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May 12, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:05:48
Edition 296 - Garrett M. Graff

Author and historian Garrett Graff on "doomsday" planning for a nuclear attack...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for keeping in touch and for keeping the faith with everything I do here.
Your emails are definitely seen and definitely read.
We're going to do some more shout-outs probably in the next edition.
So listen out for those if you've been in touch and thank you very much.
When you get in touch through the website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link and you can communicate with me that way.
Please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
All of that information, absolutely vital for me to get a handle on what's what with my show.
We have a very, very good guest on this edition, and I'm very pleased that I found this man.
His name is Garrett M. Graf.
He's based in Washington, D.C. He is the biographical description, the magazine journalist and historian.
He spent a long time covering politics, technology, national security, and has written for some of the biggest publications in the United States, including Wired, The New York Times.
He's been involved with The Washingtonian and Politico magazine as editor of those two.
His books are varied.
They include The FBI War in the Age of Global Terror, Globalization, The Web, and The Race for the White House.
They're just two of them.
On this edition, we're going to talk with him about the story, he's written a book about it, of the government's secret plans to survive and rebuild after a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil.
Apparently, it's a narrative that spans from the dawn of the nuclear age right up until the present day, because there were threats in the past, and there are definitely, as we all know, threats currently, not only to the U.S., but also to countries like the UK and all of the European countries.
I think you're going to find him a very interesting man, and I personally can't wait to get in touch with him.
Thank you for all of your suggestions, by the way, and your feedback on the show.
Everything gratefully received here when you make a suggestion, I get on to it.
Some of the guests that I get in touch with based on your suggestions don't reply, and they don't want to know, and some of them reply immediately and are keen to be part of this show.
And that actually goes for Garrett Graf on this edition.
He was very keen to be on here and replied very quickly.
But there are some topics that we seem to run into a perpetual stumbling block about.
Flat Earth is one.
Loads of emails wanting me to get onto the topic of the Flat Earth theory.
And I've tried a number of people about this and haven't been getting replies.
The Mandela effect.
We've been trying to do some more people about that.
And again, so if you know anybody in those fields who might be willing to come on here and talk about them authoritatively and could talk with interest for an hour here, then I would be interested in considering them for the show.
But any of your guests, of course, I will consider your guest suggestions here.
All you've got to do is email me through theunexplained.tv, the website designed and created by Adam from Creative Hotspot, and I'll get right on it.
Okay, I'm not going to waste any time on this edition because I think every minute's going to count.
Let's get to Washington, D.C., a five-hour time difference between London Town and America, East Coast.
And let's talk to Garrett M. Graf.
Garrett, thanks for making time for me.
My pleasure.
Tell me a little bit about you, Garrett.
I read a little bit from your biography at the top of the show, which you won't have heard, but very, very impressive, Garrett.
So, you know, how did you get to where you've got?
I've covered national security, intelligence, counterterrorism, those types of issues in Washington, D.C. for most of the last decade.
And it's given me a lot of access and interest in institutions from the CIA and the FBI to the Pentagon and the other Intel agencies in the United States.
Right.
Now, I covered the first and second anniversaries of 9-11.
I was also on air all evening and well into the night when 9-11 happened, which of course was afternoon time in the UK.
I know it was a morning time for you on the east coast of the US.
It's very close to my heart, that whole subject and the events of that terrible day.
But one thing that struck me very forcibly, both on the first and second anniversaries of 9-11, when I went to speak to people on the streets of New York and asked them how safe they felt.
Almost to a man and woman, they said that they felt that they were safe and they felt that the U.S. government and its various armatures of security had their safety covered.
Now, that is a response that you wouldn't get here in the United Kingdom, I don't think.
If you went and asked that question in London, you would get people being a little more skeptical.
Not all of them, but quite a few.
Why do you think that is?
So, I mean, some of it has to do, obviously, and this is an area where I don't pretend to know your history as well as you do, but the UK and the U.S. just have very different histories with terrorism.
You know, the U.S., it has been a very rare and relatively only modern phenomenon for us, certainly in anything at a large-scale attack.
Whereas, of course, the UK has weathered, you know, in many ways, decades of IRA terrorism and other incidents more recently stemming from Islamic extremists.
And, you know, this is, I think, a lot to do with the cultural traditions of both of our countries, in part because, and I say this as a compliment, while the UK might have more of a regular and long-standing tradition of weathering terror attacks, it's also better and more sophisticated and more mature as a population in responding to them.
That the U.S., the fear is, when it happens, is great and society-altering in some ways.
Whereas I think the U.K. is much better about getting up and dusting itself off and soldiering on.
So, you suggest that to the population of America, and I don't doubt this is the case because there is a great sense of, you know, we're safe at home.
To the population of the United States, then the idea of the specter of terrorism is quite a new thing to them.
Is it also a new thing to the security services, who I would guess that up until the 1980s, 1990s, and certainly the 2000s, the U.S. security agencies were more thinking about threats to the government from other regimes than threats from international terror?
Yeah, I mean, some of it is talking about the scale of the issue as well.
You know, the FBI and law enforcement in the United States was certainly used to dealing with terrorism, you know, certainly from the 1960s onwards.
