TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081092/08109928.000

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                                                                                COVER STORY, Page 32

The Doomsday Blueprints


How times change. Though the Soviet Union is gone, Washington
was once convinced that World War III could break out without
warning. Children practiced hiding under desks, parents built
bomb shelters, and in case of nuclear attack the U.S. government
hoped to save the President and keep the country running by
relying on . . .

By TED GUP


    The project was known simply as the Outpost Mission --
one of the cold war's most closely guarded secrets. Beginning
in the mid-1950s, an elite unit of helicopter pilots and crew,
the 2857th Test Squadron, was stationed at Olmsted Air Force
Base in Pennsylvania posing as a rescue team for military and
civilians in distress. Their real mission, so sensitive that
only the pilots and base commander knew, was to rescue
President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- and, later, John F. Kennedy,
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon -- in the event of a nuclear
attack. Posted outside the blast range of an atomic assault on
Washington, they were to swoop down onto the White House lawn
when an attack seemed imminent and spirit the President away to
one of several hollowed-out mountain sites or to the heavily
reinforced communications ship, the U.S.S. Northampton, off the
Atlantic Coast.

    The pilots were also ready to make a rescue attempt after
a nuclear assault. On board their helicopters, they packed
decontamination kits as well as crowbars and acetylene torches
to break through the walls of the presidential bunker buried
beneath the White House. They flew practice runs with their dark
visors lowered to shield their eyes from the A-bomb's flash, and
were dressed from head to toe in 20 lbs. of protective clothing
-- boots, gloves and rubber bodysuits impregnated with lead to
block out the radiation. They carried extra radiation suits in
canvas bags for the President and First Family. If the pilots
could not reach the bunker through the rubble, a second rescue
unit stood ready with heavy equipment, including cranes, to
extract the President. In the 1960s the squadron was moved to
Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and remained operational until
1970.

    Outpost Mission was but a fragment of a vast and secret
doomsday plan devised by senior U.S. officials who spent their
lives preparing for the unthinkable -- nuclear war. Their
mission: to ensure the survival of the U.S. government, preserve
order and salvage the economy in the aftermath of an atomic
attack. Still others were charged with rescuing the nation's
cultural heritage, from the Declaration of Independence to the
priceless masterpieces of the National Gallery of Art. Now, with
the end of the cold war, many doomsday operatives are breaking
their silence for the first time. Confronted with the potential
horrors of atomic warfare, they drafted detailed contingency
plans and regulations that, while trying to save constitutional
government, would have radically transformed the nation's
political and social institutions.

    What they envisioned was an America darkened not only by
nuclear war but also by the imposition of martial law, food
rationing, censorship and the suspension of many civil
liberties. "We would have to run this country as one big camp
-- severely regimented," Eisenhower told advisers in a
top-secret memo dated 1955. Nor is it a matter only of remote
historical interest. Many of those doomsday regulations would
still be put into effect after a nuclear attack, and while
preparations for rescuing the nation's leaders and cultural
treasures remain in place, efforts to shield the civilian
population were virtually abandoned decades ago.


    "DUCK AND COVER" IN THE WHITE HOUSE

    For those too young to remember the height of the cold
war, consider this: by 1960, about 15,000 high schools were
equipped with radiation-monitoring kits. "Duck-and-cover" films
depicting how to act during a nuclear assault were part of the
elementary school curriculum. The U.S. had distributed 55
million wallet-size cards with instructions on what to do in the
event of an attack. Backyard bomb shelters were common. Senior
Washington officials received an emergency telephone number that
bypassed the commercial system and linked them directly to
crisis operators, who understood that if the caller uttered the
single code word -- FLASH -- it meant the call was "essential
to national survival." Never out of the President's reach were
the Presidential Emergency Action Documents and "Plan D," his
options for responding to a surprise nuclear attack.

