NPF: THE DESIGNATED SURVIVOR

At some point during the State of the Union coverage every year, usually during the extended "Entering the chamber and shaking hands with everyone and his brother" sequence, the commentators will note the absent Cabinet member, aka the Designated Survivor, who will accede to the Presidency if…well…everyone dies. This practice was born of Cold War paranoia about a Soviet nuclear "decapitation strike" that would wipe out the Federal government in the blink of an eye. It's rare that the entirety of the government is located in one room and the godless Communist was simply waiting for such an opportunity to pounce. A member of the Joint Chiefs once described the overall Continuity of Operations Plan as a means of protecting the presidency, not the President. In other words, it doesn't really matter who it is. Our system is designed to operate as long as someone fills the required roles, be it a low-ranking bureaucrat or the White House janitor. Pretty inspiring stuff, our government.

Curiously, it was only recently that four members of Congress (one Senator and Representative of each party) were included. Legislative continuity apparently did not strike anyone as important, but the survival of a small group of Congressmen would be necessary to nominate new individuals (presumably themselves) to the Vice-Presidency and Presidency Pro Tempore of the Senate.
buy augmentin online buy augmentin no prescription

Part of me thinks it would be interesting to see a pitched battle for the Vice-Presidency between Robert Byrd and Chuck Grassley in a two-man Senate. Then again, in the wake of a nuclear strike I don't think many of us would be too concerned about finding someone to inhabit the smoldering ruins of the Blair House.

online pharmacy buy cytotec online no prescription pharmacy

This year's DS, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, was in for a big disappointment if a nuclear strike hit the Capitol on Wednesday night. Since Hillary Clinton was attending a conference in London she would have become President and, well, at least the new post-apocalyptic government would have HUD covered. But Madame Clinton was not in a secure location; hypothetically she too could have been killed while out and about in London. So where was Mr. Donovan? Our secure locations, interestingly enough, are most likely the same as Dick Cheney's infamously undisclosed ones.

Even after all these years it is unlikely that there's anything more secure than the NORAD Cheyenne Mountain complex. There are also some underground facilities at Offut AFB in Omaha, home of the former Strategic Air Command (intentionally located in the dead middle of the continent, hence giving our land-based air defenses ample opportunity to shoot down incoming Soviet bombers). But Designated Survivors probably stay a lot closer to home.

online pharmacy buy vibramycin online no prescription pharmacy

Everyone has heard of NORAD, but the undisclosed locations of choice in recent years are less famous.
buy stromectol online buy stromectol no prescription

"Site R", aka the Raven Rock Mountain complex located 6 miles from Camp David, remains largely classified. Its primary tenant, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, is known to keep the facility prepared as an emergency Continuity of Government site but little information exists about the contents or other tenants of the bunker. The second option, Mount Weather in Berryville, VA, combines two facilities. The above-ground complex is the headquarters of FEMA while the underground portion remains a comparative mystery. The odds are excellent that Designated Survivors spend a few hours in one of these locations every year.

A few years ago I chuckled at a cable program that promised to count down "The greatest spies who ever lived." The greatest spy would, by definition, be someone we've never heard of. If he or she deserves the title, s/he maintained cover and was never identified. Such is the case with these "secret" facilities. If I can tell you about a place, it's not really the secret secret facility. There's probably something else out there, hidden beneath a rural mountain or hundreds of feet below some nondescript office building in Arlington. Then again in the age of satellite imaging and ground-penetrating radar it's awfully hard to keep secrets. When the Russians began digging an end-of-world superbunker to put NORAD to shame at Mount Yamantaw in the Urals, satellite data let the American intelligence community feel like it was there digging the hole. But who knows? The U.S. government can be good at keeping secrets on occasion and sites that are actually secret may exist. Only Cheney knows for sure.

5 thoughts on “NPF: THE DESIGNATED SURVIVOR”

  • This old article from Time lists what several of the Designated Survivors did during the speech. I really, really hope it's inaccurate, or we've gotten rather more stringent: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,980053,00.html

    Is it just me, or has a speech in front of an audience filled with nearly every important person in the government been a horrendously dangerous, wholly unnecessary ritual ever since suitcase nukes were invented? Why can't the president just give the speech on TV? I assume members of Congress have televisions. Is the political theater of the applause breaks really worth the risk?

  • This sounds suspiciously like politics. No? Game theory, then. Query: Can any shared information truly and continuously be kept secret from a larger audience? Answer: No, not really. It's equivalent to a boundary problem in quantum physics. Under the laws of this universe, eventually you get leaks. (For those who wish to play at home, this is the other part of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: delta E times delta T is greater than or equal to h-bar over 2).

    So, if Cheney knows, we know. If Cheney does not know, we may not know, but the probability we do not decreases according to a Poisson distribution of unlikely events.

    Besides, bunkers ain't all what they are cracked up to be. The Soviets, bless 'em, borrowed an old strategy from naughty little boys and suicide bombers – use 2 bombs, and have the second on a timer set to go off after the All Clear sounds, and every one climbs out of the bunker (or the ambulances arrive).

  • Cheney pissed off his neighbors in DC for a good two years while he blasted a new bunker for himself at the VPs house on Mass ave during 04-06. The blasting noise was so loud and so prolonged that the local residents tried to file an injunction against him in the DC government.

  • Stumbled into this internet site by chance but I’m certain glad I clicked on that link. You really answered all the questions I’ve been dying to answer for some time now. Will definitely arrive back for more of this. Thank you so much

Comments are closed.