I mean, one of the things that we forget a lot about today is just how common airplane hijackings were worldwide through much of the 1960s and 1970s.
I mean, in the 1970s, you had a commercial airliner hijacked almost every single week in the United States.
And that was certainly true in much of the rest of the globe as well.
And but that was, you know, those were low-grade incidents.
I mean, they were not the goal was neither the total destruction of the aircraft, nor was the goal to destroy targets on the ground, as we saw on 9-11 itself.
I guess the big shift was certainly, and certainly this side of the Atlantic, but definitely on your side of the Atlantic, was the thought that if you found yourself on a hijacked plane, that's a big spin of the roulette wheel.
The chances of that happening very small.
9-11 showed that ordinary people doing ordinary things in ordinary places could suddenly be in the crosshairs.
Absolutely.
And that was, and also, you know, up until 9-11, the recommendation for everyone involved in a hijacking was to, you know, sit back, relax as best you can, and let the professionals handle it.
You know, the idea that a hijacker would be attempting a suicide mission had never really occurred to law enforcement pilots or passengers before that day.
The FBI as a security agency, I mean, my memories of that were an old TV series that they used to rerun here with a man called Ephraim Zimblis Jr. in it, who wore a very, very smart suit, and it was called the FBI.
And I got this impression of an all-embracing, all-American organization that had my safety and security absolutely at heart.
But I wonder how organizations like the FBI, who worked in that way in the past, managed to cope with something that you can't predict and is very hard to investigate.
In terms of terrorism, the kind of people who are involved in that are not the kind of people who might have been involved as agents of a foreign power or be involved in some kind of major crime.
Well, absolutely.
And part of that challenge, obviously, is that what you saw after 9-11, and really, you know, if people begin to dive into this, I'm using 9-11 as a very clear turning point.
But, you know, there had been shifts in this much earlier, you know, in 1998 with the al-Qaeda's attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 in Aden Harbor in Yemen.
One of the things that really challenged the FBI and U.S. and U.K. security services up until then was they had all been geared towards after-the-fact investigations where a bomb would go off and you flood the zone with agents and investigators, and then you go out and you arrest and prosecute the perpetrators.
Well, in a large-scale attack, A, the damage is too great to wait for that to happen.
And B, what we saw on 9-11 were effectively four different suicide missions.
And so there's no one left for you to go out and prosecute.
And so prosecution isn't the deterrent.
And so the FBI, and again, I'm using the FBI a little bit as a shorthand here for the intelligence community writ large in the United States and the UK.
But the FBI really had to reorient itself towards trying to interdict and identify these plots before they took place.
And part of that challenge also is something that we, you know, a much later evolution, a much more recent evolution in this has been this shift towards the so-called lone wolf attackers,
sort of these self-radicalized people who have not necessarily traveled to Pakistan or to Yemen or to Somalia or Afghanistan to get weapons training and bomb training, but just pick up a knife or pick up a gun and go out and attack someone.
And so you have now the challenge of identifying and interdicting and stopping attacks by people who may not have really done anything illegal up until the moment they launch their attack.
You have a new president.
I think the world knows that now.
His name is Donald Trump, and he is taking a different view of many, many things.
Although some things that he is doing are the sorts of things that presidents in the past have done.
I'm thinking about his, you know, he said he wouldn't get involved in the Middle East and now he kind of is.
But when we see things like the firing recently of Mr. Comey and various other of you, he wants to get hands-on involved, it seems to Me?
Do you think that there will be a change in the way that America does these things within the next few years?
I don't necessarily know that that's a case, in part because I think what we are beginning to watch right now, you know, I've been following very closely the Comey story as it has unfolded since his firing is I think, in all honesty, we are watching the beginning of the unraveling of the Trump presidency.
And it's challenging to say whether we might actually even, I think, have Donald Trump as president for the next four years at this point.
I mean, it seems you could look at this one of two ways.
As you say, the unraveling very early of this presidency or the fact that the realities of being in office have started quite quickly to dawn upon him.
There are things that pragmatically you have to do.
Yeah, and part of what we've seen with the president is he had, you know, he came to this office with no experience in governing and no experience in working in Washington or on the world stage.
And some of his voters certainly saw that as an advantage.
I mean, that was part of the reason that he won the election.
But at the same time, I mean, on sort of issue after issue, what you are seeing is him saying, you know, oh, wow, like this turns out to be more complicated than I thought.
And, you know, he actually expressly said that in terms of healthcare, where he gave a speech, you know, a couple of weeks into his presidency, where he said, you know, nobody thought healthcare could be this complicated.
And you're like, well, no, actually, yes.
Literally everybody understands that healthcare is this complicated.
And, you know, then in meeting with the president of China discussing China and North Korea, he said, you know, I listened to the president of China for 10 minutes and I realized it wasn't as easy as I thought.
Well, I mean, look, as far as I'm allowed to express a view, and some of my listeners don't like me talking about American politics to any great degree, but I studied it at university.
I am a great, you know, follower of the scene there.
And also, just in terms of being a citizen of the world, I think we have to have some interest in and concern about things.
What I wonder is, and I pray that America stays safe, and I pray that you don't see the kind of terrorism and the terrorist price exacted on your streets that we've seen exacted on our streets.
