Word: doomsday
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...have a more intimate understanding of the doomsday scenario than Bernard T. Gallagher. Known to his friends as Bud, he was a Strategic Air Command pilot and served as director of Mount Weather for 25 years, until his retirement last March. A robust 70 years old, he wears a white cowboy hat, drives a hot-pink '65 Mustang convertible and is an unabashed patriot. As an "atomic-cloud sampler," he flew through the billowing mushrooms of 13 U.S. nuclear blasts in 1952 and 1953. To measure the radiation passing through him, he swallowed an X-ray plate coated with Vaseline...
...concluded they were all often well within the kill range of a nuclear assault on the capital. With a 100-megaton weapon, a helicopter anywhere within 50 miles of the White House would have been destroyed in flight, the report noted. There were also unexpected hazards. During one doomsday exercise, Eisenhower was driven by convoy from Washington. As he neared the site, a truck loaded with pigs entered the narrow road. The convoy halted and authorities forced the truck to inch backward up the mountain and past the site's entrance. Eisenhower laughed that such elaborate plans could be ruined...
...soldier, Ike had few illusions about the doomsday plans. A "secret" White House memo dated 1956 records his rebuke when a Cabinet Secretary noted that 450 people were evacuated "rather smoothly" during an exercise. Eisenhower "reminded the Cabinet that in a real situation, these will not be normal people -- they will be scared, will be hysterical, will be 'absolutely nuts.' We are going to have to be prepared to operate with people who are 'nuts...
...decisions. But in the event of an impending nuclear attack, she is supposed to report to Mount Weather as a member of a Bravo team and publish the Emergency Federal Register, which would inform the surviving public of the crisis regulations in effect and create a chronicle of doomsday actions. "A very important part is to have copies of what happened for when we get back to normal, whether it's one year or 100 years," she says...
...type and declares, "The person described on this card has essential emergency duties with the Federal Government. Request full assistance and unrestricted movement be afforded the person to whom this card is issued." Her card expired June 30, 1984, but she continues to have a standby role in the doomsday scenario. During the 1980s she took part in several relocation exercises at Mount Weather, where for days on end she practiced putting out her crisis publication on an aging manual typewriter. Says Girard: "I felt like I was in a 1950s movie...