This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (20 page)

Despite this repetitiveness, the ensuing discussion revealed a shared recog
nition of the challenges of continuity of government. Robert Cutler bluntly stated there would be no advance warning of an attack and Washington would be completely destroyed. Even with a warning, observed Eisenhower, panic and traffic jams would prevent essential personnel from getting out of the District. Flemming pointed out the drawback of using public buildings such as schools as emergency headquarters: in case of an attack, local
residents would need community buildings for emergency services. And what exactly was a wartime essential agency? Secretary of the Treasury George M. Humphrey declared there was no postattack need for the Departments of Agriculture, Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), and even Treasury, which he confidently predicted could be run for 90 days by 15 people. Eisenhower agreed: neither Agriculture nor HEW had any idea how to run the government. Flemming thought otherwise. His staff had identified Crop Reporting, Research Coordination, and the Farm Credit Administration as wartime essential units of Agriculture, but he kept quiet.
³⁹

The results of this meeting distinctly shaped the Arc and emergency planning. Not once did participants discuss the need for legislative and judi
cial continuity planning, even though the NSC paper “Continental Defense” had recommended it. Cutler’s point about the utter destruction of Washington, though obvious, became the first rule of continuity planning. As the ODM bluntly told executive agencies: “Accept demolition of the Governmental facilities at Washington, D.C.”
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And the President’s point that key executive personnel wouldn’t get out of Washington eventually led to the continuous manning of a “hardened” (blast proof) underground center by cadres of wartime essential executive personnel.

Eisenhower also affected relocation planning in two more ways. During the meeting, Harold E. Stassen, director for Foreign Operations, twice men
tioned the need for underground sites to house communications equipment and perhaps even a cadre of officials ready to assume direction of the execu
tive branch. (Stassen envisioned them standing by in case the Soviets targeted the legally designated successors to the president and vice president.) As the NSC’s secretary wrote:

The President stated that one trouble with the idea of key officials going into underground structures was the morale problem of the public. He said you couldn’t afford to do this because of the adverse psychological impact—the public would be greatly upset. The President indicated that he would rather have the Soviets know he was at Camp David rather than to be five miles under Pike’s Peak. He would have the critical communications centers and matters of that kind underground, but he and the leaders of the Government should remain above ground.
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Eisenhower didn’t have to say this twice. The first groups of wartime essen
tial personnel sent to an underground site arrived secretly and didn’t include high-level officials. The President also made it clear he wanted a test of continuity preparations.
⁴²
Before the year ended, such an exercise, dubbed Operation Readiness, was carried out. And it was held at a very special place.

Forty-eight miles northwest of Washington as the crow flies, or a helicop
ter, is a thickly wooded mountain in Loudoun County, Virginia, near the towns of Bluemont and Berryville. You can drive past this mountain—just take Va. Rte. 601 (Blue Ridge Mountain Rd.) south from Rte. 7—but if you drive too slowly, you might be surveilled or an unmarked vehicle might
follow you. Chain link fences and barb wire abound, and armed guards patrol. Tall signs proscribe all sorts of activity, including photography and even drawing. If you were to get close, you could see, in clearings on the mountain, mowed lawns, buildings, antennas, microwave dishes, an aircraft control tower, and a helipad. You could see, too, a road leading to the mouth of a tunnel, its guarded gate big enough for a truck to pass through.
⁴³

High Point. Western Virginia Office of Controlled Conflict Operations. Special Facility. The Classified Site. Mount Weather. These are some of the names given over the years to the mountain, or to be precise, the facilities on and within this peak in the Blue Ridge range. Mount Weather still serves as the primary fixed relocation site for the executive branch. Its current overseer, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), operates the underground facility strictly “off-the-books,” just as FEMA’s predecessors did.

For all the official subterfuge, Mount Weather’s existence and purposes have long been an open secret. Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II referred several times to an underground government command post in the Blue Ridge Mountains called “Mount Thunder” in their 1962 novel
Seven Days in May
.
⁴⁴
In 1974, the crash of a TWA jet on the mountain brought unwanted attention. Two years later,
The Progressive
published Richard P. Pollack’s in-depth account of Mount Weather. Pollack, who interviewed many former staff, described the facilities within the “mysterious mountain” as an artificial city with offices, cafeterias, and dormitories; a place where elec
tric cars glided down streets and personnel used a closed circuit color television network to hold meetings; where “a small army of computer specialists” fed options for recovering from a nuclear war or a biological weapons attack into a Sperry-Univac computer. Pollack also identified the executive bodies with assigned space at Mount Weather: the president and his staff, nine departments, and seven federal agencies.
⁴⁵

