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

On 11 February 1977 President Carter received SIOP and emergency action briefings while flying on the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP) on the way to Plains, Georgia. No record can be found of the briefing itself, but Brzezinski sent Carter his reactions, several paragraphs of which are deleted from this version. Some of them are familiar, such as Brzezinski’s perception that the SIOP options were rigid. He also proposed an additional SIOP option, which has been entirely excised. Whether this proposal or the other withheld information remains so sensitive that it must be excised nearly 50 years later is open to question.

When Brzezinski forwarded to President Carter Harold Brown’s report on nuclear war planning, he observed that one of Brown’s points was that “LNOs and the SIOP require repeated interaction between the NCA and the planning process if our nuclear force planning is to reflect the policy preference of the NCA.” (See FRUS Document 36)

This NSC report from late 1977 describes the efforts by President Carter and Brzezinski’s office to meet that requirement by staging emergency drills and exercises. In July 1977, an OPAL (Operation Alert) III drill tested emergency evacuation procedures from the White House, while in October 1977 an Ivory Item exercise involved President Carter in a test of conferencing procedures in the event of a missile attack.[3] According to the NSC Crisis Management Staff, presidential participation in Ivory Item “has never been done before, and the event triggered revisions and changes in the SIOP based on Presidential guidance for the first time in history. Before the drill “SIOP designers have had to imagine what the President would want to see and know in an emergency” [italics in original]. “Without a single clue from the President,” they had produced a “thick ‘Decision Handbook”—presumably, the compendium carried in the nuclear football, which was “the product of years of speculating in J–3 about the President’s needs.” That would begin to change.

The NSC staff found that Ivory Item had “monumental” implications for strategic planning doctrine, including “refinement” of SIOP options, greater presidential awareness of the limitations of the escalation control concept, and an additional point that remains classified.[4]

Bill Gulley, the director of the White House Military Office, reported to the President’s assistant, Hugh Carter, Jr., that an Opal III drill that day “went very well,” except that the helicopter rotor could have killed Brzezinski aide William Odom had not the watchful air traffic control officer ordered the pilot to slow it down. Gulley, who later wrote an insider memoir, observed that he “was absolutely convinced that we should never run an OPAL III drill without the aircontrollman manning TEACART [the helicopter].” He noted that if “the balloon went off,” the air control officer might not get to TEACART in time but it would be necessary to “take chances” under such circumstances.[5]

Hugh Carter prepared a brief report on the 9 July 1977 Opal III drill to evacuate White House officials and deliver them to NEACP at Andrews Air Force Base, MD. According to the summary, the helicopter arrived Andrews at 07:41:50 and the NEACP was airborne at 07:53. From the time when the drill was initiated, its total length was 14 minutes and 53 seconds. Not mentioning the details, Hugh Carter reported that the drill “went quite well,” although there were areas where improvements could be made. President Carter wrote “good” on the memo.

Reporting on the last OPAL drill, Hugh Carter stated that it “went well,” taking 14 minutes and 53 seconds from start to finish (arrival at NEACP).

On 28 January 1978 President Carter visited the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, and Odom reported on some of the conversations he overheard and some of the key issues, including warning system vulnerabilities, launch on warning, and false warnings.

This version of Odom’s 28 January 1978 memo to Brzezinski from the Carter Library includes text deleted from the version published in FRUS (Document 3). The new text consists mainly of a statement on findings by U.S. intelligence on “recorded Soviet exercises,” with “initial impressions by analysts suggest[ing] surprising sophistication in limited employment at the theater level as well as at the strategic level.”

In response to questions from President Carter, Harold Brown provided answers, which Brzezinski summed up in five points, of which three are fully excised.

This complete version of the 20 March 1978 Brzezinski memo has been available at the Carter Library since 2013. The three excised items concern Defense Support Program vulnerabilities, systems for warning of Soviet SLBM (submarine launched ballistic missiles) attacks, and secure communications with NEACP.

During August 1978, Brzezinski traveled to Nebraska and Colorado for visits to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command and the North American Aerospace Command. Before the trip, Odom brought to Brzezinski’s attention the wide range of issues, notably the role of forces for deterrence and for war fighting, but also C³I, planning and targeting, interactions of U.S. and Soviet forces, Ivory Item, and arms control and force postures, that he would have to address.

