This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (45 page)

Arc, the ODM created the Federal Executive Reserve, “composed of leading persons from the industrial, educational, and financial worlds” who “represent a substantial standby capability for augmenting the executive resources of Government.” These individuals were given security clearances. In the spring of 1959, five teams of “reservists” received tours of Mount Weather. The State Department brought in 45 people; and the Interior Department, 27. Even the Housing and Home Finance Agency had a team. Hoegh to Goodpaster, June 18, 1959, box 21, folder “Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (2),” SSAS.

1. Lewis Berry to Director of Administration, September 23, 1960, box 11, folder “Shelters and Vulnerability Reductions 2-1,” RG 396, Selected OCDM Central Files, 1959–60 (hereafter Central Files).
   
2. William Durkee to Buford Ellington, August 23, 1965, box 1, folder “Federal Regional Centers,” RG 396, Assistant Director’s Subject Files, 1961–65.
   
3. Harry B. Yoshpe
   ,
   Our Missing Shield: The U.S. Civil Defense Program in Historical Perspective
   (Washington, D.C.: FEMA, 1981), 538; “A New Civil Defense Center,”
   WS
   , August 6, 1971; “Civil Defense Stands by in Underground Olney Center,”
   The Sentinel
   , October 21, 1971, clippings, MCHS.
   
4. “Review of Federal Relocation Arc,” November 5, 1958, box 3, untitled binder, RG 396, Declassified P-95 Records, Accession 66A-03; Record of Action, Director’s Staff Meeting, December 11, 1958, box 1, folder “Committees Director’s Staff (A-G),” RG 396, OCDM National HQ Central Files, 1958–61 (hereafter National HQ Files).
   
5. “Relocation Site Activities, Calendar Year, 1959,” February 29, 1960, box 1, folder “Confidential—Use of Buildings”; Joe Walstrom memorandum, May 16, 1961, box 4, folder “Site Hardening,” RG 59; Dean Poblens to Jack Scott, November 23, 1959, box 4, folder “High Point Classified Location”; John J. O’Neill to Eugene J. Quindlen, September 14, 1959, box 4, folder “Federal, State & Local Plans”; “Summary of Emergency Readiness Status of Federal Agency Headquarters,” December 31, 1960, box 21, folder “Agency Readiness Summaries as of 12-31-60,” RG 396, National HQ Files.
   
6. Hoegh, September 2, 1958.
   
7. Hoegh to Goodpaster, September 23, 1959, box 5, folder “White House Gen. Goodpaster,” RG 396, National HQ Files.
   
8. “Requirement for Special Resource Data at the Classified Location,” March 24, 1960, box 5, folder “Federal, State & Local Plans 1-8,” RG 396, Central Files; OEP, “Interim Standing Operating Procedures for Emergency Use of the Classified Location,” September 14, 1962; Robert Phillips to J.M. Chambers, November 29, 1962, box 6, folder “Special Facilities Branch,” RG 396, Declassified P-95 Records, Accession 66A03.
   
9. William Y. Elliott to Mr. Henderson, April 10, 1959, box 1, folder “Background Information on V.R. Program,” RG 59.
   
10. In March 1960, the JCS ordered the establishment of a Department of Defense Damage Assessment Center at Site R. See Memoranda for the Chief, Defense Atomic Support Agency, March 21, 1960, and January 13, 1961, box 27, folders “3181 (17 March 1959) Gp. 3” and “Gp. 4,” RG 218, CDF 1959.
    
11. Walstrom, “Emergency Relocation: The Alternate Joint Communications Center,” July 22, 1960, box 1, folder “Background Information on
    

V.R. Program,” RG 59; “Briefing Sheet for the Chairman, JCS,” April 14, 1959, box 27, “folder 3181 (4 March 1959)”; Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, September 17, 1959, box 27, folder “3181 (4 September 1959)”;
Memorandum for the Secretary of the Army, May 13, 1959, box 27, folder “3181 (17 March 1959)”; Arleigh Burke to the Secretary of Defense, September 21, 1959, box 22, folder “3180 (23 March 1959),” RG 218, CDF 1959.

1. Gates to the Chairman of the JCS, October 5, 1960; Chairman of the JCS to Gates, September 9, 1960; “Concept for the Use of the Alternate Joint Communications Center,” Briefing Sheet for the Chairman of the JCS, December 28, 1960, box 17, folder “3180 (9 May 1960),” RG 218, CDF 1960; Walstrom memorandum, July 22, 1960.
   
2. Staff Notes no. 4, August 1, 1956, box 24, White House Office, Staff Research Group Records, 1956–61, DDEL, 3; J. Patrick Coyne to Robert Cutler, January 3, 1958; “Readiness Status of Selected Relocation Sites,” December 30, 1957, box 7, folder “[Emergency Governmental Relocation Sites][1954–58],” NSC Briefing Notes; White House Army Signal Agency to AEC et al., July 29, 1958, box 2, folder “Emergency Procedures—EAPs (2)”; Aurand to Goodpaster, October 17, 1960, box 2, folder “Emergency Procedure—General (5),” EAS; Bill Gulley with Mary Ellen Reese,
   Breaking Cover
   (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), 146–50.
   

