Date

Oct 2, 1980

Description

Brzezinski updated President Carter on FEMA’s ongoing planning for presidential succession arrangements. FEMA’s Nine Lives exercise during May 1980 crystallized plans that led to Operation Treetop, an “intermediate step” toward a new COG capability for dispersing the top five officials in the presidential succession as a means to “to reduce greatly our vulnerability to a surgical strike against the National Command Authority.” In his letter to President Carter, Macy updated him on the contingency planning, identified “problem areas,” such as legal interpretations, improvements in support for successors, and helicopter support, and enclosed a “description of the [contingency] plans which were tested and the procedures associated with each.”[7]

Those were developments that continued during the Reagan administration and beyond, with Nine Lives Exercises involving officials from a number of agencies while TREETOP became a major continuity of government program.

Source

Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, Volume IV, National Security Policy (FRUS Document 213)

Document published in following posting(s):

New State Department History Details Nuclear Targeting and Continuity of Government, 1977-1980

Apr 17, 2024

Memorandum From the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski) to President Carter, “Emergency Procedures for Presidential Succession,” with letter from FEMA director John W. Macy and attachment (exempted in full) attached, 2 October 1980, Secret