After Brzezinski received briefings at SAC and NORAD headquarters, Odom reviewed key points, such as “rigidities” in the SIOP, U.S. vulnerabilities in C³I, the need for political guidance in shaping LNOs, the importance of the SSBN (ballistic missile launching submarine) fleet for offsetting vulnerabilities, and the “blindspots” in the DSP system, among other issues. There are also a few excisions, one of which redacts a significant point about C³I vulnerabilities.

This summary of Document 6 in this EBB (FRUS Document 82), prepared by Odom for Brzezinski’s possible use in a memorandum to President Carter, shows the point about C³I vulnerabilities in its entirety. Odom saw it as an “extremely serious” problem because a “small Soviet attack on our C³I could make it virtually impossible for the surviving or successor NCA to retaliate for days and weeks, perhaps months.” Odom’s statement that U.S. strategic forces were in a “poor condition to respond” is also striking and may relate to the other excision in FRUS Document 82.

While not a FRUS selection, this interesting Odom memorandum was relevant to the debate over the risk of a surprise Soviet SLBM attack to “decapitate” the National Command Authority and C³I. The dispute was between the Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Command Admiral Harry D. Train, who believed that Soviet redeployments of ships and submarines to safer locations, such as in the Barents Sea, would provide useful tactical warning, and Commander-in-Chief Strategic Air Command, General Richard Ellis, who “rejects this analysis by insisting that the benefits of a surprise SSBN attack for the Soviets could easily outweigh the loss of most of their fleet.” Odom believed that the controversy “would generate a healthy review of the warning issue in the JCS,” but also “points up an issue which will confront us more often in the future: the significance of the growing C³I vulnerability to a decapitation attack.”

William Odom’s major responsibility was crisis management, and he periodically briefed Brzezinski on the state of play, from civil defense to continuity of government. Two of the “Emerging Issues” are withheld from this version although previously declassified (See Document 7A).

Two of the “Emerging Issues” not declassified in the FRUS version of this memo (Document 7 of this EBB) were C³I, which was the “most significant … rivalling the potential vulnerability of our strategic forces.” The other one was “war doctrine,” which “flows directly from C³I.” The interrelationships between the administration’s command and control policies and nuclear weapons planning had become stronger, as evident in PD-59.

Brown responded to Brzezinski’s question about the level of “Soviet fatalities if population were attacked directly in the SIOP rather than following current policy, which targets industry.” The so-called “philosophy” issue refers to the priority of the then-current SIOP which was to retard Soviet post-war recovery in part by targeting industrial assets, as opposed to population as such. The latter approach was a descendant, although on a horrifically larger scale, of the World War II “area bombing” campaigns that produced large-scale urban casualties.

According to Brown, the industrial targets option was “estimated to produce Soviet fatalities of about 33 percent (84.5M) of the total population (includes estimated effects from fallout).” By contrast, in a direct attack on the population using SIOP weapons and Poseidon weapons otherwise committed to military targets, the “estimated fatalities would increase to about 44 percent (115M).” Interestingly, while this figure was declassified, the Pentagon withheld similar numbers from FRUS Document 124.

The excision in this memorandum demonstrates the deep-seated nature of secrecy surrounding the SIOP. One possibility is that it concerns the number of weapons required by the plan’s largest option.

The version of the Brown memorandum released to the National Security Archive has a bit less information from the second paragraph compared to the FRUS version, but it includes a memorandum from the Pentagon’s Planning and Evaluation Office (P&E) that responded to Harold Brown’s request to confirm the JCS’s casualty estimates. Unable to do so, P&E developed its own estimates of fatalities caused by attacks on economic and population targets. The range of numbers assumed the “combined effects of radiation and airblast,” with fire effects evidently not considered.