63. Ted Gup, “The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway,”
WP Sunday Magazine
, May 31, 1992; Thomas Mallon, “Mr. Smith Goes Underground,”
American Heritage
51, no. 5 (September 2000): 60–8; Stephen I. Schwartz, ed.,
Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), 214.

1. Mallon, “Mr. Smith”; Mary Louise Ramsey to J. George Stewart, April 21, 1955, AOC; Goodpaster memorandum, May 1955, box 8, folder “White House Relocation Site (4),” EAS; Flemming to Sherman Adams, June 30, 1955, box 16, folder “Civil Defense (1),” CF.
   
2. As reported in “Notes for Mr. Richardson,” January 20, 1960, box 5, folder “Federal, State & Local Plans,” RG 396, Central Files.
   
3. T. Perry Lippitt to Val Peterson, February 16, 1954; “Emergency Plan Supreme Court Building,” box 2, folder “Supreme Court CD Organization,” RG 396, Records Relating to the U.S. Capitol, Senate, and House Protection Plans, 1951–54; James Browning to Earl Warren, November 19, 1959; John Davis to Warren, April 29, 1966; Warren to Davis, April 29, 1966, box 414, folder “Court-Subject File-Marshal Civil Defense,” Papers of Earl Warren, LOC, Manuscript Division.
   

10 The Satchel Has Been Passed ...

1. Quoted in Circular Memorandum to Regional and Division Engineers, Bureau of Public Roads, November 29, 1961, box 2, folder “Civil Defense Misc.,” Papers of Leonard J. Dow, LOC, Manuscript Division.
   
2. “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1961,
   PPP: John F. Kennedy, 1961
   , 1.
   
3. David Halberstam,
   The Best and the Brightest
   (New York: Fawcett Crest Books, 1972), 50–81.
   
4. For Rostow’s statement, see Kenneth D. Rose,
   One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture
   (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 36.
   
5. Goodpaster memorandum, January 25, 1961, box 1, folder “Memos— re Change of Administration (4),” Whitman File, Presidential Transition Series. For Eisenhower’s predelegation for the use of nuclear weapons, see William Burr,
   

ed., “First Declassification of Eisenhower’s Instructions to Commanders Predelegating Nuclear Weapons Use, 1959–1960,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 45, May 18, 2001, accessed June 23, 2005 at
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB45/
.

1. “Kennedy Complains to Truman on Lack of Civil Defense Plan,”
   Washington
   Times-Herald
   , October 10, 1949, p. 1; Kennedy to Truman, October 8, 1949, box 1, folder “C.D., General,” RG 304, Records Relating to Civil Defense, 1949–53.
   
2. Douglass Cater, “The Politics of Civil Defense,
   ”
   The Reporter
   25, no. 4 (September 14, 1961): 32–4; Thomas J. Kerr,
   Civil Defense in the U.S.: Bandaid for a Holocaust?
   (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1983), 116–19.
   
3. Kerr,
   Civil
   , 118–19; “Special Message to the Congress,” May 25, 1961 and
   “Radio and Television Report to the American People,” July 25, 1961,
   PPP
   , 402, 533–40.
   
4. For the first strike planning, see Fred Kaplan, “JFK’s First-Strike Plan,”
   The Atlantic Monthly
   288, no. 3 (October 2001): 81–6; William Burr, ed., “First Strike Options and the Berlin Crisis, September 1961,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 56, September 25, 2001, accessed June 23, 2005 at
   http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB56/
   . For an overview of U.S. nuclear strategy, see David Alan Rosenberg, “Constraining Overkill: Contending Approaches to Nuclear Strategy, 1955–1965,” Seminar 9 (1994), Colloquium on Contemporary History, Naval Historical Center, accessed June 23, 2005 at
   http://www.history.navy.mil/colloquia/cch9b. html
   . For public fears, see Walter Karp, “When Bunkers Last in the Backyard Bloom’d,”
   American Heritage
   31, no. 2 (February/March 1980): 84–93; Allan M. Winkler,
   Life under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom
   (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 127–30.
   
5. Kerr,
   Civil Defense
   , 105, 120–6; Harry B. Yoshpe,
   Our Missing Shield: The U.S. Civil Defense Program in Historical Perspective
   (Washington, D.C.: FEMA, 1981), 346–50; Wallace Bowers memorandum, September 15, 1961, AOC.
   

1. Senate Committee on Government Operations,
   Civil Defense in the District of Columbia, Hearing before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation of the Committee on Government Operations
   , 86th Cong., 1st sess., April 27, 1959.
   
