Rummy and Dick and Ronnie circa 1983--Exercises?

[rich]

from today's Washington Post

James Mann got interested in writing about Ronald Reagan when he
discovered that, while Reagan was president, Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld used to sneak off to undisclosed locations to prepare for
Armageddon.

A longtime Los Angeles Times reporter, Mann left the paper in 2001 to
write books full time. First up was "Rise of the Vulcans," a
historical portrait of President George W. Bush's foreign policy team.
Mann spent a couple of years asking Washington notables what they knew
about Cheney, Rumsfeld and his other subjects.

"One guy said, 'Oh, well, I took part in these exercises with this
guy,' " Mann recalls. "It took a while to find out what the exercises
were."

It turned out, as Mann revealed in "Vulcans," that Cheney and Rumsfeld
were part of a highly classified program "nowhere authorized in the
U.S. Constitution or federal law." It was designed "to keep the
federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the
Soviet Union."

Rumsfeld was in the private sector at the time. Cheney was in
Congress. But both had done stints as White House chief of staff, and
now, as part of a small group of "team leaders" designated by Reagan,
they had been tapped to help run a replacement government should the
president die in a nuclear strike. They would vanish for days to
rehearse, hooking up with "a convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying
sophisticated communication equipment." Even their wives didn't know
what was going on.

The discovery gave Mann a reporter's thrill.

He remembers thinking: "Jesus, if I ran into this in the course of
other research, what else is there?"

But his work on "Vulcans," which was published in 2004, had him asking
larger questions, too.

Reagan's first term had featured harsh anti-Soviet rhetoric, a massive
arms buildup and a terrifying episode involving a 1983 NATO exercise
that nervous Soviet leaders feared might presage a real attack. In
this context, Mann's discovery made him wonder:

"How close did it come? And was Reagan really thinking about nuclear war?"


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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/25/AR2009032503769_pf.html