This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (28 page)

It’s not your responsibility to identify hostile aircraft. The Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) in Colorado Springs bears this burden, and it will use the new National Warning Control System (NAWAC) to contact you. Based at FCDA headquarters in Battle Creek, Mich., NAWAC provides multiple telephone circuits between CONAD, the Air Division Control Centers, and the three Air Defense Forces (Western, Central, and Eastern) that oversee the divisional centers. If the commander in chief, CONAD, declares a Warning Yellow, the FCDA Liaison Officer at CONAD presses the warning tone signal key. On your dais, you hear a recorded siren for 15 sec
onds, followed by this voice announcement, with the blank fields filled in by the Liaison Officer:

Attention all warning points, repeat, attention all warning points. This is an air raid warning. I repeat, this is an air raid warning. Hostile enemy aircraft have been detected approaching the United States. Their position at —— Greenwich Mean Time was —— (GEOREF [geographical reference] coordinates). Their direction of flight was —— (to 8 points of the compass). Their estimated ground speed was —— miles per hour. This is enemy raid No. —— . Stand by
to receive warning times and further track information from the FCDA Warning Center for your area.

You promptly notify your key points and wait for the warning time. Say your Air Division Control Center answers to the Eastern Air Defense Force, based at Stewart Air Force Base in New York. Its FCDA liaison officer calls with a time and place: “Enemy raid No.——can reach Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by——Greenwich Mean Time. Stand by to receive further track informa
tion.” Using maps and this information, you calculate precise warning times for your Key Points.

Naturally, your position requires regular participation in exercises “for the purpose of developing proficiency and skill in all phases of the attack warning operation.” Some drills are unannounced, such as the one staged on December 20, 1955, at 6 a.m. During this “Surprise Alert,” average alert receipt took 31 minutes; in a few instances, more than an hour passed. Some attack warning officers changed the message from “test alert” to Warning Yellow and told off-duty personnel to stay home. The Emergency Operations Center at FCDA headquarters in Battle Creek, Mich., wasn’t ready, forcing supervisors to rearrange furniture. Concluded one participant, “it is still obvious that headquarters personnel were not completely familiar with the alerting procedures, and that they must become more efficient in passing the alerting information in
exact terminology
” (emphasis in original). The exer
cise’s denouement was equally embarrassing: a survey of 100 FCDA employ
ees revealed only 3 had readied their homes for a nuclear attack.
²

***

If drills like Surprise Alert caught FCDA headquarters personnel unprepared, then how ready were the Key Points? This question concerned the NSC Special Committee on Attack Warning Channels and Procedures for Civilians (hereafter Beach Committee). On March 5, 1955, Eisenhower had signed NSC 5513/1, “Attack Warning Channels and Procedures for Civilians,” a detailed chart defining warning conditions, channeling, and public announce
ments. To suggest improvements, Eisenhower asked Edward Beach to chair a committee that included, among others, Arthur Flemming, Val Peterson, and Defense officials.
³
By March 1956, one flaw stood out: “certain weak
nesses in the Civil Defense Organization of the Washington metropolitan area, as presently supported, cause grave concern as to the continuity of the essential functioning of the Federal Government and the survival of the local population.”
⁴
Specifically, the Beach Committee worried that an attack warn
ing might fizzle out at the District’s Key Point in the old Fort Reno school. Peterson concluded, “civil defense survival measures in the District of Columbia must be directly related to the plans for providing continuity of the Government itself during an emergency. These factors make it imperative that the Federal Government provide an efficient, dependable attack warning center for the Washington Metropolitan Area.”
⁵

In May, Eisenhower asked the FCDA to take responsibility for Washington’s warning system. Peterson decided since “the bomb knows no political boundaries,” neither would the warning system. Taking a cue from dispersal planners, Peterson designated the new warning area, called the metropolitan target zone, as a circle with a 20-mile radius from the zero milestone marker (figure 9.1). The zone encompassed the District; the Maryland counties of Montgomery and Prince Georges; and in Virginia, the cities of Falls Church and Alexandria and the counties of Arlington and Fairfax.
⁶
To replace Fort Reno, Peterson proposed a control center “in a pro
tected place, secure from sabotage or subversion, and sufficiently remote.” This new “Warning Center” would activate all sirens, horns, the Bell and Light system, and Conelrad; and FCDA officers, not local civil defense per
sonnel, would staff the center round-the-clock, seven days a week. Surface buildings at Mount Weather offered an ideal home for such a center. (The underground facility wasn’t finished until September 1958.) Mount Weather was guarded and far from Washington, it was wired to NAWAC, and Bell System microwaves provided communications capability. Furthermore, an automated emergency power source was in place, and the FCDA already had staff working there.
⁷

The NSC approved the plan in September. Peterson confidently predicted the new Warning Center would be operable within nine months, but he grossly underestimated the project’s challenges.
⁸
Allan R. Edwards, the senior attack warning officer, struggled to find personnel willing to work in a remote facility in a rural area. When he arrived at Mount Weather on October 12, the circuits were staffed continuously only Monday through Friday. Two of his available attack warning officers were eager to use their annual leave. He excused a third, Donald Dorris, to search for nearby housing. “One of the prime factors (I think) in considering any man to work here,” he explained, “would be if he is contented and can find a place in these small communities where his abilities are challenged and where he can find personal satisfaction in doing community work in such small towns.” Robert D. Jones was such a man. He built a new home for his family, joined the local Kiwanis, and became a Scoutmaster. Though not as active in community service as Jones, Lloyd Anderson, a disabled veteran, assured Edwards that his family liked the area, that he enjoyed his work. Dorris didn’t. Rather than move his family to Berryville or a nearby town (such as Front Royal, where the Andersons lived), he commuted from Falls Church. After just one year, he requested a transfer, a familiar problem for Edwards. “All other men who have left this office have not liked the location,” he told a superior. To stop attrition, Edwards introduced a daily bus service. Attack warning officers could drive to Leesburg (about 22 miles east of Mount Weather) or to Winchester (about 25 miles northwest) for an early version of “Park and Ride.” All but one of his officers used the buses during its first week of service in March 1957.
⁹