2. DCD, Bulletin no. 8, Series 1959, Office of Civil Defense Memoranda Orders, Washingtoniana; Robert McLaughlin to Holifield, February 19, 1960, box 228, folder 4-100, RG 351, BOC; Donald Smith, “Oh, So
   That’s
   Whatever Happened to Civil Defense,”
   WS Sunday Magazine
   , January 10, 1971.
   
3. DCD Newsletters for October 1961, June–July 1962, and October 1962, AOC; Kathleen Perkins to Wilbur Lawyer, July 26, 1960, box 228, folder 4-104, RG 351, BOC; Stephanie Brown, “In the Event of a National Emergency: Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Fallout Shelters,” paper delivered at “Washington Builds for War: Defense, the Homefront, and Security in the Capital Region,” Sixth Biennial Symposium on the Historic Development of Metropolitan Washington, D.C., March 5, 2005, Washington, D.C.
   
4. DCD, “Instructions to Shelter Occupants for Emergency Use of Shelters,” Pamphlet File, folder “Civil Defense,” HSW; H.C. Fellows to the President of the Federation of Citizens Associations, December 14, 1961, box 3, folder 77, FCA.
   
5. Benjamin Taylor to Marvin Blumberg, May 12, 1961, box 19, folder “Shelters & Vulnerability Reduction May–June 1961,” RG 396, OCDM National HQ Central Files, 1958–61 (hereafter National HQ Files).
   

1. “Communications Center Here to Be Underground,” November 1, 1962, clip
   ping, MCHS.
   
2. Editorial,
   Fairfax City Times
   , November 8, 1961, 4.
   
3. Rose,
   One Nation
   , 78–112; Winkler,
   Life Under
   , 129–31; Kerr,
   Civil Defense
   , 122–9; Yoshpe,
   Our Missing
   , 15–6; Inez Robb, “Please—No Civil Defense Yak,”
   Raleigh
   (N.C.)
   Times
   , September 3, 1962, clipping in box 2, folder “Civil Defense Notes,” Dow Papers.
   
4. DCD Newsletter, May 1962, AOC; “CD Signal’s Automatic Evacuation Meaning Is Dropped,”
   WP
   , May 4, 1962, sec. A, p. 8.
   
5. Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, “
   One Hell of a Gamble”: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964
   (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 188–9, 217, 242.
   
6. Fursenko,
   One Hell
   , 188–9 (the quote is on 189); “Chronologies of the Crisis,” compiled for Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds.,
   The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Documents Reader
   (New York: The New Press, 1992), accessed June 23, 2005 at the National Security Archive
   http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/chron.htm.
   .
   

22. “Chronologies of the Crisis”; Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds.,
The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis
(Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997), 45–76, 189–203.

1. Furensko,
   One Hell
   , 242–3; “Chronologies of the Crisis”; “Radio and T
   elevision Report to the American People,” October 22, 1962,
   PPP: John F. Kennedy, 1962
   , 806–9.
   
1. “Civil Defense Queries Rise in D.C. Area,”
   WP,
   October 24, 1962, sec. A, p. 4; “103 Shelters Licensed, Five Are Ready for Use,”
   WP,
   October 26, 1962, sec. A,
   
2. p.
   14; “Shelter Sites Grow, 103 Certified here,”
   WP,
   October 27, 1962, sec. A, p. 1.
   
2. DCD Newsletter, November 1962, AOC.
   
3. “Stores in Capital Find No Panic,”
   NYT
   , October 26, 1962, p. 18.
   
4. May
   ,
   Kennedy Tapes
   , 338–40; McCone memorandum, October 23, 1962,
   FRUS, 1961–1963
   , vol. XI, 173–4.
   
5. McDermott to Shepard, October 24, 1962, box 2, folder “Emergency Planning,” RG 396, Declassified P-95 Records, Accession 64A927.
   
6. May,
   Kennedy Tapes
   , 347–55.
   
7. McDermott to Leo Bourassa, October 27, 1962, box 3, folder “Special Facilities Branch,” RG 396, Declassified P-95 Records, Accession 66A03; Alice L. George,
   Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis
   (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 48–51.
   
8. McDermott to Sen. Spessard Holland and attachment, September 28, 1962; “Concept of Operations for the White House Emergency Information Program,” October 4, 1962; McDermott to Edward R. Murrow, October 17, 1962; Robert Philips to J.M. Chambers, October 22, 1962; Chambers to Salinger, October 25, 1962; Phillips to McDermott, October 25, 1962; “Recent Developments
   White House Emergency Information Program
   ,” April 26, 1963, box 4, folder “White House Information 1961–62,” RG 396, Declassified P-95 Records, Accession 64A927. For the Kennedy administration’s handling of the media during the crisis, see George,
   Awaiting
   , 87–114.
   
9. “Chronologies of the Crisis.” By October 26, 24 of the SS-4s were operational. See Furensko,
   One Hell
   , 266.
   
10. Aurand to Wilton B. Persons, November 11, 1960, box 2, folder “Turnover— Memos for Records,” Whitman File, Presidential Transition Series; “Helicopter