You Might Want to Know: II. What's COG? What Does It Have to Do with Nuclear Weapons?
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Part Two
In 1949, after the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb, we got to work more seriously on how we might keep our own nation from being killed. To put it another way, we got to work trying to assure “continuity of government.” COG, for short.
In 1950 President Truman established a Federal Civil Defense Administration. The FCDA’s job would be to think about what we should do, and could do, to mount a “civil defense” against atomic bombs and the radioactive fallout they produced.
Civil defense is different from COG. Civil defense tries to insure Continuity of the Governed, us, not Continuity of the Government.
To try to insure Continuity of Government, we began, after 1949, to build shelters for our leaders. Not just to protect against fallout which is what civil defense was focused on. Civil defense shelters, which we’d have to build on our own dime, wouldn’t be expected to survive a direct hit by a nuclear weapon. COG shelters, which taxpayers would pay for, would need to survive one. If this were possible.
A whole lot of money would be spent on these shelters and other COG measures over the course of the Cold War. Billions of dollars for sure. Hard to know just how much. The members of Congress, which is who appropriates money in our system, probably didn’t even know. You can hide things in military budgets. Big things. We’d succeeded in hiding from Congress the whole Manhattan Project.
Before the big shelters got built for our leaders, the plan was that if our leaders learned that enemy bombers were on the way, they would “evacuate” from the obvious targets--like Washington D. C. and the Pentagon--and “disperse” to someplace safe. Or at least safe-er. Almost any place would be safer than Washington D.C., you had to think.
Caves were thought to be an option. Efforts were made to locate caves near Washington D.C. That’s kind of funny, isn’t it? If a nuclear attack were coming, our leaders would be heading back to caves. Like starting over as humans. This time, though, the world they found outside afterwards would be different from the one the first humans had to work with.
President Truman had the White House remodeled in 1950. When he did that, he’d had a shelter built under it. It wasn’t one that would withstand a direct hit by an atomic bomb, that was obvious. Instead, the plan was to evacuate President Truman if we could. Except he’d said he wouldn’t go. He wanted to be, he said, where he could be in touch with the people. If that were possible. Even if he and we were still alive, the connections between us might not be so good.
Even if President Truman had agreed to be evacuated, would we have been able to get it done in time? If people in the area had been told that we were about to be attacked, the traffic would be murder. On some roads around the city, we pre-positioned bulldozers to doze off the cars that might be blocking the President’s way.
In 1951, at Raven Rock, Pennsylvania, eighty miles north of Washington, D.C., President Truman got us to start building a big underground shelter. Raven Rock, also called Site R, would be an emergency operations center for the president and military leaders. In 1953, the first year of President Eisenhower’s administration, it became operational.
Later in the 1950’s, other big underground shelters that had been built for COG also became operational. One, called Mount Weather, at Front Royal in Virginia, forty-eight miles west of Washington, D.C., was for other military and civilian leaders. A few years later another one opened for members of Congress at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.
In other places around the country, re-location centers were built for federal government workers who had evacuated and dispersed. Some, but not all, states set up re-location centers for state government officials. If they did, they had to pay for it themselves.
Raven Rock was for our most important leaders, known as our National Command Authority. We put in there lots of special communications equipment that we hoped would still work in the post-attack environment.
By the end of Eisenhower’s administration, we had helicopters that would take care of the traffic problem, for the leaders in Washington D.C. at least. For the people who were assigned seats on the helicopters, anyway. Somebody--I don’t know who or how this was decided--worked up a list of who should be assigned seats on the helicopters. They were given special tickets. Secretly. If you were on the list, you had a ticket. If you didn’t know whether you were on the list, you weren’t.
We thought we would need other underground shelters for other military commanders. In 1955, we built one for the Strategic Air Command at their headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska. The general in charge of SAC could connect from deep underground by telephone to all of SAC’s two hundred bases and units around the world. If they were still there and communications were working. Eight hundred people could be “buttoned up” in that shelter for two weeks commanding our bomber force, we thought. After two weeks, I don’t know what we thought would happen. That would depend on what had already happened.
In 1957, SAC started building inside a mountain in the Holyoke Range in Massachusetts an Alternate Command Center. In case the first center at Offutt wasn’t working. It would be just a few miles from Amherst, where I would be attending college starting in 1959. None of us knew it was there. It’s now being used by the Amherst College library for storage.
Then, in 1960, it wasn’t just bombers SAC would be commanding. It was also intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Soviets had these too. Evacuation wouldn’t be much of a strategy any more. You’d have less than thirty minutes to do what you were going to do.
The U.S. Navy would soon have operational Polaris nuclear missiles in its submarines. A challenge there for the National Command Authority would be how to get orders to the submarines, wherever they might be. They might just end up being out there.
By the middle of Eisenhower’s administration, the Army had been sent lots of tactical nuclear weapons to our Army in Western Europe. If the Soviets had invaded Europe, the commanders might not think they needed orders from home. How things stood back home might seem irrelevant.