This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (23 page)

So runs the ten-minute silent film prosaically entitled, “Operation Alert, Pentagon, Washington, D.C., 6/15/1955.”
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As evidenced by the smiling sec
retary, the camera was hardly a fly on the wall; Pentagonians knew they were
being filmed during yet another exercise. This time, however, the staging was much more elaborate: approximately 6,000 federal workers from 30 executive agencies evacuated the capital and carried out a three-day simulation of operat
ing the government from the Federal Relocation Arc. (Originally,
OPAL
55 called for 15,000 employees to relocate. Although national news magazines and Washington’s newspapers reported that figure, only 6,000 actually went.)
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Operation Alert 1955 (figure 7.3) was also a national exercise imagining 61 bombs of between 20 kilotons and 5 megatons detonating over 60 cities in the continental United States and territories. “Casualties” nationwide:

8.25
million dead, 12 million injured, 25 million homeless. Warning Yellow came at 12:05 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, and 640 cities sounded their horns and sirens. As the President wanted, evacuation began immediately. Although 62 cities only held “paper” evacuations, 18 cities evacuated several thousand residents each, for a total of approximately 117,000 people. For three days, civil defense professionals tested communication networks, trans
mitted disaster reports, and solved (on paper) various recovery problems. As they worked, they “telescoped” time, that is, compressed it. At 10 p.m. Wednesday, for example, they pretended it was D plus 5, the fifth day after the bombing.
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Media attention trained on Washington and the Arc. “
Could the rest of the country get along without Washington
?” asked
Newsweek
, which offered tanta
lizing tidbits about the Arc. (“Locations are officially secret . . . but top plan
ners realize that any self-respecting spy could pinpoint most of them by trailing next week’s exodus.”) Of course, the White House had no intention of letting reporters tail the “exodus” to the gates of Site R or Mount Weather. To shroud
OPAL
55 in secrecy, however, would deny Americans a chance to see their government calmly recover from an imaginary attack. To help create this scene, the Office of the Press Secretary to the president assembled a temporary press office in a downtown Richmond, Va., office building. Dubbed Newpoint, the press office was open 24 hours daily until
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55 ended early Friday night, June 17. Newpoint featured telephones, handouts, and government information officers; just as the White House wanted, it helped get
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55 favorable press coverage.
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Eisenhower’s part began with the Warning Yellow. Clad in a lightweave tan suit and a brown felt hat, the President strode at a normal pace from his office to a waiting Cadillac limousine. A Secret Service agent drove him and two aides to Mount Weather. Meanwhile White House staff got into their own cars. Some followed the President; others drove to Camp David, which Eisenhower had recently designated as another presidential relocation center. Beach and Goodpaster, for example, went to Camp David, while Press Secretary James Hagerty and Cabinet Secretary Maxwell Rabb went to Mount Weather. The President arrived at two o’clock, but to conceal Mount Weather’s general location, an obliging reporter wrote that after riding for three hours and twenty minutes, Eisenhower was still only about halfway to his destination.
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This was probably Eisenhower’s first visit to Mount Weather. After a short tour, the President met with his Cabinet, the heads of executive agencies, and their assistants, a total of 43 people. Calling themselves the Interim Assembly, the group spent an hour and an half discussing the “problems” the ODM wanted them to solve. The Interim Assembly didn’t gather underground; they met beneath canvas Army tents pitched on the grounds. Round-the
clock construction likely proscribed an underground meeting, and since
some participants were spending two nights at the site, they needed beds and meals. (Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and select White House staff stayed overnight in Camp David’s well-appointed lodges.)
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Furthermore, if Newpoint produced stories about the President and his Cabinet hunkered underground, Americans might have wondered why they were above ground as the imaginary bombs rained down. The tent city also afforded the opportunity to depict the echelon of the executive branch regrouping in spartan but safe conditions. Government photographers took full advantage, shooting pictures that Newpoint gave to the press. We see an unnamed man in sunglasses, his tie neatly knotted, emerging from the Bureau of the Budget tent. We see Eisenhower and the Interim Assembly seated at narrow tables beneath lights strung from tent posts. Their heads bent, these executive officials intently study papers as the President speaks, though Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey is standing, grinning at the camera, unintentionally jarring viewers’ suspension of disbelief.
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Eisenhower reinforced the exercise’s nuclear reality by delivering a televised speech from Mount Weather. The Army Signal Corps used the closed-circuit television system linking the White House and Mount Weather to relay the feed to New York. NBC and Dumont televised the address, and the other networks (and NBC) broadcast it on
AM
radio.
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Americans who tuned in heard their President review
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55 activity across the nation and promise them that the United States would carry on.
