The survival of America’s military and civilian leadership would be harder to achieve. As a subset of the World Wide Military Command and Control System, a new administrative structure was established. The National Military Command Center replaced the Joint War Room at the Pentagon. It would serve as the nation’s military headquarters during a nuclear war. Since the Pentagon was likely to be destroyed at the beginning of that war, an Alternate National Military Command Center was formed at Site R, inside Raven Rock Mountain. It would have the data-processing and communications equipment necessary to manage the SIOP. It would be staffed year-round, twenty-four hours a day, awaiting the arrival of the president and the Joint Chiefs during an emergency. But fixed sites now seemed like easy targets for Soviet missiles. McNamara thought that the United States also needed mobile command centers that would be difficult to find and destroy. The Air Force wanted these command centers to be located on airplanes. SAC already had a plane, nicknamed “Looking Glass,” in the air at all times as a backup to its headquarters in Omaha. The Navy wanted the command centers to be located on ships. McNamara decided to do both, creating the National Emergency Airborne Command Post and the National Emergency Command Post Afloat.
None of these command posts would matter if there were no means of transmitting the Go code after a nuclear attack on the United States. The Navy began work on an airborne system for contacting its Polaris submarines. Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) planes would quickly get off the ground, climb steeply, and send an emergency war order on a very-low-frequency radio, using an antenna five miles long. SAC began to develop a Post Attack Command and Control System. It would rely on airborne command posts, a command post on a train, a command post at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and a command post, known as The Notch, inside Bare Mountain, near Amherst, Massachusetts. The bunker in Cripple Creek was never constructed; airborne facilities were less expensive, and more likely to survive, than those underground. The Emergency Rocket Communications System provided another layer of redundancy. If SAC’s airborne command posts somehow failed to send the Go code, it could be sent by radio transmitters installed in a handful of Minuteman missiles. A prerecorded voice message, up to ninety seconds long, would be broadcast to bomber crews and launch crews, as the specially equipped missiles flew over SAC bases.
The most intractable problem was finding a way to keep the president alive. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post was placed on full-time alert at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. But the plane would need at least ten or fifteen minutes to take off. And it would need another ten minutes to fly beyond the lethal range of a thermonuclear explosion. At least half an hour of warning might be necessary for the president to reach Andrews, get into the airborne command post, and escape the blast. Traveling by helicopter to the National Emergency Command Post Afloat, a Navy cruiser kept off the coast, would take even longer. And a Soviet missile attack might come with little or no warning.
After considering a variety of options, Secretary of Defense McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk supported the construction of the National Deep Underground Command Center. McNamara described the bunker as a “logical, survivable node in the control structure… a unified strategic command and control center under duly constituted political authorities.” It would be located beneath the Pentagon, at a depth of 3,500 feet. High-speed elevators, a light-rail system, and horizontal tunnels more than half a mile underground would link it to the White House. It would hold anywhere from fifty to three hundred people, depending on whether Kennedy chose to build an “austere” version or one of “moderate size.” It was designed to “withstand multiple direct hits of 200 to 300 MT [megaton] weapons bursting at the surface or 100 MT weapons penetrating to depths of 70-100 feet.” If the Soviets attacked on that scale and the new bunker met those design goals, the president and his staff could expect to be the only people still alive in Washington, D.C.
