Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die by Graff Garrett M

Author:Graff, Garrett M. [Graff, Garrett M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2017-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

I . The communications links between the four command posts were kept constantly open and running to ensure that the systems were always working and any outages would be noticed immediately.

II . In later years, the company would become a major builder of the nation’s hardened missile silos.

III . The books would have the scintillating titles of Ground Motion Technology Review and, later, Approximate Probabilistic Methods for Survivability/Vulnerability Analysis of Strategic Structures .

IV . Since no model existed for the elaborate spring-mounted, EMP-protected system, the Air Force first built and tested a full-scale replica in Albuquerque.

V . As Odom explained years later, “Under PD-59 the targeting of Soviet forces in East Europe probably would not have prompted an immediate Soviet strike on the United States.” Although unknown at the time, historians have since uncovered that the Soviet Union was undergoing its own shift in strategic doctrine, which similarly focused on limiting nuclear attacks to the European combat theater.

VI . Generated automatically by an unsophisticated computer, the code words were preprinted the same for every month—meaning that watch officers received code words for days like February 30 and September 31.

VII . Other important papers and artifacts from the Library of Congress and National Archives, like the Gutenberg Bible, were moved outside Washington, too; many vital documents ended up at Washington & Lee University in Virginia.

VIII . Doomsday planning went beyond government institutions as well; the atomic age had begun to reshape the museum world within months of Hiroshima. In 1946, wealthy art collectors Sterling and Francine Clark had been planning to either donate their trove of European art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or build a small museum near their home in Manhattan, but as the Cold War deepened, Sterling Clark—the heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune—became afraid that their extensive art collection could be destroyed by an atomic attack. Rather than keeping their art in New York, the couple settled on building what would come to be known as the Clark Art Institute—now considered one of the nation’s top art museums—in the more rural Massachusetts Berkshires near Williams College.

IX . The nation would have been puzzled by some of the cultural treasures meant to be preserved during a nuclear attack: When the Pentagon was asked what valuable documents and artifacts should be preserved, it included a list of the oil painting portraits of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.