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But Eisenhower also parted the veil of nuclear reality by declaring mock martial law across the nation. The simulated order, in effect for 30 days, surprised many, especially military leaders who expected to be entirely focused on fighting the war. On Friday morning, when the Interim Assembly met with the President in the conference room at Site R, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Arthur Radford cautiously suggested that martial law required additional discussion. Val Peterson observed that some people thought the order meant the mili
tary would take complete control of the government. “By no means!” exclaimed Eisenhower, who explained that the destruction plotted by
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55 had made him realize “we would have to run this country as one big camp,” with soup kitchens and shelters for the millions of homeless survivors. Martial law seemed the only way to begin recovery until Congress could reconstitute itself and civilian authorities, particularly mayors and governors, could function. “If anybody knew of a better idea,” said the President, “he should bring it out.” No one did. When a reporter later asked about the declaration of martial law, Eisenhower offered a similar answer. After recounting the exercise’s imagined devastation, he said: “Here there was, as I saw it, no recourse except to take charge instantly.” The President wanted gov
ernmental leaders and the public alike to recognize that “the ordinary processes by which we run this country simply will not work” after a nuclear attack; but, as other
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55 activity revealed, his point wasn’t getting across.
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At Warning Yellow, some 200,000 federal employees stopped work and exited their buildings. Most acted out a rehearsal within a rehearsal: they walked to their cars to demonstrate whether or not there were enough
vehicles to transport every worker. At the Treasury Building, for example, occupants followed signs directing drivers to the left, riders to the right. In groups of five, riders trailed drivers to their cars. As if playing a twisted game of musical chairs, individuals left without rides walked to the Mall, where war
dens counted heads in order to estimate the deficiency. The 6,000 relocating employees actually got in their cars, or, if they worked at the Pentagon, boarded buses to get to their respective relocation sites. The State Department alone sent 600 employees to Front Royal.
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Under the ODM’s direction, the relocators carried out various activities. Agencies had previously submitted problems to ODM, which sorted them into 18 different categories such as civil transportation, money and credit, and public order. ODM also wrote its own problems. On Thursday it asked the Department of Agriculture to detail the measures “necessary to avoid panic buying and hoarding and assure consumer confidence that sugar will be fairly distributed.” At Front Royal, State Department personnel tackled a problem devised by the Maritime Administration: “Requisition of U.S. privately owned ships and ships of enemy flag.” The Justice Department and Navy also worked on this problem, which required back-and-forth communications. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sent 17 employees to the outskirts of Chillicothe, Ohio, where a monitoring station served as its relocation site. (No one had readied the site beforehand, so relocators had to bring bag lunches, prompting a request for a used refrigerator and a coffeemaker.)
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After its first meeting, the Interim Assembly split in half. While most of the Cabinet Secretaries and agency heads (the principals) left Mount Weather, their assistants (the liaisons) stayed behind. They worked until 1:30 a.m. Thursday morning and remained at the site until Friday afternoon. Joined by ODM staff, liaisons divided into committees and worked on some 60 prob
lems. For example, the Stabilization Committee studied rationing. It noted with concern the Government Printing Office’s contracts with four privately owned printing plants, all located in critical target areas, and estimated that as much as six months might elapse before the federal government could issue ration books. Much of the work at Mount Weather consisted of infor
mation exchange with other sites in the Arc. By the drill’s end, telephone lines and microwaves had carried 9,685 calls and 13,619 teletypewriter mes
sages. The sheer bulk of traffic and indiscriminate classification of “messages of a parochial nature” overwhelmed Mount Weather’s communications and coding equipment.
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Throughout metropolitan Washington,
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55 found some residents to be better prepared than others. In northern Virginia, hundreds of municipal and county employees used cars and public buses to gather at the Fairfax County Garage, their designated relocation site. They ate a hot lunch cooked over camping stoves and pretended to give first aid to casualties. Local civil defense offices encouraged stay-at-home mothers to practice evacuating their children by disguising
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55 as a picnic. In Montgomery County, the Ayrlawn Citizens Association arranged a carpool to the Frederick County
town of New Market, 25 miles away. They were met by the Farmers Emergency Civil Defense Committee, which promised mutual aid. In the District, only three public schools directly participated in
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55. At Woodrow Wilson High School, for example, students gathered curbside, where willing parents waited in their cars, creating an evacuation motor pool of 160 vehicles. (Students returned to class without getting in the cars.)
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At 11th and F Streets, clothing salesman Henry Salcedo left his store to see what was happening. When told he was standing at ground zero, he feigned shock. “I knew there was some sort of business about an air raid,” he said. “But I didn’t know a thing about it going off around here.” A Woodward & Lothrop’s saleswoman encouraged patrons to ignore the warning. “It’s noth
ing but a test,” she cheerfully told several curious shoppers, “go ahead and browse.” Just as the rites of capitalism continued uninterrupted, so did the diplomacy of communism. “We’re just working as usual,” said a spokesman at the Soviet embassy.
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Conspicuously absent from
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55 was Congress. Although the Supreme Court half-heartedly took part, sounding its building alarms and sending employees to designated shelter areas, Congress kept working. Practicing evacuation made little sense since the legislative branch didn’t as yet have a relocation site. Also, reports of lawmakers setting aside the people’s business to practice saving their lives had potential political liabilities. It was for this reason that legislative leaders had deferred establishing a relocation site. “Congress, mindful that constituents dislike legislators who pamper them
selves, only recently . . . authorized a search for an alternate Capitol,” reported
Newsweek
.
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