Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

But both of these plans were overly optimistic. NEACP and NECPA could completely ensure the president’s survival only if he received adequate warning. Fifteen minutes is not a lot of time. Maybe, just maybe, if you are lucky and BMEWS spots the Soviet missiles the minute they leave the silos, the president can make it to safety on the NEACP plane.

Even that is cutting it close. And with the advent of SLBMs, the United States needed a better solution.

At the end of 1963, the secretaries of state and defense proposed one to newly inaugurated President Lyndon Johnson. It was called the Deep Underground Command Center, or DUCC. It would be built thirty-five hundred feet under the Pentagon. In a memorandum to the president, the case was made:

As you know, the currently projected Washington Command and Control Complex consists of the National Military Command Center (a soft installation in the Pentagon), the Alternate National Military Command Center at Ft. Richie, Md. (being hardened to withstand [REDACTED] of overpressure), and Emergency Airborne Command Post, the Emergency Command Post Afloat and [REDACTED]. Studies indicate that the fixed facilities of this complex and their communications could be eliminated with reasonably high probability by a small number (6–10) of 10 megaton weapons, resulting in only the aircraft and the ship surviving. The aircraft… would require 10 to 15 minutes to become airborne and another 10 minutes to fly beyond the lethal range of a 50 MT [megaton] weapon if airburst over Andrews. The ship is 30 to 60 minutes flying time from Washington. Both times are in excess of the upper limit of expected tactical warning. Projected improvement in enemy weapons size and delivery means [SLBMs] will further shorten this time.

This isn’t very good news. But wait, there’s more:

These considerations create serious doubt that currently projected facilities are keyed to today’s threat, much less the threat of the 1970’s, or that they adequately provide for protection of top civilian and military leaders who would be required to make and disseminate high level decisions in an emergency.

But there was hope on the horizon:

Studies of deep underground structures and analysis of weapons test data indicate that it is feasible to design and construct a command facility at depths of about 3,500 ft. so that it will withstand multiple direct hits of 200 to 300 MT weapons bursting at the surface or 100 MT weapons penetrating to depths of 70–100 feet. Extrapolation of weapons technology predicts that such weapons represent the upper practical limit to be credited to the enemy in the mid-1970’s.

We’ve gotten a little jargony, so let’s quickly talk about the power of nuclear weapons. The strength of a nuclear weapon is referred to as its “yield,” and is listed in either kilotons (KT) or megatons (MT). This terminology was created in order to help people understand the magnitude of a new and undeniably transformative technology. Take something people have understood for decades (TNT), and use it as a foundation to help explain the exponentially greater power of this novel weapons system. Hence, when I say the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima (“Little Boy”) had a yield of 13 KT, I am saying it had the explosive power of 13,000 tons of TNT. “Fat Man,” dropped on Nagasaki three days later, had a yield of about 22 KT. For comparison, the largest conventional explosive dropped by any combatant in World War II was equivalent to 10 tons of TNT. On November 1, 1952, the United States detonated a thermonuclear (hydrogen) device in the Pacific on the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The test, code-named “Mike,” produced a yield of 10.4 MT—the equivalent of 10.4 million tons of TNT.

The most powerful weapon ever tested in human history was the so-called Tsar Bomba. On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated a thermonuclear weapon on Severny Island, about 250 miles north of the Russian mainland, with a yield of 58 MT (about fifteen hundred times as powerful as both Little Boy and Fat Man combined ). The Soviets had also designed a 100 MT weapon, but they worried the test would kill everyone on Earth, so they decided not to do it.

That was nice of them.

But take a quick peek back at the document I was quoting earlier. The DUCC would be designed to “withstand multiple direct hits of 200 to 300 MT weapons.” That’s pretty damn good, considering we now know the largest man-made explosion in human history was the Tsar Bomba at 58 MT. So why design the DUCC for such dramatically more powerful weapons? Why the overkill (so to speak)?

Because no one—even the Soviets, despite their decision to scrap the testing of the 100 MT weapon—knew the upper limits of nuclear weapons development, which by this time had ceased to be a scientific calculation, and had frighteningly become a geopolitical one. You could drop a “lowly” 5 MT bomb on New York City and easily kill millions. Or Washington. Or Moscow, Beijing, Chicago, Seoul, London, Paris, Berlin. You didn’t need anything larger than that. Military necessity was not the driving force behind bigger and bigger yields. It was national pride and propaganda: Hey, look at us, our nuke is larger than yours.

So the DUCC was overengineered, but better safe than sorry. It also had an additional cool feature: The principals could access the DUCC without leaving their respective buildings (the White House, Pentagon, State Department). This had two benefits. First, it made for a quick and easy getaway to safety. The president or secretary of state would take an elevator down, and then a handy access tunnel would lead him to the safety of the DUCC. Second (and arguably as important), because the evacuation would be underground, there would be no overt signs of panic. The president and his team could take shelter without the political consequences of being seen running from DC. In a real emergency, this wouldn’t make much difference (everyone who might vote against him in the next election would likely be dead). But in a false alarm, or a crisis situation in which the worst was averted, the president could look cowardly fleeing for the hills while the rest of the country remained sitting ducks.

Why would this matter? Because a president fearful of how his actions could look to voters might be less likely to seek shelter when it counted. That would be a serious problem.

Okay, then. Let’s build this thing, right? The president supports it, as do the secretaries of state and defense. Who could possibly stand in the way of a secret underground lair for America’s civilian and military leadership?

Interestingly, it was the Joint Chiefs of Staff who resisted the project.

In a memorandum to Secretary of Defense McNamara, dated January 10, 1964, the JCS made their views known: “It is the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that a DUCC as a military command center cannot be justified and it is not recommended for inclusion in the National Military Command System (NMCS) program.”

Then they gave their reasons.

1. It was lacking many of the advantages of the other, already existing options. It would force military leaders to operate while cut off from the outside world, and “without adequate staff or support in a ‘buttoned-up’ environment from which communications and egress would be uncertain following a nuclear attack.”

2. It was way too expensive. Congress was unlikely to appropriate funding specifically for the DUCC, so the construction and upkeep of the facility would have to come out of the budget for the NMCS, which would “limit in number and degree of enhancement of the more desirable mobile alternate command centers” and curtail “communications and other support systems.”

3. Communication in the DUCC would be extremely vulnerable. “The weakest link in a hardened communications system is the antenna. In view of limited progress to date in the design of hardened antennas, the probability of survival of DUCC communications depends primarily on redundancy of antennas.” And we weren’t there yet technologically. Not even close. The president and his generals would be in command of the DUCC—but not much else. Unlike in the more mobile systems, leadership would be stuck there for quite some time. It’s not like anyone can just pop their heads out once the bombs stop dropping. Washington is likely to be gone . And what’s left will be incredibly radioactive.