Word: doomsdays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
Girard is not alone in questioning the government's plans for self- preservation. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S.'s doomsday planners are engaged in a sweeping reassessment of crisis scenarios. The old relocation centers are under review. Some are to be mothballed, others converted to more mundane uses: record storage and office space. Contingency plans and dusty crisis regulations are being re-examined. Having outlived its enemy and its original mission, the doomsday bureaucracy faces a more immediate threat -- irrelevance. But as the last members of the original generation of doomsday planners step down, they...
...doomsday government story required Gup to dig even deeper. "I ate a lot of dust," he says, while sifting through reams of official archives. He unearthed documents about how Washington planned to protect the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. During the reporting, Ted thought frequently of his two toddler sons David and Matthew. "I pray that they won't have to grow up under a cloud of anxiety and that all of this will seem exotic and far away to them...
...most difficult challenges facing doomsday planners was deciding what cultural treasures should be saved. In 1950 the National Gallery of Art began construction of a $550,000 facility on the grounds of Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Va., as a safe haven for works of art. Funded by a private trust, the windowless structure had storage areas for sculptures and screened partitions to protect paintings. Nearby was a three-bedroom cottage, fully furnished and complete with china, silverware and napkins -- ready for the curator to move in and oversee the collection. Several former gallery executives recall that...