Rummy and Dick and Ronnie circa 1983--Exercises?

[Paul Mackin]

Interesting.

When you start reading you think you are going to get a bizzaro rendition of 
a pair of Dr. Strangeloves presiding over the end of the world deep in the 
bowels of the earth, but that was only a grabber.

What the piece is really about is how a surprisingly unhawkish Reagan helped 
pave the way for Gorby to end the cold war.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "rich" <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 4:14 PM
Subject: Rummy and Dick and Ronnie circa 1983--Exercises?


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