Filed under: alt-future, American politics, disasters, Legacy Systems | Tags: Continuity of Government, Raven Rock, US Government
I wish I could say that I was busy writing a new book, and that’s why I haven’t posted in a month, but really it’s more about life getting in the way of art, or something. One note is that between last April and this April, I wrote 21 responses to environmental documents for the California Native Plant Society and attended way more meetings than that. This isn’t due to the current administration in Washington, but rather more that we’re in (or just past) the height of the current business cycle, so every bad idea for a development has lumbered out of its crypt, demanding a new life. Or, less, poetically, projects are on their second or third go round after having been rejected the last time, because the land was available for cheap, and some developer suckered some investor into buying it on the promise that the land was so cheap they could afford to deal with all the legal hassles this time. And if it doesn’t work this time, there will be a next time as long as the land remains in private hands. But I’m getting side tracked.
I’ve also had some time to do a bit of reading, and I’d recommend Garret Graff’s Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die. It’s a history of the US government’s attempts since Truman to figure out how to save the presidency from a nuclear war, secret undisclosed underground bunkers and all. It’s fun reading if you’re into this kind of thing, and I suspect it does play into modern politics in some ways that the book itself doesn’t go into.
One important point is that most of this planning is for the executive branch. The House of Representatives only had the now decommissioned Greenbrier bunker to save itself. If they could get out of Washington DC in the 15-60 minutes they had to save themselves, and the Supreme Court was even less prepared to evacuate. Moreover, as we found in 9/11, the one time they actually activated what they call the Continuity of Government System (COG), a lot of the billions of dollars in plans they made didn’t mean squat, either because people wouldn’t evacuate, or they couldn’t evacuate, or critical systems broke down. Of these, the first point is perhaps the most critical, or it was until Trump took office: most presidents, when faced with the question of whether they’d evacuate the White House during a nuclear attack, decided early on that a) they didn’t want to start a nuclear war, and b) if faced with the threat of incoming nukes, they preferred to stay in the White House, leading the defense of the US until they died. Most officials followed their bosses’ lead without even knowing they were doing so. Even Dick Cheney, who was in Washington during 9/11, refused to evacuate, trying to hold everything together from the little bunker under the White House while Bush was evacuated into a randomly flying Air Force One and incidentally (accidentally) left out of touch with the levers of power.
Under Bush and Obama, the planning changed, and now the idea is that the Presidency and other offices will devolve in a huge long complicated line of succession as office holders get destroyed. Rather than making elaborate and likely unworkable plans for getting hundreds of people moved hundreds of miles in a handful of minutes, their new attempt at making sure the US executive branch continues to work apparently centers around having lots of people in the line of succession. If this ever becomes an issue, we may well have a civil war if two people claim the presidency (President and Anti-President, I guess), but that seems more workable than asking dedicated people to leave their posts and families on the vague promise that they’ll somehow survive in an under-tested bunker or jet.
And it turns out that the tinfoil hat crowd was largely right: COG is a huge, decades-long, multibillion dollar set of poorly supervised programs, led in large part by an agency now known as FEMA. It also turns out that post catastrophe US government will almost exclusively be the executive branch running in authoritarian mode with martial law, at least until (heh heh) elections can be held, judges can be appointed, and the legislative and judicial branches can be properly reconstituted, since their survival plans suck dead rat. So yes, the idea that FEMA is this (sinister?) organization designed to implement authoritarian rule in the event of an emergency turns out to be largely true. While it’s now, finally, doing good by helping ordinary Americans deal with natural and other disasters, that wasn’t its first or arguably even its biggest purpose. It’s been through a lot of name changes and ping-ponged between civilian and military control, but the agency now known as FEMA got its start building bunkers for the Cold War, simply so we could fight a nuclear war with the Soviets, on the apparently workable premise that if both sides had something like a Dead Hand to launch nukes after being attacked, neither side would attack. And, more importantly, to spend billions of poorly audited dollars doing so. How much of it is good, how much evil? Hard to say, but most of it (thankfully) was trashed without ever being used.
There are at least three systems at play in (preventing) nuclear war: the Soviets and now the Russians have their Dead Hand, an automated system to launch surviving nukes if nuclear explosions are detected, even if the human command system is knocked out. The US has the COG system to insure that human hands stay alive to push the buttons from somewhere, the UK prime minister gave their UK nuclear sub commanders sealed, hand written orders to be opened in the event of nuclear war, and who knows how the other nuclear powers handled retaliation. And some version of all of these systems is still active. And it’s unclear whether any of them will work, let alone how many fully functioning missiles exist in the world right now.
