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How Would the U.S. Government Survive the Apocalypse?

Garrett M. Graff's 'Raven Rock' Explores Seventy Years of American Government Planning for Nuclear War.

By Matthew KresalPublished 6 years ago 4 min read
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Since the dawn of the nuclear age, how to survive a potential war fought with perhaps the most dangerous weapons invented by human beings has been a frequently asked —not just by private individuals, but by governments as well. Tracing the history of how the U.S. government has planned for a nuclear showdown and its aftermath, Garrett M. Graff's 2017 book Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die is a sobering but engrossing look into this shadowy world.

The book traces the routes of the doomsday planning back to the Second World War and the preparations made in the event of a German bomber attack upon the nation's capital. After the atomic bomb was dropped and the Cold War began to take hold, those plans began to evolve across decades and billions (if not trillions) of dollars in studies and construction costs. What started as bunkers or simple evacuation plans eventually came to include multiple shelters, technological advances that helped give rise to the internet, questions of constitutional law, and the troubling matter of whether a nuclear war would even be survivable.

The book draws its title from Raven Rock Mountain Complex in Pennsylvania, just one of many Cold War bunkers set up in the 1950s that still operate in some capacity to this day. The facility, meant to act as something of an "alternate Pentagon" carved beneath the countryside, becomes something of a case study, running throughout the book as the tides of strategic thought shift from the Cold War era from the Cuban Missile Crisis through the Age of Terror. Readers learn how the facility was born and operated in secret throughout the Cold War, largely put into mothballs by Dick Cheney when he served as Secretary of Defense under the first President Bush, and then hurriedly put back into service and expanded after 9/11.

Inside the Raven Rock bunker

Rave Rock's history is just one of the many surprises to come out of the book. There's tales of nuclear close calls; collusion between government and industry throughout the Cold War, including AT&T's role in keeping wartime communications working, as well as plans by the Eisenhower administration for certain business leaders to effectively run portions of post-war America; how the Air Force developed the technology to launch its ICBM's from its flying command posts while simply flying over them; how Jimmy Carter became the unlikely President most interested in Continuity Of Government (COG) planning; and how an infamous traitor gave the Russians detailed knowledge of them in the 1980s. The book also explores how the JFK assassination and Watergate left permanent marks on those plans, from a more firm establishment of the Presidential line of succession to how Nixon's Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger ordered military leaders to essentially ignore a nuclear launch order in the last days of the Nixon administration. These stories demonstrate the often perilous nature of Cold War planning and the ingenuity behind advances the public would learn of years after the fact.

Yet the book makes for very sobering reading at times for many of those reasons, and for two facts primarily; the first is that, as early as the 1950s, the U.S. government knew that saving the public was an impossible feat. Worse, despite protestations to the contrary, including calls for families to build suburban fallout shelters and plans from the Reagan era to evacuate major cities, the government focused on saving itself and keeping the country capable of fighting a nuclear war if not necessarily reestablish democracy in its aftermath.

Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) bunker on 9/11, one of the incidents portrayed in 'Raven Rock'

The other sobering fact is demonstrated by our recent history with the events of 9/11. Despite decades of COG planning, not to mention all the money spent on communications and bunkers, chances are they would never have worked. The disorganized way in which things unfolded that day might well demonstrate that the basic problems of these plans have, even after seven decades, never been overcome. It's a terrifying yet simple fact that Graff makes clear.

Raven Rock is more than just another Cold War history lesson as a result. It's a journey through the ever-shifting landscape of governmental planning, from 1945 to the present day, as the men occupying the land's highest elected offices struggled to come to grips with a basic question: how would America survive in the event of a large-scale attack? For all of its insights into Cold War thinking, the book serves as proof of the timeless adage about "the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry."

More than seventy years after the Trinity test ushered in nuclear weapons, we're still learning how true that is.

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About the Creator

Matthew Kresal

Matthew Kresal was born and raised in North Alabama though he never developed a Southern accent. His essays have been featured in numerous books and his first novel Our Man on the Hill was published by Sea Lion Press in 2021.

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