But assuming that that might happen one day there, and Mr. Trump will be forced to react, and he does have ultimate power over the security agencies, what do you think he might do?
Or is that impossible to predict?
It's impossible to predict in part because almost by the day here, he is getting more and more constrained by what I would call loosely the normal constraints and paths of power here in the United States.
And certainly that's been true in the hours and days since the firing of Jim Comey.
You know, whatever freedom and benefit of the doubt in terms of action he had during his early days or weeks in the presidency are getting increasingly difficult, both because of the internal politics of the people around Donald Trump himself, but then also because of the way that Congress and the press corps and certainly the Democratic Party is reacting to him.
Now, we have a situation here, but it's a situation everybody everywhere faces.
We are trying to find ways to, as you say, interdict, to stop terrorist attacks before they happen.
Now, one of the ways that you do that is by intercepting electronic traffic.
And there are measures proposed and in the works here that involve internet service providers and others who handle communications having to hand over encrypted data, etc.
And there's a huge, of course there is, there would be their civil liberty debate about that.
You know, how much of your freedom should you trade in order to remain safe?
It is the biggest, perhaps, debate of our time.
And yet, I'm just kind of wondering how Mr. Trump is going to react when such things are proposed there in the States.
He doesn't necessarily have a unifying political ideology in the way that we are used to people of a particular party having a unifying worldview that helps guide their decision making.
You know, this is someone who has no background in politics, came to these subjects relatively recently, and so is sort of figuring out his own path about each of them.
And he is not, by any stretch of the imagination, traditionally conservative.
He's not traditionally liberal.
He's not traditionally libertarian.
And he's not traditionally protectionist.
You know, he's sort of picking and choosing on each issue, which makes it very hard to predict exactly how he's going to react.
You know, in talking to people about this administration, I think in some ways, and I don't actually mean this as a joke, I mean this as a serious political observation, his policies and his policy choices have been driven in large part by what gets the biggest applause and the loudest cheers from campaign rallies that he holds.
The things that he has a consistent support at rallies continue to be talked about.
And things that don't receive applause, he will pivot right back to talking about building the wall and making Mexico pay for it.
It's a fascinating time we're living in.
And look, I get listeners from America who beat me all over the head by venturing into this territory.
So I don't want to go too far down this route, but I just think it's interesting to ask you, especially with your background, I mean, your prestigious background with magazines like Politico and other publications that you've been involved in.
I think we're living in interesting times, as the Chinese said many thousands of years ago.
What we're here to talk about mostly is the research and writing you've done about something that's always fascinated me.
And the description of the book that you've written about this topic is it is the eye-opening true story of the government's secret plans to survive and rebuild after a catastrophic attack on American soil.
We all know this stuff goes on, but we don't get to hear the details, yeah?
Absolutely.
I mean, these are decades of plans that existed broadly known in the United States as continuity of government.
And what they focused on was how to rebuild and restart the United States after a nuclear attack.
I mean, these are both the details of what would happen literally during a nuclear assault, where you have, you know, how the president and top officials would be evacuated, where they would go, and then, you know, everything about what would happen to modern life afterwards.
You know, where the American public would go, who would be in charge of caring for them, feeding them.
And, you know, the book largely focuses on the United States, but it certainly gets into some of the details of the UK's plans because these were plans that existed in almost every major country during the course of the Cold War.
And we had a network of more than 100 bunkers in the United States.
Canada had its own separate network of bunkers, and the United Kingdom had its own separate net of bunkers.
I mean, this was an era, though, where you had the so-called chrome dome of U.S. military aircraft constantly flying 24-7 ready to strike back at the USSR as it was in case it did anything untoward.
And there were bunkers to protect everybody, and there was the whole duck and cover thing.
And here we called it protect and survive.
People were much more geared up to this.
And yet, in this modern age, we have similar threats out there.
Of course, we do from a whole variety of sources.
Nobody knows what Russia is going to do ultimately.
We think they'll kind of stay on side.
But, you know, we intercept their submarines around our waters from time to time and just make them aware that we're watching them.
So that sort of dynamic goes on.
Nobody knows what North Korea is going to do, even if the South is making overtures back towards North Korea these days and trying to see if they can be, I won't say friends, but have better relations again.
So it is a very uncertain world.
We're all aware of the bunkers.
We had a lot of them here.
A lot of them have been sold off.
So a lot of us are aware of what the planning was, or have a rough idea of what the planning was in the 1960s and 1970s, but I don't think any of us really have much of an idea of what is being done now to ensure those things you talked about, continuity of government and protection for those people who might survive something cataclysmic.
And you're absolutely right.
I mean, these were historical plans during the Cold War, but they have been rethought and reimagined and restarted in the years since 9-11 in a way that we actually have very little understanding of.
Many of these bunkers had been largely mothballed during the 1990s and have been restarted and even expanded in the years since 9-11.
The book's title, Raven Rock, refers to what would have been the alternate Pentagon during the Cold War, a bunker in Pennsylvania near the presidential retreat at Camp David.
