Here are some highlights from this 2017 book by Garrett M. Graff:
* Beyond the physical infrastructure, a major concern in the national evacuation plans was precisely how smoothly those “host areas” would absorb their new residents. Racial tensions were to be anticipated—particularly in areas that would see large influxes of minority evacuees, like Ulster County, New York, which would see nearly half a million minority Bronx residents descend on its nearly entirely white town. These tense questions around integration were a particular concern of Reagan’s first appointee to head FEMA , Louis Giuffrida, who as a colonel in 1970 had written his Army War College thesis on how the government could establish internment camps for “Black Nationalists” in the event that revolutionaries tried to seize control of America’s inner cities. The agency Giuffrida inherited in 1981 had spent its recent years studying similar issues about the problems of evacuees upsetting the racial balance of their “host areas.” “There could be a lot of opposition because a lot of the white people [in Virginia] don’t want a lot of the black people,” D.C.’s head of emergency planning, John Colbert, explained. The head of FEMA ’s predecessor agency, the DCPA , in 1978 had been asked by a reporter: “How are you going to keep those people there from shooting the people coming in?”
“That’s tough,” Bardyl Tirana said, simply.
“Since you’ve studied the problem, you no doubt have an answer to this?”
“Don’t assume that,” Tirana replied.
A FEMA study, done just as the Reagan administration was taking office, laid out myriad problems with evacuating “Blacks, Hispanics, and Orientals” during a national emergency. The fifty-seven-page report, Special Problems of Blacks and Other Minorities in Large-Scale Population Relocation , found that emergency management officials thought minority populations would require “more attention (education) to achieve comparable levels of understanding and recognition of the reality and necessity of crisis relocation.” Beyond that, they were likely to have a “lower rate of public compliance,” less access to both private transportation and private shelters, and have “a greater problem in being accepted in crisis relocation host areas.”
* CNN , which first broke word of the scheme in the 1990s, reported that planners believed “to protect the United States’ unique Constitutional form of government from the ultimate threat it was necessary to have this alternate system of succession.” As one National Program Office employee told the news channel, “We have to go on the premise that we have enough alternates in enough locations to do the job.” William Arkin, a nuclear weapons scholar who had become one of the nation’s leading experts on COG programs, concurred that the Constitution simply didn’t allow for the flexibility necessary to execute and survive a nuclear war—particularly a surprise attack. “The tension cannot be resolved,” he told CNN . “As long as we have nuclear weapons, we’re going to have to fudge on the Constitution.”
But that left the big question: Given the secrecy around the program, if someone from PS3 emerged from a nuclear disaster as the “president,” who among the American public or world leaders overseas would respect that leader? As Duke University law professor William Van Alstyne explained, “If no one knows in advance what the line of succession is meant to be, then almost by hypothesis no one will have any reason to believe that those who claim to be exercising that authority in fact possess it.”
Indeed, after realizing that the systems for authenticating a successor were lacking, the Reagan administration began to institute elaborate mechanisms with FEMA and the Pentagon to ensure a successor’s legitimacy. The plan called for special coded communications that could prove a successor’s identity and establish the highest-ranking official still alive within the government.
* Then, to establish that the remote PS3 teams were, in fact, controlling the government, the plan called for military demonstrations that proved a new president’s authority to foes and allies. “Sometimes, you order U.S. forces to do something,” Clarke says. “You say to the adversary in advance, ‘I’m going to order our forces to do X. You will observe that. That’s how you know that I’m in charge of U.S. forces.’ ” One option was to have the new “president” order an American submarine up from the depths to the surface of the ocean as a clear sign that the successor was in full control of U.S. military forces. The Soviet Union or U.S. allies could then independently verify, either by satellite surveillance or firsthand visual confirmation, that such an action followed.