    The doomsday plans took shape during the Eisenhower
Administration, spawning an entire bureaucracy and a web of
government relocation sites situated around the capital in what
became known as the Federal Arc. Each year the government
conducted elaborate exercises in which thousands of officials
relocated in mock nuclear attacks. Eisenhower and his Cabinet
convened at Raven Rock, the 265,000-sq.-ft. "Underground
Pentagon" near Gettysburg, Pa., code-named "Site R," or at Mount
Weather, a bunker near Berryville, Va., code-named "High Point"
(see "Doomsday Hideaway," TIME, Dec. 9, 1991). Airborne command
posts and reinforced communications ships stood by to receive
the Commander in Chief and his advisers. Congress had its own
top-secret relocation center buried beneath the Greenbrier, a
five-star resort in White Sulphur Springs, W. Va. Outfitted with
its own Senate and House chambers, as well as a vast hall for
joint sessions, the facility was code-named "Casper," and only
half a dozen members of Congress knew it existed.

    Few men have a more intimate understanding of the doomsday
scenario than Bernard T. Gallagher. Known to his friends as Bud,
he was a Strategic Air Command pilot and served as director of
Mount Weather for 25 years, until his retirement last March. A
robust 70 years old, he wears a white cowboy hat, drives a
hot-pink '65 Mustang convertible and is an unabashed patriot.
As an "atomic-cloud sampler," he flew through the billowing
mushrooms of 13 U.S. nuclear blasts in 1952 and 1953. To measure
the radiation passing through him, he swallowed an X-ray plate
coated with Vaseline and suspended by a string that hung out of
his mouth during the flight.

    In 1956, during the Suez crisis, Gallagher sat in the
cockpit of an F-84 Thunderjet at England's Bentwaters Royal Air
Force Base, an atom bomb fixed beneath his plane. On high alert,
he waited for a single command to take off. His target was a
Finnish airfield, presumably one the Soviets would otherwise
use. "I don't think people realize how close we were ((to
nuclear war))," he says. From 1958 to 1962, he was squadron
commander of Outpost Mission, on call to rescue the President
from nuclear attack; three years later he went to Mount Weather.

    Though Gallagher has spent his life preparing for nuclear
war, he has few illusions about what it would mean. "Through
the years, we always reacted like we could handle an all-out
nuclear attack," he says. "I don't think people -- even our top
people in government -- have any idea of what a thousand
multimegaton nuclear weapons on the U.S. would do. We'd be back
in the Stone Age. It's unthinkable."

    Buried within a mountain of superhard greenstone, the
200,000-sq.-ft. Mount Weather has been a primary relocation site
for the Cabinet and cadres of federal employees -- and was long
a primary haven for the President. J. Leo Bourassa, Gallagher's
predecessor, recalls the day Eisenhower summoned him to the Oval
Office and spoke to him of Mount Weather. "I expect your people
to save our government," Eisenhower told him. "You know damn
well I'll be there as soon as I can." In May 1960, Eisenhower
and his Cabinet convened at Mount Weather as part of a training
exercise. Bourassa says it was he who entered the Cabinet Room
and handed Eisenhower the Teletype report informing him that the
Soviet Union had shot down Francis Gary Powers, pilot of the U-2
spy plane. Eisenhower's response: "I'll be a son of a bitch."

    Twenty-four hours a day, the site tracked the whereabouts
of those who were in line to succeed the President. Had the
U.S. come under threat of attack, the Cabinet Secretaries and
Supreme Court Justices -- and, depending on the threat, the
President himself -- were to be airlifted here. On approaching
the facility, the helipad tower would answer, "Bluegrass Tower."
Before they could be admitted past the facility's 6-ft.-thick
steel "blast gate," officials would have to show their special
ID cards. If they arrived after a nuclear attack, they would be
checked for radiation. Anyone who was radioactive would trigger
a series of sensors, setting off a bell and a flashing light --
yellow or red, depending on the level of radioactivity. Those
who had been most exposed were to be led to decontamination
showers and washed with medicated soap. Their clothes would be
incinerated, and they would be issued military coveralls.
Electric carts converted to ambulances would shuttle back and
forth to the facility's subterranean hospital.

    Gallagher says he wrote a memo for the site's triage teams
making it clear that except for the President and his successor,
no individual's life was to be considered more precious than
any other's. Patients with blast wounds or burns whose
treatment was so time consuming that it would have been at the
expense of others' lives were to be marked with blue toe tags
and given no extraordinary lifesaving measures. The facility was
equipped with a crematorium. Automatic weapons were stored at
the site, and Bourassa says he would have implemented a
shoot-to-kill order to prevent anyone not on the site's roster
-- even family members of officials or locals -- from gaining
access. He also instructed the staff that saboteurs and
troublemakers were to be ejected. "Radiation or not, throw them
the hell out," he says he told the staff. "I don't give a damn
what the radiation count is."