But even content employees get bored. “Conduct, especially on the dais, should be above approach [
sic
] at all times,” FCDA official Sanford Dee

Figure 9.1
By the time the federal government finished taking responsibility for the metropolitan Washington attack warning system, evacuation plans werecomplex, confusing, and impractical. In addition to the main evacuation routes, which reach to all four sides of the figure, this 1959 map marks a fixed evacuationboundary line; the District’s night boundary (people south of this line between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. were supposed to evacuate to the south); the District’sday boundary (people north of this line between 7:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. were supposed to evacuate to the north); two-way roads limited to civil defense traffic;two-way roads effective “only at the times the associated blue boundary is in effect”; and finally, rail passenger pick-up points. Washington Warning Area Map I,Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

admonished staff in July 1957. “Feet should be kept on the floor, levity and loud talk should be eliminated, and reading should be confined to official publications.” Dee also scolded a few officers for failing to keep detailed logs of their shifts. The next winter, Mother Nature came close to accomplishing something the Soviets never attempted: shut down Mount Weather. On February 15, 1958, the worst snowstorm in 40 years swept across the area, and “practically all business was brought to a standstill.” Even the roads to Mount Weather weren’t cleared until the morning of February 19. While on duty, Jones fell and broke his leg; Edwards was out with a viral infection. Stranded by the storm, the intrepid E. R. McKay nevertheless pressed onward to the facility. For three days and nights, he and Anderson took turns manning the circuits, earning praise for “splendid service rendered in this emergency.”
¹⁰

Integrated control of warning channels and sirens presented another chal
lenge. As of February 1957, the DCD still staffed Fort Reno 24 hours a day and was responsible for relaying warnings throughout the area.
¹¹
To supplant the existing system, the FCDA needed three new circuits in the metropolitan target zone: one, called the Area Communications Circuit (ACC), to allow voice contact between Mount Weather and the 17 area Key Points; a second for the warning devices; and a third for Conelrad. By October, the FCDA had planned the circuits but hadn’t as yet installed them; actual work didn’t begin until 1958. In Maryland and Virginia, legal transfer of the sirens and horns required both local and state approval, while additional sirens slated for installation on privately owned buildings required easement agreements.
¹²
Finally, all three circuits had to connect to an alternate site in case Mount Weather became inoperable. The FCDA designated its facility at Olney, Md., which served as its Region II headquarters, as the back-up control point.
¹³

Changes to the national warning system further complicated the takeover. In 1957, the FCDA streamlined its warning protocol by removing its attack warn
ing officers from the Air Division Control Centers and consolidating them at CONAD, now also called the National Warning Center, and the bases of the Western and Eastern Air Defense Forces.
¹⁴
This change made the Civil Air Defense Warning System obsolete. To use the new warning system more effectively, Edwards requested the installation of additional equipment on his circuit.
¹⁵
The new system also had the responsibility of delivering fallout reports. In May 1958, the Military District of Washington agreed to provide Mount Weather with postattack radiological readings received at its relocation site at Fort Belvoir, Va. (The instruments were located at the Nike missile sites.)
¹⁶

As of June 1958, ACC telephones were still being installed and the locations for radio–back up units had just been selected. Mount Weather now controlled the District’s sirens, but several jurisdictions still operated their warning devices. Installation of 195 new sirens throughout the metropolitan target zone didn’t begin until September. On November 25, AT&T personnel accidentally triggered sirens in the District and Montgomery County while wiring the latter’s sirens into the Mount Weather circuit. (The workers forgot to return sequential relays to the normal condition.) For three minutes beginning at 4:30 p.m., the District’s sirens blared steadily—Warning Yellow.

Montgomery County’s sirens sounded for 20 minutes. Startled White House staff called the National Warning Center to ask if an attack was underway. One year later, 29 of 46 sirens in Montgomery County failed during a test; prior to the takeover, the sirens had worked 85 percent of the time. Both incidents demonstrated that metropolitan Washington didn’t as yet have an “efficient, dependable” attack-warning system.
¹⁷

Still, the locals welcomed the federal takeover because it reduced municipal and county expenses. Fondahl no longer needed dispatchers working round
the-clock at Fort Reno, and the takeover relieved him of Conelrad operation and siren upkeep.
¹⁸
Even with this acquiescence, however, the Eisenhower administration had contradicted its own principles of self-help and local responsibility. Rejection of federally funded shelters came at the same time that the FCDA was taking over metropolitan Washington’s warning network. If the bomb knew “no political boundaries,” then what about Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas? Ongoing improvements to the nation’s early warning capability benefited everyone, but if locally controlled Warning Points couldn’t function properly at the moment of attack, then millions of Americans wouldn’t receive a clear, quick warning, no matter how well the DEW radars and the National Warning Center performed. Washington was a city like Atlanta and New York, but it was also the capital. Wartime essential personnel somehow had to reach their relocation sites before the bombs detonated; otherwise, the Federal Relocation Arc would be another empty outpost in the land of the blind.