How We Forgot the Cold War by Jon Wiener

Author:Jon Wiener
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

The point of the Greenbrier Bunker, as Linda Walls told me, was “to preserve the democratic form of government” during and after a nuclear war. But when Reagan became president, conservatives planning for nuclear war decided to ignore the fate of Congress and focus instead on the survival of the White House and the executive branch. The Presidential Succession Act, passed in 1947, had established who would become president if the elected president and vice president died or became incapacitated: the Speaker of the House would become president next, then the president pro tem of the Senate (usually the majority party member with the most seniority), then cabinet officers in the order in which their posts were created: first, the secretary of state, then treasury, then defense, and so on.

But as the Reagan administration began planning for war with the Soviet Union, they worried that a nuclear exchange would kill much of official Washington and could easily make it impossible to determine who was the new president who would serve as commander in chief as the nuclear war continued. They called this problem “decapitation.” The Reagan strategists were planning on a “protracted” nuclear war that would last six months, “with pauses for reloading silos and firing fresh volleys of missiles.”23 So it would be crucial to have a commander in chief, who could order the military to keep fighting—and perhaps even order them to stop.

Reagan therefore created three separate leadership teams that would be sent out of Washington to three different bunkers once an attack was launched, each with a cabinet member who was prepared to become president. If the Russians took out one team, another would be ready to take command. This was not just a plan; as James Mann reported in the Atlantic Monthly, the Reagan administration practiced it “in concrete and elaborate detail.”24

The most remarkable thing about this plan is that the team leaders included Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. At the time, neither was part of the Reagan administration: Cheney was a congressman from Wyoming; Rumsfeld was CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals. The two had worked together in the Ford White House and apparently were part of the innermost circle of power, even when they were out of the White House.

The big problem planners anticipated was how to establish the legitimacy of whoever survived as president—how to convince the surviving Americans, the allies, and of course the surviving Soviet leaders, that, for example, Malcolm Baldridge, Reagan’s little-known secretary of commerce, was now “President Baldridge.” Their solution was “to have the new ‘President’ order an American submarine up from the depths to the surface of the ocean—since the power to surface a submarine would be a clear sign that he was now in full control of U.S. military forces.”25

But what about Congress, out there in West Virginia forty feet underground in the Greenbrier Bunker? Shouldn’t they be involved in decisions about fighting, and possibly ending, this war? One of the planners told James Mann that was “one of the awkward questions we faced .

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