Fittingly, the most complete description of Mount Weather appeared at the end of the Cold War. In December 1991,
Time
correspondent Ted Gup offered readers a fascinating glimpse into the history and workings of the “Doomsday Hideaway.” A tenacious researcher, Gup pored over county, state, and federal records, and he interviewed more than 100 people associ
ated with Mount Weather. Gup described side tunnels housing offices and the 21,000 iron bolts, eight to ten feet in length, which anchor the under
ground city’s roofs and walls to the mountain’s densified Precambrian basalt, one of the earth’s hardest rocks. Gilbert Fowler, who worked at Mount Weather for 31 years, told Gup about the “guillotine gate” and a steel door 5 feet thick and 20 feet wide that would absorb a thermonuclear blast and keep out unauthorized persons, including the families of officials with assignments at Mount Weather.
⁴⁶

Mount Weather had its origins in the Experimental Hard Rock Mine operated by the Bureau of Mines, which tested new drilling and blasting methods there beginning in 1936. A tunnel led to the narrow mine, which was 250–300 feet deep and a quarter-mile long. In 1954, under the direction of the mine’s superintendent Paul L. Russell, the Experimental Mine was
expanded and converted to serve as a relocation center. Just as it had at Raven Rock, work continued round-the-clock. Fowler supervised one of the three 40-man crews given the “rough, tough, dirty” job of hollowing out a moun
tain made of the dense basalt. The Army Corps of Engineers also did much of the work, which wasn’t finished until 1958.
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However, progress on Mount Weather was far enough along for it to host Operation Readiness, staged by the ODM on November 20, 1954.

Operation Readiness had two concurrent phases. In the first, the heads or alternates of 30 wartime essential agencies met at Mount Weather to listen to a briefing on the Soviet Union’s attack capability, then broke into small groups to discuss general postattack recovery challenges. In the second phase, small cadres of personnel from the 30 agencies went to their relocation sites where they spent six or more hours “solving” specific recovery problems. Operation Readiness was a subdued, one-day affair. The White House didn’t tell Congress, the public, or the press about the exercise, and participants traveled discreetly to their sites.

The meeting at Mount Weather was called the Interim Assembly and involved some 110 people. They gathered in the underground chamber, which measured approximately 35 feet wide and 100 feet long. Cubicle walls divided the space into rooms for small-group work. In addition to a public address system, the Signal Corps had set up three portable television cameras and television monitors in each cubicle. “This permitted the various groups to meet separately or to communicate with each other readily by sight and sound,” wrote Flemming, who added that the “arrangement simulated the planned development of the High Point underground facility where individ
ual rooms will be available for the various functional areas, equipped with adequate intercom and outside communications equipment.”
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The television system was put to use once everyone arrived. Although Eisenhower wasn’t present, he spoke for 15 minutes using “phonevision,” which allowed the Interim Assembly to watch the President on monitors.
⁴⁹
Then Rear Admiral Thomas H. Robbins of the Joint Chiefs of Staff used intelligence estimates of Soviet weapons and delivery systems to describe a hypothetical attack on the United States. During the afternoon, the Interim Assembly divided into five work groups: the Cabinet and National Security Council, Transportation and Communication, Production and Materials, Manpower and Stabilization, and Civil Defense. A different ODM official served as each group’s leader. Flemming, for example, headed the Cabinet and Council group, which discussed wartime organizational problems. Throughout the afternoon, the groups puzzled over the myriad challenges of recovery from nuclear war. The Production and Materials group assumed all major target areas would be evacuated prior to an attack. Therefore, “the first problem would be to improve the morale of the civilian population and to stabilize the labor force by using available communications to urge people to return to their homes and jobs.” It recommended that transportation be provided for the evacuees to take them home and to carry them to and from their jobs.
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Meanwhile, 961 executive branch employees worked on problems at dozens of relocation sites in the Arc. At Front Royal, 99 State Department personnel answered questions such as: “Should friendly diplomatic missions be assigned a relocation site or sites?” From the Commerce Department’s relocation site, Undersecretary Walter Williams coordinated the problem-solving of 11 units within Commerce, each of which had its own site within the Arc. The Coast and Geodetic Survey, for example, determined how it would provide nautical and landing charts to ports and terminals close to devastated areas. The Bureau of the Census estimated the effects of the attack on workers in a given city. According to one observer, “[a]s the play of the problems got under way at the individual Bureau centers, communications between the centers and the Departmental Headquarters developed in volume and a realistic atmosphere of emergency was produced.” Some depart
ments seemed to fare better than others. Treasury reported 50 problems solved; Agriculture, none. The CIA took part but didn’t report on its problemsolving. Every agency called Mount Weather with progress reports during the day, but some couldn’t make connections or reach their principals.
⁵¹

