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The Pentagon's Plan To Build A Secret Super Command Bunker 3,500 Feet Under Washington D.C.Joseph TrevithickUnlike any fortification on earth, the Deep Underground Command Center was intended to withstand multiple direct hits from giant nukes on Doomsday.AP—1975 APThe COVID-19 pandemic has thrust the topic of "continuity of government," plans in place to ensure critical elements of the U.S. government can keep functioning in the midst of an extreme crisis, back into the general public consciousness. It has also sparked renewed interest in the hardened, underground facilities where those personnel would work, such as the U.S. military's "underground Pentagon" at Raven Rock, which you can read about more in this past War Zone feature. Had the U.S. government made different decisions during the Cold War, some of these teams might be sheltering inside a massive, very deeply buried bunker unlike any on earth, intended to shrug off direct impacts from nuclear bombs with huge yields of hundreds of megatons.In January 1962, Charles Hitch, then the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), sent a memorandum regarding a proposed Deep Underground Command Center (DUCC) to then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The plan was to construct "a 'superhard' command post easily accessible to the NCA [National Command Authority] and designed for minimum dislocation or interruption of official routines," according to an official U.S. military historical review of command and control architecture from 1960 to 1977. The National Command Authority refers to the highest possible source of orders for American forces, the only mechanism by which a nuclear strike can be ordered, which consists of the President and the Secretary of Defense, as well as the approved deputies that would take their place if either of them were to be killed or otherwise incapacitated."The center could include an office where people, such as yourself, could conveniently spend a day every week or two to conduct business almost as usual and be in a position to assume National Command in the event of a no-warning attack on Washington," Hitch wrote to McNamara. Read more at: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/33003/the-pentagons-plan-to-build-a-secret-super-command-bunker-3500-feet-under-washington-d-c