Now, Raven Rock was a key node in the U.S. government response to September 11th and has been dramatically expanded in the years since 9-11 and now encompasses almost 1 million square feet of office space and workspace and would hold between 3,000 and 5,000 people today in the event of an attack on Washington.
Now, this is true across the country with many of these bunkers.
NORAD, which was the North American Air Defense Bunker, which some of your listeners might know from the early 1980s movie starring Matthew Broderick War Games.
NORAD is the bunker in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs in Colorado.
And it had been shut down entirely soon after 9-11 as the country began to focus on terrorism, but has actually been reopened and restarted in recent years.
And I was in it just a couple of weeks ago.
And they are in the process of rebuilding the command post entirely to focus on cyber threats.
And also, interestingly, the threat of an electromagnetic pulse, which your listeners might know is the sort of a side effect of a high altitude nuclear explosion that would knock out electronics over a very wide swath of the country.
And NORAD is specially shielded from an EMP attack.
And so if North Korea or another rogue state launched such an attack, NORAD would turn into one of the nation's most important command centers.
How did you get to visit this place, Garrett?
Because I can tell you if it was the United Kingdom, you probably wouldn't be allowed to.
Well, so some set of these bunkers over the years have been turned into tourist destinations.
The Congressional Bunker where the U.S. Congress would have gone had been built and hidden under a luxury mountain resort in West Virginia, a couple of hours west of Washington, at the Greenbrier Resort.
That is now actually open to the public, and you can walk through these very strange rooms where the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives would have met in the event of an attack.
And I know that's been true actually of some of the bunkers in the UK as well.
The Burlington bunker, which would have been one of the major UK relocation facilities, has been sort of turned into some public tour space in Wiltshire.
And then same actually in Canada.
The North Bay bunker, which would have been one of the Canadian government's major relocation facilities, has been turned into a tourist attraction as well.
Now, many of these bunkers are still in use today.
Also, as I said, NORAD, Raven Rock, and the third one just outside Washington is known as Mount Weather, which is where the president and the civilian arm of the U.S. government would go.
That's still very much in use, and that and Raven Rock are totally closed to the public.
But NORAD, because it is a sort of quote-unquote normal military facility, does allow some access to journalists working on a specific story or with a specific interest.
I mean, it's certainly not a facility that you can just walk up to and tour under normal circumstances.
As far as you are aware, authoritatively, I'm sure that you've asked questions of the right people.
Is the U.S. building new facilities like this?
Yes, the U.S. is very certainly building new facilities like this.
There have been a number built across the country since 9-11, but many of these bunkers just have continued to exist.
And so you have this sort of very weird situation where, you know, literally dozens of these bunkers across the country still exist and are still in use.
Not just these big ones that I've mentioned, but some smaller ones in places like Massachusetts, Texas, Colorado, Georgia.
You know, the U.S. built these sort of regional command posts around the country so that the U.S. after an attack would, you know, sort of the federal government would break down into less one national government and more of a regional multi-state government network, which actually the U.K. did as well.
I mean, it set up all of these regional command headquarters across the UK, and that that is very much still how and where a lot of these bunkers still exist in the United States in places like Denton, Texas, and Maynard, Massachusetts.
It's going to surprise people that there is still a big emphasis on these things when the nature of the threat quite perceptibly has changed.
You know, the chances that somebody's going to loose off a dirty bomb, we hope they never will, somewhere in a big city, maybe downtown, you know, Manhattan, whatever, or in central London, the chances of that are probably higher than the chances of maybe Kim Jong-un loosing off something should he have the capability that might hit San Francisco.
But even so, America is making this kind of preparation, even in an era when the threat is different.
Yeah, and in some ways, those two things are very much related.
You know, part of the thinking has been driven certainly by 9-11.
Again, it started a little bit before 9-11 with you might remember the sarin gas attack by a doomsday cult in the Tokyo subway was actually a major wake-up call for these planners in the U.S. government,
at least, who really began to realize that today's challenge with terrorism and with rogue states like Iran or North Korea is less the world-ending Armageddon of a mass global thermonuclear war with Russia and more the possibility that on a random weekday,
something terrible would happen just in Washington.
And so you could have very easily today a scenario where if an attack happened on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or a Thursday when the U.S. Congress is in session, I mean, almost every one of the nation's leaders lives and works within a couple of miles of the White House and Capitol Hill.
And so the idea of how do you build in procedures to devolve power around the country if you have an attack that wipes out Washington but leaves the other 329 million Americans just fine.
And so many of these plans since 9-11 have focused on what happens when you have your government leadership knocked out.
You know, who steps up and assumes power?
Who is outside of Washington who could be involved in these plans?
That's a fascinating thing that I've never really considered, Garrett.
If the central nexus, the core of government in Washington is disabled, we won't say wiped out, but severely damaged, who does step up to the plate?
Where does power devolve to?
And this is where these plans get really interesting and really sort of funky in a way that the average person has never thought about, which is we think of the president of the United States as the one person that we elect every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
But the truth is that over the course of the Cold War, the presidency has actually become this massive infrastructure that involves several hundred officials, each of whom is ready to step into the office above them.
So what you have are a presidential line of succession that runs through both houses of Congress, including the Speaker of the House and the President pro tem of the U.S. Senate, as well as all of the U.S. cabinet agencies.