The communication difficulties, as well as the assumption that urban populations would evacuate before the detonation of atomic bombs above their cities, exposed the gross inadequacies of continuity planning. One participant later characterized Operation Readiness as a “rather feeble command and staff exercise.”
⁵²
Eisenhower told Flemming, “I have not seen any specific plans to apply during the very first minutes and hours of any evacuation from this city [Washington].” Once the alarm sounded, Eisenhower predicted, the “effect would be to jam roads and possibly to make impossible the orderly and rapid evacuation of personnel essential to the continued functioning of the government.”
⁵³
Flemming conceded that “the need for improvements in communications facilities was highlighted to nearly every agency.” He recommended the next test use mobile communications equip
ment to link the Arc and that relocation sites be activated for two or three days rather than just a few hours. Flemming also suggested “an evacuation test of Washington, D.C.”
⁵⁴
This meant, of course, that the test couldn’t be carried out behind-the-scenes, like Operation Readiness.

Fortunately, Washingtonians already had some experience with civil defense drills.

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7

I
f
the Soviet Union had attacked the United States on Wednesday, June 15, 1955, would the following have happened in Washington, D.C.?

The Tu-4 bombers, hundreds of them, depart from remote locations in the northern Soviet Union: Anadyr, on the Bering Sea; the Kola Peninsula, east of Finland; and an island in the Kara Sea, inside the Arctic Circle. The attacking force also includes ten M-4s, newer bombers with turbojet engines. Carrying conventional and nuclear bombs, the aircraft press toward targets in the northeastern and northwestern United States. None of the planes will retrace their routes; the Tu-4s and M-4s lack the range to return home.

North America’s early warning net is a patchwork of two ground radar lines, airborne radar, and the Ground Observer Corps. The northernmost radar is the Distant Early Warning Line (DEW), which isn’t yet complete; construction of a test segment began in July 1953. So far, 18 stations stretch from Point Barrow to Barter Island, covering about half of Alaska’s arctic coast. The diesel-powered, unmanned radar units can detect aircraft flying at altitudes between 200 to 65,000 feet. “Scatter” radio, so-named because it bounces waves off the troposphere to prevent magnetic interference, relays sightings to human controllers at the two main stations. Some of the Tu-4s cross the DEW, but the controllers at Point Barrow and Barter Island only identify the Soviet bombers as “unknowns” and notify Canadian and U.S. air defense commands. Most of the aircraft don’t appear on radar until they approach the Pinetree Line, more than 30 domed stations on both sides of the Canadian/U.S. border.

At the first DEW report, duty personnel in the Combat Operations Center at the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) in Colorado Springs notify the headquarters for the three air defense regions for the continental United States (Western, Central, and Eastern) and ask the radar stations along the Canadian border to stay alert. As soon as CONAD receives the Pinetree reports, it orders a full Air Defense Readiness alert. Combat opera
tions personnel use direct lines to notify the Pentagon and Strategic Air Command (SAC) at Offutt Air Force Base outside Omaha. The operational Nike bases, including the one at Lorton, prepare to launch their antiaircraft missiles. Squadrons of F-86Ds are already in the air, using the coordinates of the radar sightings to intercept the attackers.

The civilian warning for Washington originates at the Air Defense Control Center at Stewart Air Force Base in Newburgh, New York. Following the Pinetree sightings, the Control Center transmits the Warning Yellow to the “Key Point,” the DCD Alternate Command Center in the former Fort Reno school in upper Northwest Washington. A Warning Yellow means an air attack is possible, but it
isn’t
a public warning; it alerts public safety and civil defense officials on a controlled system. A bell rings loudly at Fort Reno. Over the speakers, the attack-warning controller at Newburgh says, “Attention, please; attention please—Air Defense Warning Yellow. Stand by to acknowledge.” One by one, he reads off the roster of 14 Key Points answering to his Control Center. The District is 11th on the list, and the dis
patcher waits 45 seconds before tersely responding “Washington.” Now he scrambles—he’s the only person on duty. He dials Yellow on the Bell and Light system, which relays the warning to the Fire and Police Departments, the District switchboard, and more than 150 receivers, most of them in fed
eral government buildings. Using a regular telephone, he calls John Fondahl and his assistant H.P. Godwin; in turn, they hurriedly make assigned calls to District officials and civil defense deputies. The dispatcher wheels around to a radio console, turns it on. “KGF-71 to all controls,” he says, “Attention please! Air Defense Warning Yellow was received at 2:49 p.m.” This message reaches the Control net, monitored by, among others, the operators of the Muzak system, who can transmit a public warning to their 400 outlets in Washington.

