![]() Born in Iowa in 1935, Derby became one of the Defense Department’s premier experts on emergency preparedness and disaster response. The United States, for its part, had Ray Derby. ![]() It had an expensive civil preparedness program hundreds, perhaps thousands, of underground bunkers and extensive continuity of government programs. When Carter took office, the Soviet Union had a head start on preparing for nuclear war. government booklet released across the country in 1950. Pages from "Survival Under Atomic Attack," a U.S. What follows is a glimpse at how the government developed some of its most closely held national-security secrets - and how the Trump administration, or any of its successors, might rely on them to survive the end of the world as we know it. They have been the object of a multibillion-dollar pastiche of programs and a magnet for conspiracy theorists around the world. Their contents inform the continuity of government plans that remain in effect for the Trump administration. If the presidency could survive after a nuclear war, what exactly would it do afterward? How could the surviving commander in chief be identified? Who would identify him? How would he fulfill the three main functions of the presidency: to be the chief executive of the government, the head of state, and the commander in chief of its armed forces?Ĭarter’s answers came in the form of Presidential Directive 58, which was issued in the final months of his presidency Ronald Reagan amended those plans with his own presidential directive in 1983. ![]() It was during that period that military planners in both the Soviet Union and United States began to grapple with what until then had been an unthinkable heresy: abandoning the Mutually Assured Destruction catechism that had governed global order since the 1950s and preparing for surviving an all-out nuclear war.Ĭarter and his White House were interested in more specific questions. During Carter’s presidency, such anxieties were focused squarely on the Soviet Union. Today, such an apocalypse could be triggered by any number of nuclear-armed states, including North Korea and Pakistan. Carter’s decisions remain classified, but documents newly declassified by the CIA, along with the archives at several presidential libraries, provide a new window into the White House’s preparations for an imminent apocalypse. It concerns nuclear war, and how the U.S. Among the greatest foreign-policy dilemmas faced by former President Jimmy Carter is one that has never been publicly aired but is gaining new relevance.
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