This is a book review of Graff’s 2018 “ Raven Rock. The Story of the U.S. Governments Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die”.

This book exposes the government’s plans to carry on government and democracy after a nuclear war with Russia that began in the Cold War and continues on today. But without the rest of us, civilians would not be saved.

This is a patently ridiculous plan because our nation, and human life will be destroyed, as Graff explains below:

“The result of the president launching the nation’s bombers, submarines, and missiles against Russia would almost surely destroy not only both countries but all human life on the entire planet. There are some 30,000 nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal, the rough equivalent, one CIA director calculated, of 55 billion traditional 500-pound TNT bombs from World War II. Enough, as he said, to carpet each state in the union with a billion bombs—and still have five billion bombs left over.”

In the initial plans that began during the Truman administration, civilians were to be saved, but as time went on it became clear this couldn’t be done (that will be the subject of a later post).

So if the government wasn’t planning on helping the American people survive for two weeks after a nuclear war, then Homeland Security and FEMA surely don’t have any plans to help us cope or survive the permanent emergency ahead of energy and resource decline, which they certainly know about as shown in my posts at energyskeptic under menu item experts, categories government and military. The actions that especially need to be taken 20 years ahead of time are relocating some of the 80% of the people who live within 200 miles of the coasts to the interior of the country, where 80% of food calories are grown, rationing of food and energy fairly, and much more.  Individuals simply can’t cope on their own, actions at all levels of government would need to be taken to soften what lies ahead.

Whenever a nuclear war starts, only top government officials will be able to go to the deep mountain shelters built at hundreds of billions of taxpayer expense.   Mostly from the executive branch, it was decided not to tell Congress anything since one of them was likely to spill the beans.  And the Supreme court didn’t want a shelter, since their families couldn’t come with them (many other departments and people felt this way as well).

It’s known that tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on shelters, evacuation aircraft and helicopters, vehicles, keeping bomb shelters running, communications systems, and much more, but since so much of the money is in the top secret black budget, it may never be known how much has been spent.

And what a waste of money!  Chapter 17 has an amazing recounting of what an utter fiasco ensued after 9-11, much of it new information to me.  All these plans made for five decades fell apart. Anything that could go wrong did with evacuation plans, finding the 20 or so officials in the chain of the presidency in a decapitation event, miscommunication and being unable to communicate at all, confusion across all government and military agencies, no one who knew much about what the Continuity of Government (COG) plans were or how to activate them, all of the top FEMA employees were at a conference in Montana and unable to help out, and the inability of President Bush to speak to the people or anyone else for that matter from the airplane he was flying in – such a mess that we’d all be dead now if this had been a nuclear war.

But were these crazy plans scrapped after 9-11?  Heck no, if anything the government is spending even more money on bomb shelters, airplanes to run a nuclear war from in the sky since the U.S. land will be ruined and devastated below,

Here’s how the author describes his book:

“This book is meant to be the first definitive tour of the hidden architecture of the Cold War’s shadow government. It is a history of “how.” How nuclear war would have actually worked—the nuts and bolts of war plans, communication networks, weapons, and bunkers—and how imagining and planning for the impact of nuclear war actually changed the “why,” as leaders realized the horrors ahead and altered the course of the Cold War at several key points in response.

Since the Truman administration and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the federal government’s basic plan hasn’t changed a bit from the initial plan of run and hide in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia.

This story is a challenge to tell because much of the COG machinery remains shrouded in secrecy. Many of my requests to declassify even 50-year-old reports and memos were denied. The National Archives refused my request to release, for instance, four Kennedy-era memos from 1962 and 1963 dealing with civilian emergency planning—arguing that all four still remain so vital to national security that not a single word of them could be declassified.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent anthrax attack on the U.S. Congress restarted a focus on COG and COOP planning that continues to this day. Today, this secret world still exists, just beneath the surface of our country. In many ways, it’s actually more expansive, powerful, and capable today than it ever was during the twentieth century.

A generation before Ashton Carter took over the Pentagon as President Obama’s fourth defense secretary, he had helped design the E-4B “Doomsday plane” meant to help the commander-in-chief run a nuclear war from the sky—the same plane is still in use today to ferry defense secretaries around the world. It sits every day on a runway in Omaha, Nebraska, fully staffed, with its engines turning, ready to launch in just minutes and run a nuclear war from the sky.

Today, blue-and-gold Air Force helicopters still practice evacuating officials from Washington each day in the skies over the capital. Today, each time a major event like a presidential inauguration or State of the Union speech occurs, there’s still a “designated survivor” from the established line of succession, who skips the event and stays in a secure facility under guard until the event ends without incident.

Throughout the 1970s the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—working with OEP’s computer facility in Olney, Maryland—devoted significant resources to calculating which natural resources and infrastructure would likely survive various attacks; it estimated, for example, that 136 of the nation’s 224 oil refineries would be destroyed in a widespread nuclear attack—most of the rest, though, would be inoperable due to the loss of electricity.”

Raven Rock parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]