Meanwhile local radio station WWDC executes Conelrad (
Con
trol of
el
ectromagnetic
rad
iation). To prevent enemy pilots from using broadcast radio waves as navigational aids, Truman authorized Conelrad in December 1951; the plan, which went into effect in early 1953, mandates cessation of all television and radio broadcasting after a Warning Yellow. Just after the Key Points receive their warning, Air Defense Control telephones WWDC, Washington’s Key Station for Conelrad. By law, other area television and radio stations continuously monitor WWDC. The stations deliver this message:

We interrupt our normal program to cooperate in security and civil defense measures as requested by the United States Government. This is a Conelrad radio alert. Normal broadcasting will now be discontinued for an indefinite period. Civil Defense information will be broadcast in most areas at 640 or 1240 on your regular radio receiver.

Twelve minutes will pass before the stations assigned the 1240 a.m. band are ready to broadcast civil defense information, while those given 640 a.m. must wait 25 minutes. It’s mid-afternoon. No public sirens or horns have sounded. Television and radio sets are going dead, yet the city bustles with noise: clattering streetcars, car horns, people talking. But something is wrong, obviously—why else would radio and television go off the air? In dens, kitchens, and offices, Washingtonians are reaching for phones, looking for car keys.

School principals wonder if they should start evacuating their buildings, shoppers at Woodward & Lothrop uneasily ask clerks if they know what’s hap
pening. Passersby in the Federal Triangle and on the Mall notice a flurry of people rushing from the tempos and other federal buildings. They number among the 40,000 wartime essential personnel with assignments in the Federal Relocation Arc, and they have instructions to leave the city immediately after hearing the Warning Yellow on their buildings’ Bell and Light units.

Once the first interception of Soviet bombers confirms this is no false alarm, the attack-warning controller in Newburgh relays an evacuation order. The DCD dispatcher dials Blue on the Bell and Light system, pushes the alert button on the consoles that control Washington’s 36 RCA electronic horns and 13 Motorola gasoline-powered air raid sirens. For five minutes, a deaf
ening, steady tone blares from the roofs of schools, fire stations, and govern
ment buildings. The dispatcher passes the alert to the Control net, then WWDC telephones to tell him the Conelrad frequencies are ready on 1240 a.m. An automatic timer cuts off the sirens and horns, the dispatcher pulls his microphone close. He has no script to read, no tape to play—the civil defense information promised by the Conelrad announcement is his alone to phrase and deliver.

“Attention please! The Air Defense Control Center of the United States Air Force has just delivered an Air Defense Warning for Washington. The city must evacuate immediately.” He repeats his announcement and tells Washingtonians what they should do, what must happen. Everyone in the city center should evacuate at least four miles from the White House, then seek shelter in private homes and public buildings. Drivers should obey civil defense traffic regulations, which were published in local newspapers. Police are turning back inbound traffic and making all bridge lanes outbound. The attack isn’t imminent, he says repeatedly; otherwise, the Air Defense Control Center would have issued a Warning Red (take cover immediately). The dispatcher also tells residents what they
shouldn’t
do: try to find their families before evacuating; attempt to take anything other than their civil defense survival kits; ignore or disobey instructions from police, military, and civil defense personnel.

The President, his wife, and some 20 staff members have already left the city. At the Air Defense Readiness alert, Eisenhower suspended his regular schedule but remained in the White House. As soon as the Air Force Command Post at the Pentagon indicated a Warning Yellow was being ordered, Eisenhower agreed with Edward Beach that he should proceed immediately to Mount Weather. In accordance with the White House Emergency Plan, the Shelter Duty Officer places both shelters on full operational status. The White House Police take their emergency posts, tourists are quickly ushered from the mansion. Secret Service agents whisk the President’s entourage to the South Portico, where helicopters from the Anacostia Naval Station pick them up on the lawn. Remaining White House personnel move to either the West Basement entrance or the East Lobby, depending on where they parked that morning. White House police assign
those without cars to drivers; when full, each vehicle joins the exodus of wartime essential personnel.
¹