    Mount Weather could hold two, even three times as many
people as there were bunks -- several thousand in all. Only the
President, Cabinet Secretaries and Supreme Court Justices had
private quarters. Eisenhower had family pictures on his desk.
A therapeutic mattress was installed for Kennedy's bad back. For
those who could not cope with the stress, the facility had
sedatives as well as a padded isolation cell, complete with an
observation window. One official dubbed it "the rubber room" and
said there were straitjackets on pegs outside the door --
something Gallagher denies. So complete is the site's inventory
that it now includes birth-control pills -- not because of any
anticipated sexual activity but so that female officials would
not have to interrupt their pill-taking cycles.

    Up until last May, an underground meteorological station
at the site issued daily reports on wind direction and speed,
plotting potential radiation patterns. The site's television
studio is prepared to provide the President -- or his successor
-- a national audience over the Emergency Broadcast System.
Throughout the Eisenhower Administration -- and for years after
-- a vault held tape-recorded addresses by both Eisenhower and
celebrity Arthur Godfrey. The prerecorded message was concise:
The country has come under nuclear attack, but the government
continues to function. In addition, a number of prominent
newsmen who had taken oaths of secrecy had agreed to accompany
the President to the relocation site of his choosing and lend
their familiar names and faces to help calm the surviving
audience.

    In another room was the top-secret Bomb Alarm, a system of
sensors and copper wires that crisscrossed the country and
reacted to overpressure, heat and brilliance. On a huge U.S. map
dotted with hundreds of tiny light bulbs, a red light would go
on to mark the site of a nuclear explosion. Atop the mountain
a series of remotely operated cameras and radiation sensors
monitored the area. A nearby nuclear hit would vaporize those
devices, but the site was equipped with backup radiation sensors
that could be pushed out of the mountain. There were also human
"probers" from among the security force, who would don
rubberized radiation suits and venture out to test the air.

    Only once did the facility go on full alert -- on Nov. 9,
1965, when a power failure darkened much of the Northeast.
Bourassa says he feared at the time that it was the result of
a surgical nuclear strike. His order: "Report to base at once."
The site's fleet of buses was dispatched to round up the
200-plus employees who lived in the area. Up until then,
officials had feared that the staff would not report in because
their family members would not be sheltered. But that day, more
than 80% of the staff answered the call. Bourassa also put the
facility on a high state of readiness following Kennedy's
assassination in 1963. Surprisingly, Mount Weather was not put
on alert during the Cuban missile crisis, though the situation
was monitored closely.


    WATCH OUT FOR THE PIGS

    Would the relocation plan have worked? A 1962 study for
the Pentagon examined the daytime and nighttime locations of
the dozen officials in the line of presidential succession and
concluded they were all often well within the kill range of a
nuclear assault on the capital. With a 100-megaton weapon, a
helicopter anywhere within 50 miles of the White House would
have been destroyed in flight, the report noted. There were also
unexpected hazards. During one doomsday exercise, Eisenhower was
driven by convoy from Washington. As he neared the site, a truck
loaded with pigs entered the narrow road. The convoy halted and
authorities forced the truck to inch backward up the mountain
and past the site's entrance. Eisenhower laughed that such
elaborate plans could be ruined by pigs.

    The task of devising Eisenhower's escape route from
Washington fell to naval aide Edward Beach. His assignment was
made all the more difficult given the grim prognosis for
Washington should it be hit by a Soviet hydrogen bomb. "It would
not eliminate the Potomac River," says Beach, "but it would sure
raise hell and dig a deep hole where Washington had been. We
would have a deep lake there, so shelters in Washington would
have been counterproductive. Even if you survived the blast,
you'd probably drown." So Beach and others pressed their
imaginations for alternate escape plans.

    Among the more creative schemes: Beach had the government
procure a refurbished World War II PT boat and dock it on the
Potomac at the Washington Navy Yard. Eisenhower would be rushed
by limousine -- one of two onyx-black Cadillacs with a tank
engine under the hood -- to a prearranged point on the river,
where the PT boat would be waiting. After sailing safely past
the blast zone, the President would be met by Secret Service
agents and driven to one of three underground command posts. The
PT boat, as well as an ultrasensitive underground command post
at his Maryland presidential retreat, Camp David, were secretly
maintained by an elite team of officers under the innocuous name
of the Naval Administrative Unit. There was even brief
consideration given to reconfiguring a Polaris submarine,
removing the missile tubes to accommodate an undersea
presidential command post.