Well, each of those cabinet officials also simultaneously has their own line of succession.
And so, you know, you have 20 people in line for the U.S. presidency, and then each of those people has 20 to 25 people in line for their jobs.
And so you very quickly end up with sort of some weird situations if something happens to Washington where you have someone like the UN ambassador stepping into the role of the Secretary of State.
Actually, even the UK, the ambassador to the UK is one of the senior officials in that line of succession in the State Department outside of Washington.
And then, you know, as you get sort of further down through those cabinet posts, you have people like the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois would be basically the top federal prosecutor in Chicago would be effectively one of the top U.S. officials after an attack on Washington.
And you have sort of this strange collection of high-ranking officials who live and work outside of Washington who would be in charge of reconstituting the U.S. government.
And so, you know, these people that you have never heard of, that you have never thought about, would be the ones after an attack popping up and saying, you know, greetings.
I am your new cabinet and your new president.
Well, that takes me to a point that I wanted to get you to.
It's all very well that they prepare themselves and they rehearse and they're ready for this.
And all of these people who we've perhaps never heard of or don't hear of very often are ready to step up to the plate and do their duty.
But the problem is, say in the event of that attack that we hope never happens on Washington, D.C., and the government is left in a particularly bad state, but it reconstitutes, the plan is there.
But you've then got to explain that to people.
And if you're not beginning to explain what happens to people now, because you wouldn't want to panic then, would you, just imagine what's going to happen when you have to embark upon the monumental task of telling people how things are going to be for the foreseeable future.
And that's actually, you raise a great point.
And it's one that it's one of the most troubling sets of questions that I'm left with at the end of researching this book.
I mean, I spent four years putting this book, Raven Rock, together.
And part of what really worries me as I'm thinking about this today is how little we know about what these plans would actually be like after a catastrophic attack on the Capitol or the United States.
And so that makes it hard for us to judge in advance the legitimacy of the people that would be popping up telling us that they're in charge afterwards.
That precisely gives me the point.
And especially in a country where freedom is so important, which it is in the United States, it's important here too.
But, you know, these people put themselves up on, well, I don't know if there would be television, but there'd certainly be the emergency broadcast system of radio stations in the States.
And they say, I am your regional coordinator for this, and I want you to do that.
What is to stop the public saying, who the hell are you?
And how can we be sure you are what you say you are?
That sounds to me like not an insurmountable problem, but a big one.
It's not a minor problem at all.
And I absolutely agree with you.
And part of this is, you know, certainly you need some level of security and secrecy around these plans in terms of the tactics.
I mean, the specific plans of who would be evacuated, where and how, and what are the specific communication capabilities or command capabilities of specific facilities or specific vehicles.
But there are big questions in some of these plans that we know about that have never been properly addressed.
I mean, the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is what is supposed to guide presidential succession, doesn't actually answer the question of whether it is legal and constitutional for the Speaker of the House and the President pro tem of the Senate to even be president of the United States.
That there is an active debate among constitutional scholars of whether the presidency can only exist among executive branch officials.
And this is a debate that stretches back to the literal founding of the United States when James Madison, the father of the Constitution, the man who really wrote this document, said that he didn't believe members of Congress should be allowed to be president.
And so this is, we know that there is a possibility that in the event of an attack that knocks out the president and vice president, you could have a struggle between the Secretary of State and the Speaker of the House or the President pro tem of the Senate.
And both of them could be arguing and that they are the rightful president.
And that is not the moment that you as a nation or as a world that we want to be having that debate.
You would have thought they'd have made plans for that because you're supposed to be dealing with whatever did this to You and not fighting within yourselves.
Absolutely.
And, you know, there is no good system and certainly no fast system for us as a country to decide who the leader of the free world is, if there is such a fight.
And so, you know, that seems like exactly what you want to try to sort out in advance.
And it's really stunning to constitutional scholars that we haven't.
And what would be to stop in a situation like that?
I mean, it is fascinating just to consider.
And it's not beyond the bounds of possibility.
That say maybe a rebel trucker in Nashville who had a big public following or could establish a big public following, gets hold of a radio transmitter and says, these people are telling you this, but I'm setting myself up as your leader here.
I'm going to look after your interests.
We're going to rebuild.
You know, how do you deal with that?
You're dealing with an external threat potentially or a threat that's homegrown terror.
You've got to find out what that's all about, where it's come from and what it's going to do next.
But you're also having to make sure that your legitimacy and authority is firmly imprinted on all of the states coast to coast.
There's certainly that concern.
Let me even make this a more basic concern.
Let's say that you are the field grade officer who answers the telephone at Raven Rock, and you are an Army captain and you are 35 years old.
And you have Speaker of the House Paul Ryan on one line saying, launch nuclear weapons.
And you have Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on the other line saying, don't listen to him.
Don't launch nuclear weapons.
I am the legitimate leader of the United States.
And, you know, that doesn't really seem like the time that we should be relying on that 35-year-old military officer to be listening to some constitutional law briefs from various scholars as he decides and watches these maps of incoming nuclear missiles.
But I guess this problem arises from the fact that America is a system of checks and balances.
