In The Event Of Attack, Here's How The Government Plans 'To Save Itself'
Several years ago, when Garrett Graff was working at Washingtonian magazine, a coworker brought him a lost ID badge that he'd found on the floor of a parking garage.
"It was a government ID for someone from the intelligence community, and he gave it to me since I write about that subject, and he's like, "I figure you can get this back to this guy,' " Graff recalls.
Above are the plans for Congress' nuclear bunker in Greenbrier, West Va.
Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
There were driving directions on the back of the ID, so Graff looked it up on Google Maps, and it led him to West Virginia. "The road dead ends into the side of a mountain," he says, "And you can see very clearly these big concrete bunker doors — this little guard shack, chain-link fence, and then this set of concrete bunker doors beyond."
Graff had stumbled onto one of the government bunkers designed to protect U.S. leaders in the event of a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon attack — most of which were built at the outset of the atomic age and throughout the Cold War.
"It was a facility that I had never heard of, that wasn't on any map ..." Graff says. "It just made me so curious to go back and understand what the history of these plans were, and what they are in modern times as well."
The result of that curiosity is Graff's new book Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself – While the Rest of Us Die. Based in part on recently declassified documents, it describes the bunkers designed to protect government leaders, lines of succession to replace officials who are killed, and the roles for various agencies in the event of catastrophe.
"Part of what makes these plans so interesting is thinking through ... this idea of what you're going to save for America," Graff explains. "If you're trying to preserve and restart the government after an attack, [it] becomes this very existential question about what is America? Are you trying to preserve the presidency? Are you preserving the three branches of government? Or are you preserving even the historical totems that have bound us together across generations as Americans?"
Interview Highlights
On the Raven Rock Bunker just outside of Waynesboro, Penn.
It's a bunker that dates back to the late 1940s, right at the beginning of the atomic age, as the government began to think about what it was going to mean to build evacuation facilities, in case something happened to Washington.
Raven Rock is this massive, hollowed-out mountain. It's a free-standing city ... with individual buildings, three-story buildings, built inside of this mountain. It has everything that a small city would — there's a fire department there, there's a police department, medical facilities, dining halls. The dining facility serves four meals a day, it's a 24 hour facility, and it was sort of mothballed to a certain extent during the 1990s as the Cold War ended and then was restarted in a hurry after Sept. 11 and has been pretty dramatically expanded over the last 15 years, and today could hold as many as 5,000 people in the event of an emergency.
On the Cold War-era plan for the U.S. Post Office and other government agencies in the event of a nuclear attack
The post office was the agency that would've been in charge of registering the dead and figuring out who was still alive. In part, because the post office knows where people live, they understand who was left. So you would arrive in the refugee camps, after your cities had been destroyed, and you would've been handed Form 801 from the post office, which were pre-printed in millions and millions of quantities and located in post offices around the country through the Cold War in the event of an emergency. And you would've filled it out with your name and family members that survived with you at the camp, and then the post office would've sorted through these cards and figured out who was still alive and where everyone was to begin the process of reuniting families.
The Parks Service, for instance, would've been the agency that would've actually been running, in many cases, the refugee camps, because the thinking was that park service land would be largely untouched by nuclear war.
[The Dept. of Agriculture] worked for years with Nabisco to come up with this special survival biscuit. ... They pre-made about 160 million tons of this Nabisco survival wafer that were manufactured and boxed up in tins and then hidden away in government fallout shelters around the country. This was a whole strange, shadow post-apocalypse government that existed just out of sight through the Cold War.
Full story at site
Several years ago, when Garrett Graff was working at Washingtonian magazine, a coworker brought him a lost ID badge that he'd found on the floor of a parking garage.
"It was a government ID for someone from the intelligence community, and he gave it to me since I write about that subject, and he's like, "I figure you can get this back to this guy,' " Graff recalls.
Above are the plans for Congress' nuclear bunker in Greenbrier, West Va.
Courtesy of Simon & Schuster
There were driving directions on the back of the ID, so Graff looked it up on Google Maps, and it led him to West Virginia. "The road dead ends into the side of a mountain," he says, "And you can see very clearly these big concrete bunker doors — this little guard shack, chain-link fence, and then this set of concrete bunker doors beyond."
Graff had stumbled onto one of the government bunkers designed to protect U.S. leaders in the event of a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon attack — most of which were built at the outset of the atomic age and throughout the Cold War.
"It was a facility that I had never heard of, that wasn't on any map ..." Graff says. "It just made me so curious to go back and understand what the history of these plans were, and what they are in modern times as well."
The result of that curiosity is Graff's new book Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself – While the Rest of Us Die. Based in part on recently declassified documents, it describes the bunkers designed to protect government leaders, lines of succession to replace officials who are killed, and the roles for various agencies in the event of catastrophe.
"Part of what makes these plans so interesting is thinking through ... this idea of what you're going to save for America," Graff explains. "If you're trying to preserve and restart the government after an attack, [it] becomes this very existential question about what is America? Are you trying to preserve the presidency? Are you preserving the three branches of government? Or are you preserving even the historical totems that have bound us together across generations as Americans?"
Interview Highlights
On the Raven Rock Bunker just outside of Waynesboro, Penn.
It's a bunker that dates back to the late 1940s, right at the beginning of the atomic age, as the government began to think about what it was going to mean to build evacuation facilities, in case something happened to Washington.
Raven Rock is this massive, hollowed-out mountain. It's a free-standing city ... with individual buildings, three-story buildings, built inside of this mountain. It has everything that a small city would — there's a fire department there, there's a police department, medical facilities, dining halls. The dining facility serves four meals a day, it's a 24 hour facility, and it was sort of mothballed to a certain extent during the 1990s as the Cold War ended and then was restarted in a hurry after Sept. 11 and has been pretty dramatically expanded over the last 15 years, and today could hold as many as 5,000 people in the event of an emergency.
On the Cold War-era plan for the U.S. Post Office and other government agencies in the event of a nuclear attack
The post office was the agency that would've been in charge of registering the dead and figuring out who was still alive. In part, because the post office knows where people live, they understand who was left. So you would arrive in the refugee camps, after your cities had been destroyed, and you would've been handed Form 801 from the post office, which were pre-printed in millions and millions of quantities and located in post offices around the country through the Cold War in the event of an emergency. And you would've filled it out with your name and family members that survived with you at the camp, and then the post office would've sorted through these cards and figured out who was still alive and where everyone was to begin the process of reuniting families.
The Parks Service, for instance, would've been the agency that would've actually been running, in many cases, the refugee camps, because the thinking was that park service land would be largely untouched by nuclear war.
[The Dept. of Agriculture] worked for years with Nabisco to come up with this special survival biscuit. ... They pre-made about 160 million tons of this Nabisco survival wafer that were manufactured and boxed up in tins and then hidden away in government fallout shelters around the country. This was a whole strange, shadow post-apocalypse government that existed just out of sight through the Cold War.
Full story at site
