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WASHINGTON — America’s leaders have made elaborate preparations to survive a nuclear war while everyone else apparently dies.
The plans go back decades and only cover top government officials, according to a new book.
“In the early 1950s, the government really hoped and believed it would be able to save most Americans,” writer Garrett M. Graff told The Washington Post. But “plans and ambitions gradually shrunk until, realistically, the best they could hope to do is save the senior leadership.”
Graff describes the elaborate plan in the book “Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself – While the Rest of Us Die.”
Graff discovered that the federal government maintains several huge secret underground fortresses where officials, officers and politicians — but not average citizens — would survive nuclear war in relative luxury. One of them, Raven Rock near the Pennsylvania/Maryland state line, contains several freestanding multi-story buildings with 900,000 square feet of office space.
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Raven Rock is where government leaders and top brass from the Pentagon would flee in the case of an attack on Washington D.C., Graff revealed. Former Vice President Dick Cheney hid there briefly after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
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Another underground complex, Mount Weather in Virginia, once was where the Supreme Court, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and paintings from the National Gallery of Art would be kept safe. That still might be the case, The Post reported.
The exact details of the bunkers and evacuation plans are unknown because they are classified. Graff was able to learn some details of the plans by sifting through declassified documents.
Graff became interested in the federal government’s survival plans when a coworker found a misplaced government ID and gave it to Graff.
“The back of the ID had these evacuation instructions on it,” Graff told The Post. “And so I got on Google Maps and followed the instructions and they led to a road that very clearly went into the side of a mountain, and you can see on the Google satellite view big concrete bunker doors.”
Some tidbits about those plans include:
- The government has a number of custom-built 747s that are “fully staffed with battle planners and war planners and meteorologists and anything else you might need to run a nuclear war,” Graff said.
- The flying war rooms are protected from electromagnetic pulse attacks with a fine wire mess. They can communicate with nuclear submarines via a five-mile-long wire.
- The federal government’s last major effort to help citizens survive nuclear war in the 1960s involved the distribution of 150 million pounds of wheat crackers and biscuits to fallout shelters across the country.
Uncle Sam, it seems, is a prepper.
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