which absorbed the NSRB in April 1953.
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To lead the FCDA, Eisenhower
relied first on Val Peterson, former Republican governor of Nebraska. Like Truman, Eisenhower wanted a governor to oversee civil defense, hoping this would help coax states to take the initiative. Round-shouldered and balding, Peterson looked like a high school football coach. He worked hard at civil defense but frustrations and failures led him to quit in 1957. Eisenhower then brought in another Midwesterner, former Iowa governor Leo Hoegh.

Eisenhower took office just as hydrogen weapons were becoming opera
tional. On November 1, 1952, in Operation Ivy, the United States detonated its first thermonuclear device on the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands. Observers watched the detonation, which measured 10.4 megatons, from ships anchored 30 miles away. “You would swear that the whole world was on fire,” remarked a sailor. A scientist from Los Alamos was stunned. “As soon as I dared, I whipped off my dark glasses and the thing was enormous, bigger than I’d ever imagined it would be.” The expanding fire cloud peaked at 27 miles and stretched 8 miles wide. The island used for the detonation disappeared; all told, 80 million tons of solids vaporized and dispersed throughout the earth’s atmosphere.
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Then on August 20, 1953, the AEC announced the Soviet Union had recently tested a hydrogen device with an estimated yield of 500 kilotons (actually 400).
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These thermonuclear explosions obliterated more than an island; they also shattered civil defense and dispersal planning assumptions. The newly com
pleted Project East River was among the victims. Commissioned by the Truman administration, East River was a comprehensive civil defense study begun in the summer of 1951. The Associated Universities, a consortium of nine East Coast institutions, did most of the research. Contributors to the project’s ten volumes included scientists, business leaders, and government officials. East River ultimately concluded that civil defense was workable if three conditions were met: one, military defenses prevented a “saturation” attack and provided at least one hour’s warning; two, the federal government set standards and actively helped reduce urban vulnerability; and three, qualified, experienced groups took responsibility for specific civil defense tasks. Although East River purported to be forward-thinking, many contrib
utors used atomic bomb yields rather than expected hydrogen yields as a basis for their recommendations. Given the challenges hydrogen weapons posed to civil defense, many looked to Eisenhower for sorely needed guidance. As one civil defense supporter said, “It’s up to you, Mr. President.”
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And the NSC. In September 1953, it outlined a course of action in a study prosaically entitled “Continental Defense” (NSC 159/4), which called for stepped-up intelligence efforts to discern Soviet intentions; improved port and harbor security (to prevent the smuggling of so-called suitcase nuclear bombs into the United States); cooperation with Canada to build a better early warning system; aircraft and missiles “which will achieve a high ‘kill ratio’ before attacking forces reach our borders”; civil defense, especially stockpiling and evacuation plans for urban populations; reduction of urban vulnerability through permanent dispersal; and completion of preparations for the continuity of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the
federal government.
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Of course, as the NSRB had shown, it was easy to define goals; meeting them was another matter.

Exhuming Dispersal

Dispersal was all but dead in 1953. A terse statement in the appropriations bills for the fiscal years 1952–1954 made Congressional opposition abundantly clear: “The foregoing appropriation shall not be available to effect the moving of Government agencies from the District of Columbia into buildings acquired to accomplish the dispersal of departmental functions of the executive establishment.” The military also remained hostile to dispersal. At the end of 1949, the Department of Defense and the services had 52,403 employees and more than 7.7 million square feet of office, files, and storage space at the seat of government. Three years later, those figures had grown to 71,023 and 8.74 million, respectively.
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However, the Soviet hydrogen test reinvigorated interest in dispersal. In September, Ralph Lapp pointed out America’s “industrial glass jaw,” the concentration of almost 40 percent of the nation’s productive capacity in 15 urban areas. In October, prominent Washington architect Waldron Faulkner proposed removing essential government agencies from the District. Addressing an audience of architects and planners at the Statler Hotel, the white-haired Faulkner recommended preserving the heart of the capital as “a cultural center” of libraries and museums. This suggestion echoed Tracy Augur, who had said the same thing in 1950. No one needed to remind Augur; he preceded Faulkner at the podium. Augur had returned to government work as director of the Urban Targets Division of the ODM. In his speech, he reit
erated familiar points: America’s cities were “sitting ducks,” but cluster cities would reduce vulnerability while easing urban problems.
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Project East River had also called for dispersal. It recommended using a three-tiered, federally mandated zoning system to create cluster communities around the historic city core, which would lose industry and residents to the clusters while retaining economic functions requiring a central location. Practically all new construction would be prohibited in Class I zones, dense urban areas; Class II zones would permit some new construction; Class III zones, far from the city center, wouldn’t restrict development until they approached the density of Class II zones. To enforce the zoning rules, the federal government could both coax and coerce. It could require manufac
turers with defense contracts to be situated ten miles from the edge of a Class I zone, while generous federal building loans could entice developers to Class III zones. East River didn’t explain, however, how to prevent land speculation in rapidly developing areas or how to overcome opposition to federal intrusion into local governance. Worse, the sections on dispersal relied on the study
Effects of Atomic Weapons
, published years before the development of hydrogen bombs. Despite these drawbacks, “if the [federal] government moves ener
getically, the presently insoluble problems will take on a new appearance,” suggested dispersal advocate Donald Monson.
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Although Eisenhower had little use for zoning-induced dispersal, he supported decentralization by relocating the FCDA to Battle Creek, Mich., in 1954. Although ODM officials said the agency was moving because it could-n’t find a dispersed site outside Washington, Eisenhower wanted the FCDA in a location far from critical target areas.
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The White House also lifted one dispersal recommendation from Project East River’s thousand pages. In January 1954, the NSC decided that no new federal buildings should be built in critical target areas. The ODM followed through four months later by ordering all executive branch agencies seeking new quarters to build or acquire space at least ten miles from “any densely populated or highly industrialized section of an urban area, major military installation or other critical facility.” Densely populated areas had 200,000 or more people residing within a four-mile diameter circle, while highly industrialized areas referred to circles of the same size containing defense-related factories with a total employment of 16,000. The ODM allowed two exceptions: one, if the agency’s functions required a site within the target zone; and two, if the agency wasn’t wartime essential.
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Almost immediately, the exceptions became the rule. The ODM didn’t try to move the Smithsonian’s planned building (the National Museum of American History) from the Mall because the museum wasn’t considered wartime essential. The ODM also exempted the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, then under construction, because it needed to be close to the Walter Reed Medical Center in Northwest Washington; both facilities lay within the target zone. The State Department, in need of more office space, insisted any new structures had to be in the District near State’s other buildings. However, the CIA and AEC also needed new quarters, and early signs indicated they wouldn’t stay downtown. Whether or not they would abide by the ten-mile rule remained unclear.
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