In the spring of 1977 (See FRUS Document 9), President Carter asked Secretary of Defense Brown about several key issues: “1) procedures for the conduct of a limited nuclear war, (2) the survivability of our command and control under nuclear attack, and (3) the concept of “limited nuclear options” (LNOs). Those questions prompted a lengthy report that provided important context for decision-making. Brown’s report included a detailed look back at key developments during the 1960s and 1970s, including the important Foster Panel report, the National Security Study Memorandum 169 report, and Richard Nixon’s National Security Decision Memorandum (NSDM) 242. All were responses to the problem of catastrophically huge SIOP attack options involving “several thousand nuclear weapons” (the smallest, by 1969, involved over 1,700 weapons). According to Brown, even though top U.S. officials “believed our strategic forces and plans adequate to deter a major nuclear attack on the US, they were uncertain that the threat of large-scale nuclear retaliation provided the best deterrent to lesser attacks or threats to the US and its allies.” Also concerning was the “changing strategic balance [that] appeared to erode US allies’ confidence in the strength and credibility of the US nuclear deterrent.” Those concerns led to the new approach embodied in NSDM 242 and proposals for Limited Nuclear Options (LNOs), Select Attack Options (SAOs) and Regional Nuclear Options (RNO) that would supposedly be more credible and could be used to control escalation and “limit damage” to prevent an all-out nuclear war.

Providing some detail on the state of play in producing LNOs, Brown recommended implementing NSDM 242 and continuing “current doctrine” for the use (“employment”) of nuclear weapons. The purpose of those options was “to strengthen deterrence across a broader range of possible conflicts by providing a series of preplanned, measured and discrete nuclear response options more applicable to situations where the deterrence threat of the large-scale options in the SIOP would be inappropriate or incredible.” Details on the LNOs and RNOs that top commanders had prepared are completely excised.

With his report, Brown included memoranda on “procedures for conducting nuclear war,” command and control survivability, and by JCS Chair George Brown on “nuclear weapons employment policy.” The command-and-control study found that “the potential for survivability of the US command and control system today is better than it was in 1970, with recent assessments concluding that it contributes significantly to a credible deterrence.” That was most optimistic compared to information that Odom and Brzezinski would receive in 1978 (See Documents 4 and 9).

Beginning in the early 1960s, the SIOP included “withholds” for cities and countries that could be excluded from targeting under various circumstances, mainly to limit collateral damage. In this instance, Harold Brown informed President Carter of withholds involving “non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) countries,” to illustrate their impact on “fatalities and on attack effectiveness in the NSWP.” The Defense Department deleted the rest of the memorandum.

One of the innovations of Nixon’s NSDM 242 was that it directed the creation of a “Secure Reserve Force” of strategic weapons systems whose purpose would be “protection and coercion during and after nuclear conflict.” Survivable forces such as SLBMs or bombers and ICBMs in hardened shelters would constitute the core of the SRF that could be used for retaliation or retaliatory threats (coercion). The Carter administration adapted the SRF concept and embodied it in its approach to nuclear war planning in both Presidential Directive 18 and PD-59.

Much of this report, including the major findings, has been exempted from release, but a report on strategic connectivity by the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s historical division condensed the sobering conclusions:

The secure reserve force study revealed that the National Command Authority did not have the communications systems or the means to obtain the information and intelligence required to manage the force. Because of the vulnerability of and lack of endurance in command, control, communication, and intelligence systems, the study questioned the ability of the United States to use the secure reserve after an initial nuclear exchange.

Led by Leon Sloss, the Pentagon completed the first step of its policy review on nuclear targeting in November 1978. As Secretary of Defense Brown explained in his memo to President Carter, he believed that targeting plans, the “Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy,” would “make its maximum contribution to deterrence—our basic strategic objective—if our ... policies make a Soviet victory, as seen through Soviet eyes, as improbable as we can make it.” To reinforce that point, the report emphasized targeting Soviet economic targets, “along with the control apparatus and military power [both of] which the Soviets appear to consider of high value.”

Most of the front matter, summary and recommendations in the document have been declassified, with key points about the use of “building blocks” for creating more flexibility in attack options, counterforce targeting, Secure Reserve Force, Launch Under Attack, and changes in targeting procedures concerning China.

According to the report, the U.S. did not target population “per se,” but “estimates of population fatalities will continue to be an important criterion for any decision maker contemplating the use of nuclear weapons.” While the U.S. sought to reduce “collateral damage,” war plans to impede postwar economic recovery involved “destroying large amounts of Soviet population and industry.” That raised the question whether the threat of such destruction was “the most effective deterrent, particularly in situations less than general war.”

Significant excisions are in the major findings on “General War Plans” and in recommendations 5 and 6, which may concern changes in the targeting of Soviet leadership, a topic that is discussed in FRUS Document 125.

