Garrett M. Graff

“Alaska, the push for greater command survivability revived one of SAC’s earliest 1960s-era plans for an alternate command post (ALCOP), a rail-mounted…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Tyler himself narrowly escaped death as president when an explosion occurred while he was a passenger on the USS Princeton in 1844.…

— Garrett M. Graff

“George H. W. Bush said simply, Offutt “has the most sophisticated command-and-control outside Washington.” Offutt”

— Garrett M. Graff

“attack. “One of the awkward questions we faced was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack,” a participant recalled years later.…

— Garrett M. Graff

“OUTPOST MISSION, the presidential helicopter search-and-rescue team in Pennsylvania, was also disbanded in 1970, as atomic weaponry progressed to the point where…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Hundreds more staff could join the ship in an emergency. (One young Navy ROTC officer, Bob Woodward, who went on to be…

— Garrett M. Graff

“the weeks following the war’s end, Truman announced a redesign of the presidential flag—the first since the Wilson years. Chief among the…

— Garrett M. Graff

“The security offered inside a bank safe even became fodder for a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone, in which mild-mannered, bookish…

— Garrett M. Graff

“ID issue would bedevil countless FEMA officials in the days ahead—the agency’s barebones IDs, which lacked many standard government markings like an…

— Garrett M. Graff

“A specific new fear—that a whole city could just disappear in an instant—permeated the American consciousness in the wake of Hiroshima and…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Kennedy, who had campaigned strongly on the “Missile Gap” issue, soon discovered as president that the Soviet Union didn’t have the 500…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Then, instead of relying on income and property taxes to fund the government and the nation’s war mobilization, planners suggested that it…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Humphrey had even visited the CASPER facility on multiple occasions under the cover of darkness during vacations at the Greenbrier. In 1970,…

— Garrett M. Graff

“waned. Efforts to protect civilian life fell by the wayside and a fourth and final grim phase of nuclear reality settled over…

— Garrett M. Graff

“As the president looked out over the South Lawn, toward the Washington Monument and the newly built Jefferson Memorial, an F-86 Sabre…

— Garrett M. Graff

“updates to the nation’s nuclear weapons policies represented just the third major shift in the Cold War; following Eisenhower’s “massive retaliation” and…

— Garrett M. Graff

“House Speaker Tip O’Neill, one of the few briefed on the evacuation procedures, recalled, “I kind of lost interest in it when…

— Garrett M. Graff

“This blockade and political action, I see leading into war. I don’t see any other solution,” LeMay said to Kennedy in one…

— Garrett M. Graff

“conclusion was certainly true in peacetime, but buried in the legislation that created FCDA was a separate section, Title III, that granted…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Ever since the Truman administration, official U.S. war plans assumed that the Soviets would begin a nuclear exchange by exploding smuggled nuclear…

— Garrett M. Graff

“After initial annoyance about the surprise drills, the Pentagon quickly saw value in the president’s interest. “It is the first time in…

— Garrett M. Graff

“One informed theory holds that the secret procedures have a specific, defined role for a small, preselected set of congressional leaders—perhaps as…

— Garrett M. Graff

“disrupted by the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear weapon. If Green Pine was knocked out, SAC brought online in October 1967 the…

— Garrett M. Graff

“age COG—except for one minor problem. There was no clear communication system that would ensure the nation’s leaders didn’t end up living…

— Garrett M. Graff

“The head of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr., promised all 60,000 employees loans to build fallout shelters—and arranged to sell any employees construction…

— Garrett M. Graff

“September 11, 2001, and the subsequent anthrax attack on the U.S. Congress restarted a focus on COG and COOP planning that continues…

— Garrett M. Graff

“again concluded that the Soviet Union “with a high degree of confidence” could kill the president, vice president, and all fourteen remaining…

— Garrett M. Graff

“The U.S. would have to “reinterpret” the Constitution to provide for preemptive searches and seizures when atomic terrorism was involved. Remarkably, over…

— Garrett M. Graff

“During the Obama administration, NORAD ran its first full-scale continuity drill in decades; for the exercise, the blast doors swung closed, sealing…

— Garrett M. Graff

“In an era where detailed maps and especially aerial surveillance were scarce, the government carefully maintained redundant map sources far from the…

— Garrett M. Graff

“The increasingly advanced and elaborate presidential planes were decked out with survival gear like parachutes—always five extra more than the passengers it…

— Garrett M. Graff

“British prime ministers, upon taking office, hand-wrote letters to the commanders of their nuclear missile submarines. Known as “Letters of Last Resort,”…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Evacuees in the shelters would sleep alternating head-to-toe, “the best position for sleep, in that it decreases the spread of respiratory ailments,”…

— Garrett M. Graff

“A nuclear flash started with a “fast-rising, short-duration pulse followed by a comparatively slow-rising long-duration pulse” as the fireball grew. Not even…

— Garrett M. Graff

“inside forget they were hiding in an underground bunker. Under normal circumstances, personnel approaching the PEOC would arrive at its locked vault…

— Garrett M. Graff

“At the Pentagon, for instance, in the NMCC’s secure Emergency Actions room, military officials could find anyone in the Constitution’s line of…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Among other items, the directive—the full details of which are still classified—called for wider COOP planning within government and transferred responsibility for…

— Garrett M. Graff

“Our national security can only be assured on a very broad and comprehensive front. I am using the word ‘security’ here consistently…

— Garrett M. Graff

“When the AEC met with President Truman to present its report, Lilienthal and his team left a space blank. While reading the…

— Garrett M. Graff

“On March 1, 1982, Reagan observed the IVY LEAGUE military exercise—the largest military command post exercise that the United States had run…

— Garrett M. Graff