One thing I wondered, while reading Raven Rock, is how knowledge of the Continuity of Government Programs shaped the way Washington works. Cheney and Rumsfeld were intimately involved in COG ops starting in the Nixon White House, and while their actions during 9/11 makes them seem a bit less evil than I’d imagined (Cheney stayed at his post, while Rumsfeld was reportedly at the Pentagon carrying stretchers after the attack until someone finally collared him and forced him to go back to doing the Secretary of Defense/COG stuff), both of them both knew that the legislative branch was considered expendable in emergencies and were used to using disasters and disaster planning as a way to spend a lot of money and garner a lot of power.
I also suspect current leaders in Congress kowtow to the White House now because they have this idea in the back of their heads that they’re ultimately expendable, that if things got really bad they’d be swept aside just to keep the US government running. If true, I can easily see how such a notion would poison the confidence they currently need to actually govern.
Yes, there were also, initially, plans to help more of the US populace survive, at least back in the 1950s and sporadically thereafter. These plans largely turned out to be unworkable, things on the order of finding a big enough church hall, stocking it up with basic food supplies (e.g. stuff that various commodity programs had too much of), implementing brilliant plans like having bulldozers contracted to cover 40-foot high church roofs in feet of dirt quickly so that said hall could function as a makeshift underground bunker, then ignoring the supplies and plans for 10-30 years until they all had to be thrown out and started again. And most people don’t do individual disaster prep adequately (that’s a crime I’m guilty of). Ultimately, initial, early 1950s proposals of burying all US cities to make the US bombproof faded in the 1960s and 1970s as planners realized that Americans are pants at preparing for any disaster. Thus, protecting the US morphed into COG programs that only tried to keep the top of the executive branch alive and functioning, and even these turned out to be unworkable on 9/11. Still, they’ve learned a lot from that failure, and it’s a lot less clear what current COG plans look like.
Going forward, I’m a little concerned with having people like Steve Bannon intimately involved in planning COG. It’s not just about nuclear war, although I suspect Trump would be the first POTUS to break with tradition and scuttle for the bunkers as soon as things looked scary. But that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem COG faces isn’t terrorism or nuclear war, it’s climate change. FEMA itself talks about climate change and Continuity of Government in some of its documents, but only on a superficial level. Thing is, I know they’re thinking about it, and I suspect they’re thinking about what happens if there are so many migrants that the whole idea of nation-states with control of their own borders starts to break down. In that case, I can see COG figuring out ways to switch to a more authoritarian, and presumably more survival-oriented, mode of governance. Worse, I can see people like Bannon influencing who has their fingers on which buttons, and what they target with their plans and weapons systems.
While we can spin the paranoia endlessly and end up embarrassing ourselves with unintentional anti-immigrant rants, there is a real problem here: what Raven Rock demonstrates is that the US has a long history of expensive, authoritarian, poor overseen, poorly designed, overly elaborate plans for keeping the executive branch alive at all costs. I’m quite sure they’re still doing it, but I’m a lot less sure about whether the plans will do anything more than sow chaos. They may work okay in a short-term terrorist attack, but I’m really concerned about what they’ll do as they grapple with long-term, slow-moving problems, like climate change and human migration. Guess we’ll find out.
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Putting the life back in science fiction 
Guess we have to hope that there’s another enlightened human in the ‘enemy’ camp like Stanislav Petrov in 1983 who’ll stop this nonsense before it runs away and destroys the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Saved_the_World
Comment by SFreader July 17, 2017 @ 1:33 pmAccording to Raven Rock, there have been a number of such enlightened human beings. Even back in Eisenhower’s day, they’d become concerned that nuclear war would start by accident, and a number of people have stopped spurious signals from triggering a war. I doubt we’ll ever hear about it, but if the Russian Dead Hand and other nations’ systems are as bug-prone as the US early warning systems, there’s probably a whole battalion of military officers out there who have saved the world from accidental nuclear war.
The problems have generally come when there’s saber-rattling and bad communications, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis and Able Archer. I suspect we’re in a similar era now, especially with North Korea. That and, yet again, we’re getting another generation of super-missiles that sophomoric military analysts will insist change the equation and make nuclear war winnable or some such.
One thing that might help is if ABC did a remake of The Day After. Apparently that kept Reagan up the night after he watched it and got him thinking seriously about the consequences of his actions. I think our current president needs something similar in his video cue.
Comment by Heteromeles July 17, 2017 @ 3:16 pmThreads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
Less well known than “The War Game” which left me unable to eat for a day after I saw it. Oldies but goodies.
Comment by Alex Tolley July 17, 2017 @ 3:30 pmFYI:
Comment by b. July 18, 2017 @ 7:48 pmhttp://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans-annotated.html
“Ve have a mineshaft gap!”
Comment by Troutwaxer July 23, 2017 @ 7:45 pm