The Doomsday Blueprints

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-monitorin g 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."