    In a White House vault were Eisenhower's standby crisis
orders, already initialed by the President, including some that
would have imposed martial law. Below Beach's office in the
White House's East Wing was the presidential bunker, complete
with food, sophisticated communications equipment and torches
for cutting out of the twisted rubble. In charge of the bunker
was a young officer named William Crowe, later Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff.

    As a soldier, Ike had few illusions about the doomsday
plans. A "secret" White House memo dated 1956 records his rebuke
when a Cabinet Secretary noted that 450 people were evacuated
"rather smoothly" during an exercise. Eisenhower "reminded the
Cabinet that in a real situation, these will not be normal
people -- they will be scared, will be hysterical, will be
`absolutely nuts.' We are going to have to be prepared to
operate with people who are `nuts.' "

    He warned his Cabinet not to get entangled in bureaucratic
details. "Who is going to bury the dead?" asked Eisenhower.
"Where would one find the tools? The organization to do it? We
must not assume that we are going to handle these problems with
calmness." Later he observed, "We will be running soup kitchens
-- we are going to be taking care of a completely bewildered
population." He feared anarchy. "Government which goes on with
some kind of continuity will be like a one-eyed man in the land
of the blind," the White House memo concluded.


    THE MAIL MUST GO ON

    Today each federal agency has a plan that would go into
effect in the event of a nuclear attack, part of a comprehensive
national survival program that has evolved over decades under
the direction of the President, the National Security Council
and a succession of crisis agencies, most recently the Federal
Emergency Management Agency. Their wartime duties are spelled
out in the Code of Emergency Federal Regulations, a loose-leaf
notebook containing hundreds of pages of regulations, most of
them drafted in the 1960s and '70s. Specific "action plans" are
in agency vaults and relocation sites, to be implemented by
officials in nuclear exile. Today's plans rely on redundancy.
If one location is wiped out, others will take its place.
Officials are divided into three squads -- Alpha, Bravo and
Charlie. One team stays at headquarters; the other two redeploy
at separate relocation sites.

    Against the backdrop of a nuclear holocaust, the plans
often straddle the line between prudence and absurdity. The
Civil Service Commission's crisis provisions include this
regulation: "Employees reported as dead should be carried on
administrative leave until the reported date of death." A Postal
Service regulation, activated upon nuclear attack, would suspend
the need for postage stamps on letters and postcards sent to
devastated areas. Special delivery would be eliminated
systemwide except for shipments of medicines and surgical
dressings.

    Much planning has also gone into salvaging the economy
after a nuclear attack. Treasury Department rules would require
banks to remain open during regular hours but allow them to
limit withdrawals to prevent hoarding. Treasury would also
oversee price stabilization for post-attack salaries and rent.
A 1972 regulation notes that prior arrangements have been made
with companies in "noncritical target areas" for printing
checks. The Department of Labor and New York State signed an
agreement in 1971 providing "nuclear attack economic
stabilization preparedness and operating responsibilities." The
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation would require "bank
examiners to report in a post-attack situation to the nearest
surviving Federal Reserve Bank where they can assist in the
reconstruction of the banking system."

    In fact the Federal Reserve Board has its own
140,000-sq.-ft. radiation-proof relocation center in Culpeper,
Va. Well into the 1980s the center's gigantic vault still held
a fortune in cash to be used to jump-start the U.S. economy in
the aftermath of a nuclear war. A solid wall of bills stacked
9 ft. high and held in shrink-wrapped packages filled the vault.
A forklift stood ready to move the wooden pallets buried beneath
tons of 5s, 10s, 50s and 100s. Desks at the facility feature the
names of Federal Reserve officers to be evacuated. A 30-day menu
of freeze-dried food had been prepared to be served on plain
white china. There is even a cold-storage tunnel for bodies that
could not be buried until radiation had subsided. Last month the
center's administrators were informed the facility's mission
will no longer be needed.