And the American system has been designed so that nobody can hijack power, that it's a fair and balanced, there's a phrase for you, a fair and balanced system.
Absolutely.
And this is sort of part of the challenge that we have watched Donald Trump unfold in American politics over the last couple of months and the last year, which is that we are coming to understand just how much of our government is not laws, but norms.
And that we rely, as you say, on an informal system of checks and balances and norms and standards that are more rooted in tradition in many cases than they are in actual law.
That's a worry.
I mean, if you look at states like Germany, which of course rebuilt after the Second World War, the Americans and the British helped to rebuild their systems.
And one thing that they brought in in Germany was the Beamtenstadt, the legal state.
Everything is enshrined in law.
There is a regulation and a law, and it's all written down just to make sure that nobody like Hitler could ever rise up again in Germany.
But in our systems, we don't have a written constitution here in the United Kingdom.
You do in the United States.
But a lot of it is down to dealing with the situation when it arises.
Yes, and assuming good intentions on the part of the other actors involved in the incident.
And, you know, this is sort of part of the challenge that you see sort of people wrestling with in terms of nuclear command and control in the United States now, which is, you know, we have spent 50 years trying to simplify the nuclear launch procedures to ensure that they can be executed as quickly as possible.
And so we have removed all of the checks and balances on the president of the United States deciding to engage nuclear command authority.
And that's been really worrying to Democrats and others here in the United States as they now begin to wonder, well, what happens if you don't think that you can actually trust the person in the White House with nuclear weapons?
You know, that we don't have a system where the president and the Secretary of Defense have to agree, for instance, on the launch of nuclear weapons, or the president has to get a signature from Congress in order to do it.
He can launch a nuclear weapon at anyone at any time for any reason.
And in the meantime, while all of this is going on, you've got to be explaining to the people what has happened and the fact that they are going to be safe.
We assume they're going to be safe.
And that we are working in your best interest to assure continuity and the future.
Absolutely.
And this is where a lot of these plans come into place, which is they are incredibly detailed in a way that really stunned me as I was researching them.
This is not just about the president and nuclear launch authority at the moment of crisis.
I mean, this is our national archives thought through very carefully not just the idea or not just who to preserve about government in the United States, but what.
So they decided that they were going to save the Declaration of Independence before they saved the Constitution.
And the Library of Congress thought through that they were going to save Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address before they saved George Washington's military commission.
And then you have the U.S. Post Office would be the agency that was in charge of registering the dead and figuring out who was still alive.
The National Park Service, our friendly park rangers, would actually be the people who would run the refugee camps because the thinking was that the national parks would be largely untouched by nuclear war.
And so that you could flee your devastated urban areas out into the bucolic wilderness of our national parks where there would be park rangers waiting with tents and supplies.
I can understand those things because in America, the number of portals, the number of outlets for Uncle Sam are limited.
You know, in every community, you've got the U.S. Postal Service that unites the nation.
And similarly with the Park Rangers, the Park Service, that's a thing that is nationwide.
But in America, it's a federal system and not that many things are.
Absolutely.
And then you get into sort of all of the funny plans, too, where our Internal Revenue Service had also very carefully thought through how they would levy taxes on nuclear damaged property to help raise revenue.
And then sort of part of this was also certainly during the height of the Cold War, these very expansive plans that would have appointed effectively private citizens in many cases, you know, leading CEOs of their era to be czars over large chunks of the U.S. economy.
I mean, seizing all of the transportation in the United States, seizing all of the factories and manufacturing in the United States, even including seizing the housing in the United States in many ways to ensure that refugees could be properly housed with whatever parts of America escaped damage.
Do you think the experience in recent years of New Orleans and what happened there and the rebuilding that was necessary?
We don't hear much about New Orleans these days.
It seems to have got back on its feet.
But for a couple of years back there, it was touch and go.
It was a difficult time for people there.
Do we think that we learned anything from New Orleans?
Well, so the lesson of New Orleans is actually the lesson of many of these continuity of government plans, which is that the U.S. government is not and did not really plan to be a short-term solution for people who survived an attack or a disaster.
There was always the expectation that there would be several weeks or even several months before the federal government was really able to reconstitute itself and to begin to provide aid to damaged regions.
And that's certainly something that we did see in New Orleans.
And there, certainly some of the plans just didn't work.
But, you know, it was several days when people were effectively on their own before the federal government was able to mobilize.
I remember the great sense of relief that we saw on television coverage here.
And I'm sure it wasn't a total reflection of the thing because television never is, but that sense of relief when the military engineers finally arrived to shore up the levies or try to.
Yeah, and that's sort of part of what's also sort of strange and disconcerting about when you look at how these plans would unfold, which is, you know, we like to think of ourselves as a civilian system of government.
But at the same time, there is an expectation among many people and certainly among many of the planners here who decided, you know, that effectively after a large-scale attack or even a large-scale natural disaster, we would have to declare martial law and rely on the military to help guide us back someday to a civilian government.
And what you saw with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was actually the civilian leadership asking for that.
I mean, they were asking for the U.S. military to step in.
And as you say, it was a sense of relief when, you know, large columns of armored vehicles and men with guns arrived on the scene.
And that's really troubling for a civilian society.
