You Might Want to Know: III. What's COG? What's It Have to Do with Nuclear Weapons?
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Part III
The clear truth is that after a nuclear war the role of the civil and military establishment would change or invert. The authorities would no longer be protecting the population from the enemy: they would be protecting themselves from the population. One of the effects of nuclear weapons—these strange instruments—would be instant fascism. Martin Amis, Einstein’s Monsters, 1987
In 1961, soon after John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, JFK’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, got a super-secret report from our Pentagon’s Weapons Systems Evaluation Group. It said that with the bigger nuclear weapons now in existence, a surprise attack on five locations—the White House, Pentagon, Camp David, Raven Rock, Mount Weather—would, with a 90% probability of success, destroy the nation’s “command structure.” The attack would “decapitate us,” it was said. Only thirty-five Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles would do the job.
Secretary McNamara decided not to rely only on the buried command posts President Eisenhower had had built. He got something going called Operation Looking Glass—flying command posts. For twenty-four hours every day, a big airplane would be in the air that had special communications equipment in it and a general. If the ICBM launch command centers on the ground had been destroyed, the people in the Looking Glass airplane would still be able to launch ICBMs, as long as the receivers at the Launch Control Facilities and ICBMs themselves hadn’t also been destroyed.
The submarines on patrol in the oceans could still launch their nuclear missiles of course. There the problem might be getting in touch with them. Special extra-long antennas were developed that could be strung out behind the Looking Glass airplanes.
Other airborne command posts were built for the commanders of the European Command, the Atlantic Forces, the Pacific Command, and for the President. These wouldn’t always be in the air. The airborne command post for the President, called Nightwatch, was based at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. If the President could get to it in time and if it was able to take off, he’d be able to run things from there. Until Nightwatch ran out of gas.
But also in 1961--the first year of President Kennedy’s administration and a big year for COG efforts--we began to build out west in southern Colorado another big underground command center for our military. This one would be built inside Cheyenne Mountain, under two thousand feet of granite. It would rest on huge metal springs. And have its own water reservoir, and everything else you could think of. Barber shop, crematorium, everything. This would be the Command Center for NORAD, North American Air Defense forces. They would be who would let us know if we were under attack. Or let the National Command Authority know anyway.
This bunker had as good a chance as anything on the ground did of withstanding a direct hit by one of the thermonuclear bombs both we and the Soviet Union had now that yielded a thousand times more than the Hiroshima bomb had. NORAD had the best chance of survival but it still wouldn’t be a sure thing. Hard thing to test.
Our leaders kept asking themselves what else would be needed for Continuity of Government. In the 60’s, at Mount Pony in Culpeper, Virginia, our Federal Reserve built a radiation-hardened facility and put in it several billion dollars in cash, mostly two-dollar bills, with guards around it, needless to say. This was so that in the “post-attack environment” there would be cash to spend that wasn’t radioactive. Cash that could be spent on whatever there was to buy. That wasn’t itself radioactive.
In the Eisenhower years, it had been realized that in a post-attack environment, legal documents would be needed to establish the authority of whoever was now going to be taken to be in charge. Eisenhower’s Attorney General had drawn up drafts of legislation and forms and other legal documents that he thought might be useful in a post-attack environment. After he’d drawn them up, he always had near him his own “nuclear football” with these legal documents in it. The legislation he had prepared could be presented to Congress, if Congress was still in operation.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what the Attorney General thought would be needed?Think of the legal questions that could arise in a post-attack environment. What if whoever was taken to be in charge now wanted to round up anyone thought to be “subversive,” nationalize the industries that were still functioning, censor the press, suspend elections? In a post-attack environment, you can imagine that a frightened leader might want to do all of these things.
What if some of the survivors were making competing claims about who should be president? How would that get decided? Would any “checks and balances” remain? What if our President, if we had one, or whoever got to be in charge, wanted to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law? Many of the people who gave some thought to COG, including President Eisenhower, thought that in a “post-attack environment” martial law would almost certainly be declared. If martial law were declared, would there be anything to tell us when it would end and the Constitution govern us again? Or would that just be up to the head general?
We could hope the legal documents in the Attorney General’s football dealt with that issue.
If martial law were declared, you could say there had been a kind of COG, that is, Continuity of Government. But wouldn’t we want to say our nation had been killed?
For more of the story of COG planning, see Garrett M. Graff, Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017
Next: Presidential Predicaments II: Harry Truman I-V: I. Approach to Hiroshima