Work on the Pentagon study moved forward with top officials reviewing and discussing it (and follow-up) reports at meetings of the interagency Special Coordinating Committee. This memorandum by William Odom focused on the need for flexible nuclear targeting plans allowing “military power to be more politically useful” and avoided reliance on the SIOP that was like the World War I Schlieffen Plan, an “irreversible war plan” that could not “support any conceivable war aims.” Odom sought a “a targeting capability in addition to the SIOP.”

With Victor Utgoff arranging the SCC meetings, Odom briefed Brzezinski on key issues and problems, including the necessity for presidential guidance and the need to address the C³I problem. Objecting to criticisms of Hard Target Kill (HTK) capability as “destabilizing” (because of the first strike implications), Odom argued that “we need all the HTK we can get,” noting its role for a variety of purposes.

During this meeting, the participants heard briefings on the impact of the SIOP, on the imagined Soviet version of the SIOP—the RISOP [Red Integrated Single Operational Plan], a JCS report on Soviet capability to destroy the U.S. C³I system, and the airborne command post’s control over the SSBN force. Much detail is excised, including Soviet casualty estimates and information on the vulnerability of C³I, but the fact that the JCS expected the destruction of the “Crown Helo”—the White House helicopter—comes through, although Secretary of State Cyrus Vance was skeptical of that finding.

This absorbing discussion covered a range of policy issues, including China and the SIOP and the targeting of population, leadership, and “war supporting industry.” Reflecting ongoing improvements in U.S.-China relations, the SCC discussed proposals to take China out of the SIOP and put it instead in a Regional Nuclear Option. Some, such as Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher wondered whether, if such a change leaked, it would harm U.S.-Soviet relations, to which Brzezinski observed “should this leak … upset the Soviets, too bad.”

Also discussed was the targeting of population centers and command-and-control assets. This continued discussion from a few weeks earlier (See Document 118), where there was some controversy with JCS Chair David Jones arguing that it was illegal, but where others believed that what really deterred the Soviets was a “threat to the Soviet population.” During the discussion of targeting options against the Soviet Union’s “C3-leadership,” David Aaron asked whether it was “wise to destroy Soviet ability to withhold and control strategic forces from the center.” Nevertheless, Brown asserted that a successful attack on the Soviet leadership could “require very early strikes in a conflict.”

The discussion of a targeting strategy that promoted “regionalization” of the Soviet Union prompted Brzezinski to call explicitly for an approach “that inflicts higher levels of damage on the great Russians and creates fears that the Soviet Union would dissolve.” The dialog turned to economic targets, including war-supporting industries as a specific target set, and whether that would reduce collateral fatalities, with Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) Walter Slocombe noting that “such targeting might involve 10-15 million fatalities if no care were taken to avoid them.” The meeting concluded with the topic of Hard Target Kill capabilities, which ICBM accuracy improvements could improve, and whether such capabilities were destabilizing, as some in Congress feared. While Harold Brown was more sanguine about the problem, asking “whether two hair trigger capabilities were more dangerous than one, if our increasing vulnerabilities made us more likely to preempt,” and stating that “he didn’t think so.” David Aaron was more concerned, noting that “this situation was a recipe for miscalculations” and that “the respective vulnerabilities of the two sides’ forces would be a much more important variable in determining whether a crisis led to war.”

Updating President Carter on the status of the nuclear targeting review, Brzezinski showed him PD-59, which he (actually William Odom and Jasper Welch) and Harold Brown had prepared and which he proposed that the President sign. Seeing it as a “significant step in employment doctrine,” Brzezinski described its main features, including a “strong thread of continuity with our past deterrence doctrine” and the “emphasis on flexibility,” which required a capability to adjust to “any surprises that growing Soviet capabilities could present us in operations” but also a need for a larger secure reserve force. Just as important was the emphasis on C³I as a deterrent “capability” and the “requirement for exercises to validate and improve our doctrine and capabilities.” The last point was a reference to the role of exercises such as Ivory Item for familiarizing presidents with crisis decision-making arrangements.

Brzezinski mentioned two important purposes for the directive: 1) Brown could refer to it publicly and privately as a way “to complicate Soviet planning and to convince them, and our allies, that we will not be paralyzed in a crisis between cataclysmic options and capitulation,” and 2) “it may help blunt sharp criticism that we are not dealing adequately with the changing requirements for deterrence in the face of growing Soviet forces and capabilities.” Brzezinski agreed with Brown that there should be no interagency discussion and that because the document included sensitive SIOP information, he supported the preparation of a sanitized version for wider use within the government.