Yeah, but I think, you know, most people would think, well, there's going to be a plan that kicks in here and there'll be various agencies and they're going to make it all right.
And as those people who were in the, what was it, was it that the kingdom, what was that building called that they were all in there?
There was a big, yeah, the kingdom.
The kingdom, yeah.
All of those people in the kingdom for so long discovered where law and order was beginning to break down by some accounts.
You know, things do not work as smoothly as you might want them to.
Absolutely.
And that's certainly the case when you look at these plans in almost any sector during any era that they have existed since the 1940s.
It's really clear that these plans would not work in the way that they were intended.
And in fact, in many ways, the one day that these plans were actually ever activated, September 11th, 2001, they very much didn't work as planned.
And you saw this tension between the ability to hide senior U.S. officials and the necessity that those officials felt in trying to ensure that they were able to lead.
I mean, there was sort of a very distinctive conversation about putting the president aboard Air Force One and getting him up into the sky where he was safe.
But as we talked about in Congress afterwards, it doesn't seem like Winston Churchill would be remembered quite in the same way if during the Blitz he had said, you know, you are all safe.
Your government is in control.
Don't mind me.
I'm just going to take off and fly around London for the next couple of weeks.
Yes, the perception of what happens is as important, I imagine, as the reality of what is done.
Absolutely.
And that brings me to A point that is the crux of all of this, isn't it, really?
If something on a bigger scale than an attack on one place happens, if something that affects a number of sites, perhaps major cities, the unthinkable nuclear weapons are deployed by whoever's stupid enough to use them, what becomes of the people?
You know, what happens to them?
Do they have to fend for themselves to an extent?
Very much so.
And this is sort of part of the evolution of these plans through the Cold War, where you have the grand hopes at the beginning of the Cold War that the United States would be able to evacuate and protect many of their leading cities and huge chunks of the population.
And that over the course of the Cold War, as nuclear weapons got larger and more powerful, as you saw the scale of these weapons and the size of these arsenals grow, those plans for civilian protection really shrank.
And effectively, it just got down to a point where the only thing that the U.S. government was really that concerned about was getting a small number of civilian leadership and military leaders right off into the U.S. government bunkers and that the rest of the nation would be effectively on its own.
What a lot of people suspect, certainly this side of the Atlantic where people are maybe a little more cynical one way or another, for reasons I can understand, let's say skeptical, for reasons I can understand.
There is the view that the politicians have looked after themselves and they'll have a plan.
The rest of us will probably fry.
Absolutely.
And that is certainly the almost explicit plan here in the United States.
But it is sort of funny to think through, you know, how much these government planners thought through what they would need.
You know, the Canadian bunker at North Bay, for instance, had a whole CBC radio studio with a set of jazz albums so that you could continue to play jazz after the apocalypse.
Good god.
And in the UK bunkers, you know, obviously there were provisions and thousands of tea sets set aside so that, you know, even after Armageddon, none of the British leaders would be without their afternoon tea.
Terribly important.
Listen, I have been in one of the bunkers in this country, and I think it's been disbanded now.
But we have national radio in this country.
The BBC has a national speech station.
And the main, you don't have long wave radio there.
You have AM medium wave radio in the States.
But we have long wave for one of our stations here, which covers, I mean, they're going to turn it all off now.
And that's a whole other issue because I don't think they should be turning off long range communication systems and relying on digital.
But that's another debate.
This big transmitter on 200 kilohertz AM covers from Scotland all the way down to, you can get it in France.
You know, it covers a massive area.
So it's one frequency.
Underneath the transmitter in the Midlands in England, there was a bunker.
And one night when I was working in radio in that area, we weren't supposed to go there.
One of the engineers at that site, and it's 25 years ago now, so it doesn't matter, took us down to see the bunker.
And in the bunker was a little German EU tape recorder to play back recorded information announcements, just a very simple thing, a very basic mixer, a standard microphone, just the one, then some wooden furniture for somebody broadcasting to sit at.
All of the broadcasting gear was encased in a glass case, rather like a display case that you would see in a shop in an old-style jewelry store.
And then there were bunk beds and places for people to sleep and presumably stores of storable food.
And that was it.
And it was all rather when you see it and when you confront it face to face, it makes you think the unthinkable.
It makes you confront the things that most of us, because we're busy people and we'd rather not think about bad things, but it makes us consider them.
Absolutely.
And this was part of the challenge.
You know, you're talking about it at a government level, but this was sort of part of the challenge of civilian protection during the Cold War was that, you know, most people don't really want to spend their days and particularly their weekends thinking about being obliterated by nuclear war.
And so it became very hard to encourage people outside of a few crisis moments like the Berlin crisis or the Cuban Missile Crisis to keep their own fallout shelters stocked and supplied.
You know, no one wants to devote a weekend to rotating the canned foods out of their nuclear bunker, you know, just in case sometime in the next six months is when nuclear war happens.
I get the impression listening to a lot of American radio, which I do.
There are companies that do very well out of advertising a year's supply of storable food or what was one of the commercials, 20-year shelf life or 10-year shelf life, delicious bacon packed and ready to go.
The reality is, I guess, the people who actually make those kind of preparations, even if they should, I haven't made those kind of preparations.