    The Department of Agriculture has drafted a
post-nuclear-attack food-rationing program, setting a civilian
ration level of between 2,000 and 2,500 calories a day for each
person. Among the weekly ration limits: seven pints of milk and
six eggs. The Federal Highway Administration would try to
protect motorists "from fallout resulting from a nuclear
attack." The Department of Housing and Urban Development, in
regulations code-named "Asp," "Bear," "Cat" and "Dog," spell out
the agency's approach for housing millions of refugees displaced
by a nuclear attack. "Our mission would be carried over into the
holocaust," says HUD emergency coordinator Terrence Monihan.

    U.S. doomsday strategists also coordinated their
relocation and post-attack production plans with private
industry considered vital to national survival. In April 1970,
for example, White House emergency planners joined Standard Oil
Co. of New Jersey executives in a mock nuclear war exercise.
Standard Oil's senior management withdrew to its emergency
operating center, buried 300 ft. below the ground at what was
once called Iron Mountain Atomic Storage, near Hudson, N.Y. The
well-protected facility had vaults, dining halls and more than
50 sleeping rooms for key company officials and their families.
Vital company records were stored at the facility and updated
monthly.

    Company executives discussed with White House officials
"how they would assure continuity of corporate management,
assess surviving capability . . . and mesh their company plans
with those of government.'' Company officials balked when it
appeared the government might take over the firm in wartime.
Ultimately, the executives prepared a "unified emergency plan,"
and were to be provided with radio-communications equipment for
the site.

    There were also elaborate plans for a national censorship
office called the Wartime Information Security Program, or WISP
(as in whisper). A CBS vice president, the late Theodore F.
Koop, had agreed to be the standby national censor, and about
40 civilian executives had consented to work as the unit's staff
in wartime. A 1965 internal government memo notes that
censorship manuals and regulations had been stockpiled, and a
fully equipped communications center was established outside
Washington. Press reports in 1970 exposed the existence of a
standby national censor and led to the formal dissolution of the
censorship unit, but its duties were discreetly reassigned to
yet another part of what an internal memo refers to as the
"shadow" government.


    GLIMPSING THE FUTURE

    Though the threat of a massive nuclear showdown has
receded, many government employees must still go through the
motions of preparing for disaster. As director of the Federal
Register, Martha Girard publishes an official daily record of
the Federal Government's major actions and decisions. But in the
event of an impending nuclear attack, she is supposed to report
to Mount Weather as a member of a Bravo team and publish the
Emergency Federal Register, which would inform the surviving
public of the crisis regulations in effect and create a
chronicle of doomsday actions. "A very important part is to have
copies of what happened for when we get back to normal, whether
it's one year or 100 years," she says.

    In her purse Girard carries a crisis ID card, which lists
her height, weight and blood type and declares, "The person
described on this card has essential emergency duties with the
Federal Government. Request full assistance and unrestricted
movement be afforded the person to whom this card is issued."
Her card expired June 30, 1984, but she continues to have a
standby role in the doomsday scenario. During the 1980s she took
part in several relocation exercises at Mount Weather, where for
days on end she practiced putting out her crisis publication on
an aging manual typewriter. Says Girard: "I felt like I was in a
1950s movie."

    Though Girard says she "would do whatever I could to
fulfill my responsibilities in an emergency situation," she is
uneasy about her part. "Is it a sham," she asks, "for me to
participate in this and give other people confidence that there
is a system in place that will work, when in my heart of hearts,
in the dark of night, I doubt it will work?"

    Girard is not alone in questioning the government's plans
for self-preservation. With the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the U.S.'s doomsday planners are engaged in a sweeping
reassessment of crisis scenarios. The old relocation centers are
under review. Some are to be mothballed, others converted to
more mundane uses: record storage and office space. Contingency
plans and dusty crisis regulations are being re-examined. Having
outlived its enemy and its original mission, the doomsday
bureaucracy faces a more immediate threat -- irrelevance. But
as the last members of the original generation of doomsday
planners step down, they do so with cautionary words: the Soviet
Union may be history, but new dangers abound -- nuclear
proliferation, the resurgence of nationalism and the threat of
terrorism. "You shouldn't shut the damn door yet," warns Mount
Weather's first director, Leo Bourassa. Bud Gallagher, his
successor, prefers to cite Plato: "Only the dead have seen the
end of war."