This earlier version of the memorandum from Brzezinski to President Carter lacks the language about a sanitized version but includes a sentence about China withheld from the FRUS version: “Targeting of China will be accomplished by pre-planned options for the reserve force.” That was consistent with the recommendation in the November 1978 study (FRUS Document 105) that the U.S. handle “China targeting through non-SIOP options and the Secure Reserve Force.”

The treatment of this document is another example of Pentagon overclassification. Prepared some weeks after President Carter signed PD-59, it drew upon a paper worked up by William Odom contrasting NSDM-242 and the PD and reworked it into a Brzezinski memorandum to the President. Somewhat inaccurately comparing Carter’s nuclear weapons policy to doctrinal changes articulated during by earlier presidential administrations—“massive retaliation” and “assured destruction”—Brzezinski wrote that “you may or may not want to take public credit for it, but you should have a clear view in your own mind of its historic significance.”[6] Going from PD-18 to the other PDs on strategic issues—civil defense, continuity of government, etc., Brzezinski concluded by drawing comparisons between NSDM 242 and PD-59. The Defense Department excised two paragraphs from the comparison section.

Declassified in 2006 at William Odom’s request, this version of the Brzezinski “Transformation” memorandum includes the two paragraphs, points a. and d. on the third page, which are withheld from Document 211. The first one consists of a general statement about the SIOP as consisting of “little pre-planned options” and similar broad statements on the priority given to both fixed and mobile targets, the latter of which was an important difference with NSDM-242. The second withheld paragraph consists of general statements on the “secure reserve force,” designed to give the President “larger means for influencing the unfolding military campaign.”

None of the withheld statements appear to be particularly sensitive, as they are either drawn straight from PD-59 or from other documents published in the volume, all of which raises questions about the validity of other excisions from other documents in the volume.

In his retrospective report on national security issues (See Document 25), Odom cited this item as a major step in the process of updating continuity of government procedures. It focused on two groups of issues, telecommunications endurance and NCA survival. Prepared during ongoing discussions of de-regulation, Brzezinski question the wisdom of relying on AT&T for “the provision of adequately survivable and restorable communications networks,” and emphasized the need for a “national telecommunications policy” that would ensure communications between the NCA and strategic forces and provide for continuity of government, among other objectives.

The other group of issues was the problem of “NCA survivability beyond the endurance of the NEACP, that is, about 72 hours.” He asked Brown to assist FEMA Director John Macy “in working out a new concept of basing the NCA for both of the leadership responsibilities in an emergency: commanding the armed forces and governing the country.” While Brzezinski asked that the response go to the President by 19 October, in his retrospective assessment Odom observed, rightly or wrongly, that Brown “more or less ignored” the part of the memorandum on NCA survivability (See Document 25).

Among the items denied in full for this FRUS volume, Document 197 (Tab A) is evidently about the continuity of government issue that was also discussed in FRUS Document 198 and that soon became the subject of a presidential directive. The paper on the Soviet nuclear threat assumed that, because “the locations of the primary U.S. federal relocation sites are publicly available,” it was likely that they would be targeted” with the Soviet SS-17, 18, or 19 ICBMs as likely strike vehicles. On whether the Soviets would launch a “decapitation” attack on command and control sites, there was uncertainty, but “ an attack against the NCA would almost certainly be part of a large scale strike against U.S. military forces.”

The paper on “Alternative Concepts for Presidential Successor Support” assessed a variety of platforms, including submarines, surface ships, airborne systems (including NEACP), and land-based options. Some, like submarines, were ruled out as vehicles for presidential survival because they lacked cost effectiveness, and some, like airborne command posts, were considered “imprudent,” for reasons that are partly classified. A semi-mobile ground-based option involving movement between “designated unprepared sites” (e.g., schools, armories, or hotels) was deemed the most cost-effective solution.