Maybe you have, but most people don't.
Most people don't.
But you do point at something that is certainly true about American culture these days, where there is, and I think that some of this is driven by 9-11 and the low-grade anxiety that has existed since then,
that there is a sort of culture of doomsday prepping now that exists among people in the United States who really do think very long and hard about this.
I mean, there are reality TV shows that you can watch here in the United States about doomsday preppers and their lives and just exactly what they have put together to help survive the apocalypse.
Do you think politicians there, and to some extent a reflection here, do you think that they are doing enough to make us aware of the preparations that they have made for us in the event of something bad happening?
Do you think they're being honest enough with us, in other words?
Absolutely not.
I think that this is one of the worst parts of these plans is just how little we actually have knowledge of what these plans and how they would be executed today are.
And that's pretty troubling, I think, for the reasons that we talked about earlier in the show about the fundamental legitimacy of some of these plans and procedures after an attack on Washington or a disaster in the country.
But at the same time, you know, I do think that there is more that the average person should probably be doing that the U.S. government just doesn't really emphasize as much anymore.
So people could be given guidance on, you know, in the event of any kind of civil emergency, this is what you need to do.
I suppose the stuff they wouldn't want to tell you about is the kind of powers that the authorities interacting with you as an individual citizen might be given in an instance like that.
I'm sure the powers of the military and others to shoot, for example, are greatly enhanced.
And, you know, things like looting would be a capital offense.
Yeah, I mean, so the highest level of these plans remain almost entirely secret today.
They're called enduring constitutional government, ECG.
And what they have to do with is the interaction between the three branches of government, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial.
And we know almost nothing about these plans.
And this is an area where I think it is really troubling and something that we need to be giving a lot more thought to during peacetime, you know, during the time when we have an opportunity to debate these in a quiet forum.
So how do you, now you've done this research, Garrett, and talked to the people you've talked to, do you feel, well, how do you feel about all of this?
How do you feel that you would, you're in Washington, it is a target.
How do you feel about your own personal safety?
Oh, it's, it's, I would like to say, and I, and I laugh darkly here, I would like to say that I feel good about it, but I certainly don't.
I mean, I think that the truth of the matter is, you know, we would be in real trouble in the event of a major attack, in part because what we know about these plans these days and how they have worked the few times they've ever been used in the past is not well.
And so I think that, you know, it's important to have these plans in the hopes that some of them would work.
But I think it would be a catastrophic disaster and that almost none of these plans would work in the way that we anticipate.
And in the event of something catastrophic nationwide that affected many communities, in all of the calculations these clever people have done as to how everything will work, do they give any indication as to how long it would take to get some semblance of normal society up and running again?
It depends a little bit, obviously, on the scale and particularly what was damaged.
I mean, one of the things that people really worry about today are cyber attacks on the electrical grid.
You know, that has the potential to be catastrophic across a wide swath of the country pretty quickly and for a pretty long period of time.
I mean, there's not a lot of spare power generating capability in the United States.
And so, you know, I think that most people really fear that it would take, you know, several weeks or several months to reestablish control and safety and security over any sort of large swath in the United States.
And when you talk to officials today, you know, what they really talk about is their fear of what they call the second week, which is all of that unrest that we saw in New Orleans.
That was all still the first week.
I mean, that was still when there was food in shops and food in people's cabinets.
You know, it's that second week where food begins to run out, where medical supplies have run out, where water supplies have run out.
That's where people really get worried about, you know, how society would break down.
So this is not just the job for somebody in a military uniform with lots of nice shiny gold braid on it and a pair of Ray-Band sunglasses and a big hat to do.
This is some psychology, too.
Absolutely.
Well, you've given me a lot of food for thought, Garrett.
We're going to have to talk again about all of this, but it's a fascinating topic.
And just remind my listeners what the book is called.
The book is called Raven Rock, the story of the U.S. government's plan to save itself while the rest of us die.
Oh, boy.
What a thought.
Please don't lose any sleep having heard this, but it certainly makes you think.
And what's your website?
GarrettGraf.com.
And that's Garrett with a double R and a double T. A double R, double T, double F. Yes.
Garrett, fascinating to talk with you.
Thank you so much for making time for me.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Garrett M. Graff, I think you'll agree a truly fascinating guest, and I'll put a link to his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
We have more fascinating guests in the pipeline for you.
Thank you very much for being there for me throughout all of my trials and tribulations one way or another.
But we're halfway through 2017 and we're sort of getting there and staring down the barrel of the 300th edition of The Unexplained very soon.
It's only going to be a month or so before we're there.
And, you know, I think back to when I sat exactly Here with some slightly more primitive equipment I've been learning over the years and did the first show.
And I really can't believe that here we are doing it in a slightly more sophisticated way, but still communicating and showing that the mainstream media is not all there is.
And that's a whole other story.
One of these days I'll sit and I'll talk with you about my experiences with mainstream media.
You may find them interesting.
If you want to get in touch with me, the website theunexplained.tv, send me an email through that.
If you can make a donation for the show, then that would be very gratefully received.
And if you have recently, thank you very much from the bottom of my heart for your support and your help.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, stay in touch.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
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