How Washington Planned for a Cold-War Apocalypse

RAVEN ROCK
The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die
By Garrett M. Graff
Illustrated. 529 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28.

Over drinks with the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin one evening, George Stephanopoulos — then serving as a policy adviser in the Clinton administration — pulled a card out of his wallet with details about how he would be evacuated from Washington in the event of a nuclear emergency. Sorkin later incorporated the card into an episode of his television show “The West Wing.” But Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s first press secretary, who went on to work as a consultant on the show, warned Sorkin that the plot was unrealistic since no such cards existed. They did, of course — but that had been a tightly guarded secret, and Myers had simply never received one. Not everyone could be evacuated, after all, and wonks evidently took precedence over flacks.

That is just one of the many comically macabre anecdotes that Garrett M. Graff shares in “Raven Rock,” a thorough investigation of Washington’s longstanding efforts to maintain order in the face of catastrophe. In exploring the incredible lengths (and depths) that successive administrations have gone to in planning for the aftermath of a nuclear assault, Graff deftly weaves a tale of secrecy and paranoia. The goal of “continuity of government” — an official euphemism for keeping the American state alive even if almost every American citizen ends up dead — has raised enormous ethical, bureaucratic and engineering challenges for generations of planners. Who would be saved? (Many federal officials, but generally not their families — a decision that has frequently been met with dismay.) From what branches of government? (Planning has often prioritized the executive branch over Congress and the courts.) And where would they go? (Underground, mostly.)

Graff explains how, in 1951, the federal government began building a series of secret subterranean lairs in rural Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. The first of these, known as Raven Rock, is buried under more than a quarter mile of Pennsylvania granite, covers more than 100,000 square feet and can accommodate around 1,400 people in multiple structures “carefully positioned on coiled springs to ease swaying during a nearby attack.” Other sites included a facility hidden inside a mountain at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, which housed a power plant, a medical clinic, a dentist’s office and a 400-seat cafeteria. Graff, a magazine journalist, delights in describing these hideaways (whose existence was first revealed in the 1990s) and the plans for using them; as a result, his narrative sometimes gets bogged down in elaborate, acronym-laden bureaucratese.

But he is ultimately after something more consequential: “Raven Rock” is at heart a history of the Cold War and an exploration of its lasting effects on American politics. Graff’s portrait of that era is more Dr. Strangelove than James Bond. He shows how, again and again, technocratic efforts to prepare for governing after a nuclear attack have collided with the reality that doing so would almost certainly prove impossible, owing to the speed and severity of the carnage — a fact that makes even the most thoughtful plans seem vaguely ridiculous. (Not to mention those that involved spiriting the Liberty Bell to safety.) After years of grappling with these problems, President Dwight Eisenhower reached a grim conclusion. If a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union ever broke out, he lamented to a group of advisers, “You might as well go out and shoot everyone you see and then shoot yourself.”

Graff suggests that the fears of the Cold War planted the seeds of “today’s obsessive secrecy culture” and helped shape the alarmism that he rightly notes “has guided so much of our response to the modern threat of terrorism.” He doesn’t quite flesh out that argument. Still, the book’s valuable takeaway is that if Washington ever has to reach for its Doomsday plans, it will probably be too late. The best defense against worst-case scenarios is competent, rational leadership that avoids them altogether. In the Trump era, however, that might be harder to find than a secret underground bunker.