***

Could all this have happened if the Soviet Union attacked the United States on June 15, 1955? A look at the historical evidence strongly suggests a neg
ative answer. Timely and accurate detection and identification of “unknowns” was no simple task for a nation with thousands of miles of bor
ders. The completed portion of the DEW line covered a fraction of that space. Although Pinetree provided broader coverage, its proximity to the northern United States reduced the time to identify and intercept aircraft. Furthermore, the channels through which CONAD delivered and received warnings sometimes clogged. On May 5, 1955, for example, the 5th Canadian Air Defense Control Center spotted several unknowns. The aircraft were actually SAC planes on a routine flight, but a communications equip
ment failure prevented advance notification of the Canadian center, which reported the sighting to the Western Air Defense Force in California. Because of a personnel error, SAC’s message about the flights hadn’t reached the western region, leading it to declare an Air Defense Readiness alert at

1:13
p.m. When one of the unknowns passed into U.S. air space, Warning Yellow was issued at 1:40. Two minutes later, CONAD received the misdi
rected SAC message; recognizing the error, duty officers cancelled the alert at 1:47, narrowly averting activation of Conelrad on the West Coast and dec
laration of Warning Yellow in the central and eastern regions of the United States. As an Air Force general told Beach, “It must be pointed out that the number of unknown aircraft, their speed, altitude and direction, was of an alarming nature to the ADCC’s [
sic
]. If such a hostile attack ever occurs, there will be anxious moments and rapid decisions based on the judgments and facts available.”
²

The Advisory Committee on Civil Defense for the National Academy of Sciences certainly agreed with that last statement. In 1955, it carefully studied the Washington warning system. The principal investigators, Willard Bascom and Kenneth Brickner, interviewed operation personnel, examined guidelines, and studied exercise reports. The two men also charted the intended trans
mission of warnings, beginning with the first call from the Air Defense Control Center in Newburgh. They noted that “the optimistic assumption was made that all would operate as planned. Neither we nor the Director [of the Committee] believe this to be likely.” Not only were dispatchers and switchboard operators unsure of their duties and how the warning system worked, but “the written instructions dealing with the subject are incomplete, scattered and obsolete.” The public was “abysmally ignorant” of the different warning signals and how it should respond. Warning Yellow took television and radio off the air, but as much as a half-hour elapsed before civil defense broadcasting could commence. In the meantime, telephone calls would smother the city’s switchboards, jamming circuits needed for the 25 official
calls to be placed as part of the alerting protocol. The Key Point and radio sta
tions were all in unsheltered structures within the target zone, which meant the personnel responsible for transmitting warnings were being asked to sacri
fice their lives. “It is doubtful that these men have thought much about their actions in a real attack, but the possibility that they might leave to save their own lives should be considered.” Even if the dispatcher held fast, he had no recordings, yet it “would seem logical to have a pre-recorded calm voice giv
ing instructions instead of the extemporaneous suggestions of a man under stress.” Finally, Bascom and Brickner noted the deplorable state of Washington’s horns and sirens. The 36 horns, which supposedly permitted the civil defense dispatcher to make citywide announcements, garbled voice transmissions and relied on the city’s electrical grid, making them useless after an attack. The 13 sirens didn’t as yet function properly; indeed, the District was refusing to accept the units until the contractor fixed the problems.
³

A flawed warning system, coupled with public ignorance, doomed all hope of an orderly evacuation. Because of Conelrad, Warning Yellow was really a public alert, as Val Peterson himself admitted in 1953.
⁴
In 1951, Commissioner Gordon Russell Young had pointed out the trouble a Warning Yellow would cause in the District: “the idea of keeping the general public in ignorance of the yellow alert is
unworkable
” (emphasis in original). Within five minutes, tens of thousands of Washingtonians—police officers, firefight
ers, District and federal government employees—would know of the alert. Unavoidably, many would call their families; word would spread like wildfire through the city. “There is here the makings of a first-class panic,” warned Young.
⁵
The FCDA believed urban residents would attempt to drive out of their cities immediately following Conelrad’s activation.
⁶
The DCD and suburban civil defense offices expected wardens to aid in traffic control and evacuation, but they too were susceptible to panic and concern for their fam
ilies. Henry Rapalus, a Rockville, Md., civil defense volunteer during the 1950s, wondered whether any semblance of order was possible. “Humanity goes down the drain and it’s every man for himself,” he said. “That was a big worry.” Rapalus knows firsthand how catastrophe affects people: as a young serviceman, he survived the attack on Pearl Harbor.
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