You Might Want to Know: I. What’s “COG”? What does it have to do with nuclear weapons?
You Might Want to Know: Questions Addressed in Past Postings to November 28, 2021 and Some Forthcoming Items—Click Here
Part One
“COG” stands for “Continuity of Government.” The appalling capabilities of nuclear weapons are what started some of our leaders thinking about what we would need to do to make it at least possible for our government to continue after an attack with nuclear weapons in what was called a “post-attack environment.”
It turned out to be hard to get a handle on what a post-attack environment would be like.
The nuclear bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 destroyed two mid-sized cities. From that we could infer that if even just one Nagasaki-sized nuclear bomb were detonated in the right place on the Mall in the mid-sized city of Washington, D.C., it would likely flatten or burn up and irradiate the White House, the Capitol Building, the Supreme Court—everyone and everything in the city for a couple of miles around ground zero. The many fires started by the bomb would cause more death and destruction, probably much more. As they had in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Especially in Hiroshima.
The Pentagon, where most of the leaders of our armed forces had offices, was four miles away from the Mall. A Nagasaki sized bomb might just blow out its windows. It might be able to keep operating. As long as it was upwind and didn’t get dosed with too much radioactive fallout.
One Nagasaki-sized bomb on the Pentagon would obliterate it, of course.
The military leaders in the Pentagon, if there were some left, would now have to figure out who should be in charge of the country. Our Constitution said only that the vice-president would succeed the president, but a nuke might get them both. To clarify the situation, Congress passed in 1947 a Presidential Succession Act. It provided that after the President and Vice-President would come the Speaker of the House, then the president pro tempore of the Senate, then certain members of the Cabinet, starting with the Secretary of State.
We began to try to arrange for someone on this list, a “designated survivor,” to be away from Washington at all times. Who it was would vary.
Soon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we had realized that an attack with nuclear weapons might do more than destroy cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Washington D.C. and kill most of the people in them. It could, in an expression our military began to use, “kill a nation.”
In 1948, a year before the Soviet Union developed their own nuclear weapon, our military leaders were asked how many Nagasaki-sized bombs it would take to kill the Soviet Union. The Nagasaki bomb had yielded twenty kilotons, which is now considered “low-yield.” The answer the military came up with in 1948 was that the Soviet Union could be killed by about one hundred Nagasaki-sized bombs dropped on forty-nine of their cities.
And then, in September 1949, we learned that our monopoly on nuclear weapons had ended. The Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb. It was a very close copy of the Nagasaki bomb. Some had been sure our monopoly would last a very long time, but it hadn’t. A little over four years.
Now we might want to think about how many Nagasaki-sized bombs it would take to kill our country. We had more cities than the Soviet Union. They had a lot more space.
In any case, there didn’t seem to be a military defense against an attack with nuclear weapons. “The bomber will always get through,” said the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in 1932, and in the late 40’s and 50’s our generals still believed this to be true. Not all of the bombers probably, but with atomic bombs only a few needed to get through. One of our generals had said that one bomber getting through with a Nagasaki-sized bomb would be like five-hundred seventy getting through with the bombs we’d had in World War II.
What could we do to keep our nation from being killed? Anything?
Our leaders considered doing a “pre-emptive” attack on the Soviet Union. Just go ahead and kill the Soviet Union before it killed us. In 1949, we didn’t have enough Nagasaki-sized bombs to do what the military said we’d need to kill the Soviet Union, but we would soon enough. Or we could use the conventional bombs in the preemptive attack along with the nuclear bombs we did have now.
For a while, our military leaders gave serious consideration to doing a preemptive attack, before the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons and afterwards, but in the end they didn’t do it. The President didn’t let them.
Then there came a time when the Soviet Union had enough nuclear weapons and delivery systems for them that it was clear we couldn’t do a pre-emptive attack on them without suffering grievous harm ourselves.
Would you have let our military do a preemptive attack if you’d been President?
You Might Want to Know: Questions Addressed in Past Postings to November 28, 2021 and Some Forthcoming Items—Click Here