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A review by gregbrown
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
4.0
Pretty great! A pretty breezy overview of the warren of plans and facilities in the government to deal with the possibility of a nuclear attack.
Graff does an excellent job of juggling both a chronological history that slowly unfolds in the book along with deeper dives into the various facilities. The upside of the approach is he gets to devote a chapter to 9/11 towards the end, exploring how the disaster made it clear that the biggest challenge was less Continuity of Government than Continuity of Governance—the same plans designed to safeguard decision-makers often leave them out of the loop during the crucial hours following an attack. And given that choice on the day of, officials like Cheney and Rumsfeld stayed where they were, with Rummy even leaving his office to investigate the Pentagon crash in-person!
For being a book about Continuity of Government plans, he also does a pretty good job touching on the evolving nature of the SIOP plans and other nuclear war schemes. I especially liked how—given the subject of the book—he touched on the merry-go-round treatment of decapitation strikes. First nuclear weapons weren't accurate enough to decapitate leadership... then decapitation strikes were posited as a way to reduce the number of casualties and more directly threaten the people in charge... but also, oops, we need to keep someone alive on the other side to END the nuclear exchange before it spasms out of control, so maybe we should deliberately AVOID targeting leadership.
Only downsides to the book: not enough treatment of Katrina and a hesitance to draw out some conclusions. It's kind of briefly handled as an example of the civilian-turn of FEMA as they went from Cold War plans to disaster-rescue efforts, but it also shows that any plans to protect or rescue the civilian population during a nuclear war would be fatally flawed. Even given advance warning and a known area to be devastated, things fell apart for quite a while. And the cold-war concerns about the reaction of rural Virginia to evacuated DC residents were well-grounded; anecdotal reports of armed violence, often white residents shooting at black evacuees, don't bode well for any post-war scenario.
Also: good luck reconstituting a legislative branch with anything resembling legitimacy amongst the population. Between fatalities and the already-fucked nature of the Senate, no chance of anything other than evacuating congressional leadership to Mount Weather so they can rubber-stamp executive dicta. It's amazing that the president pro tempore of the Senate, basically guaranteed to be one of the oldest, most out-of-touch members of the institution, is the one fourth in the line of succession.
Graff does an excellent job of juggling both a chronological history that slowly unfolds in the book along with deeper dives into the various facilities. The upside of the approach is he gets to devote a chapter to 9/11 towards the end, exploring how the disaster made it clear that the biggest challenge was less Continuity of Government than Continuity of Governance—the same plans designed to safeguard decision-makers often leave them out of the loop during the crucial hours following an attack. And given that choice on the day of, officials like Cheney and Rumsfeld stayed where they were, with Rummy even leaving his office to investigate the Pentagon crash in-person!
For being a book about Continuity of Government plans, he also does a pretty good job touching on the evolving nature of the SIOP plans and other nuclear war schemes. I especially liked how—given the subject of the book—he touched on the merry-go-round treatment of decapitation strikes. First nuclear weapons weren't accurate enough to decapitate leadership... then decapitation strikes were posited as a way to reduce the number of casualties and more directly threaten the people in charge... but also, oops, we need to keep someone alive on the other side to END the nuclear exchange before it spasms out of control, so maybe we should deliberately AVOID targeting leadership.
Only downsides to the book: not enough treatment of Katrina and a hesitance to draw out some conclusions. It's kind of briefly handled as an example of the civilian-turn of FEMA as they went from Cold War plans to disaster-rescue efforts, but it also shows that any plans to protect or rescue the civilian population during a nuclear war would be fatally flawed. Even given advance warning and a known area to be devastated, things fell apart for quite a while. And the cold-war concerns about the reaction of rural Virginia to evacuated DC residents were well-grounded; anecdotal reports of armed violence, often white residents shooting at black evacuees, don't bode well for any post-war scenario.
Also: good luck reconstituting a legislative branch with anything resembling legitimacy amongst the population. Between fatalities and the already-fucked nature of the Senate, no chance of anything other than evacuating congressional leadership to Mount Weather so they can rubber-stamp executive dicta. It's amazing that the president pro tempore of the Senate, basically guaranteed to be one of the oldest, most out-of-touch members of the institution, is the one fourth in the line of succession.