With this directive, President Carter authorized plans and programs to “maintain a capability for the Presidency, under the most stressing condition,” so that the President or a successor could survive repeated nuclear attack while directing wartime military operations, negotiating with allies or adversaries, and controlling domestic affairs, among other responsibilities. According to Brezinski (See FRUS Document 198), the directive was the “culmination of a long effort to improve our continuity of government program and at the same time to remove vulnerabilities to the National Command Authority for control of the military forces.” Under PD-58, a steering group would oversee COG’s programs development, while a Defense Department-led Joint Program Office would have responsibility for building a new capability. Working with the Joint Program Office, FEMA would in the meantime work to improve “the current capability” (See Document 213 for details) and continue to develop ways and means during a crisis to locate, communicate with, identify, and authenticate “dispersed successors, as a basis for determining legal succession to the Presidency.”

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.

This June 1980 letter from FEMA Director Macy to President Carter gave perspective on the Nine Lives exercise discussed above. Conducting Nine Lives in early May 1990 were FEMA and the Joint Chiefs with the participation of other agencies, including State, CIA, and Justice, along with White House offices. The exercise posited a “rapidly deteriorating worldwide situation leading to nuclear war,” but with enough warning time to “disperse selected Presidential successors to pre-identified locations prior to the attack.” Various emergency plans were reviewed, exercised, and evaluated, including the Treetop plan, to “support a dispersed successor” and dispersal of the Vice President under tactical warning, the SIOP and “communications connectivity to the dispersed successors.” Macy reported that, “To my knowledge, this was the first time a coordinated and concurrent exercise of emergency plans in support of the President and his potential successors has been conducted.”

Odom reported on the response to a false warning systems incident the night before, a hitherto undisclosed event. At 9:32 PM NORAD and the NMCC convened a conference call after a report came in about the detection of missile launches from a Kurile Island site where the “‘fan’ of one of the missile tracks included Alaska, Canada, and the tip of Oregon.” The conference call ended once warning system operators determined that “the impact of both missiles were determined to be in Kamchatka.” Odom reported that procedures worked properly: he was alerted promptly, NEACP “rolled out” at 9:32 PM, SAC readiness changed at 9:30 PM, and “The duty officers at NORAD and the NMCC sorted out the ‘anomalies’ in the computer displays quickly.”

As noted, the volume provides good coverage of the other NORAD false alarms of November 1979 and June 1980, including more complete versions of several documents from 1980.

In the wake of the NORAD false alerts, some White House officials, including presidential aide Stuart Eizenstat, became interested in the possibility of a study group on accidental nuclear war. Believing otherwise, William Odom noted that the Defense Department had prepared a “large study,” which the President had seen and thought that a White House study would invite “political trouble” for the White House and open up a “Pandora’s Box.”

The Pentagon study that Odom mentioned has not surfaced, but concern about the possibility of accidental nuclear war persisted and eventually spurred the famous report that Bruce Blair prepared for the Office of Technology Assessment in the mid-1980s and which the Defense Department confiscated.[8] Hopefully, the FRUS editors will be able to retrieve the Blair report for a future volume on national security policy.

At the end of the Carter administration, Odom prepared for his boss his perspective on the “bureaucratic play” during the previous four years concerning major developments in the national security system as conveyed through presidential directives and changes in government organization. It is a fuller version of the memorandum (FRUS Document 211) that Brzezinski sent to President Carter months earlier. Beginning with PRM-10/PD-18, Odom’s report covered the creation of FEMA, PD-41 on civil defense, PD-53 on telecommunications, PD-57 on mobilization requirements, PD-58, and PD-59. Odom argued that the series of directives represented a radical break from the “1914 syndrome” by facilitating “mobilization, defense,” and “command and control for a long conflict.” Nevertheless, he also acknowledged that they “remain essentially a paper policy” until they “significantly affected the budget process, program designs in Defense, or operational procedures in the JCS and unified commands.”

Prepared by a White House insider who had full access to the records, but also a strong point of view, this is a highly informative memorandum, with interesting details on a number of issues. For example, Odom believed that the Presidential Directive on Civil Defense (PD-41) implicitly abandoned the view “that strategic defense is impossible or destabilizing.” He also cited a memorandum on “C³I” that Brzezinski sent to Charles Duncan on 30 September 1978 (See FRUS Document 92), noting concern about “vulnerability to a relatively small Soviet attack, and our lack of C³I endurance in the event of a war;” both of those points are excised from the FRUS version. Likewise, in his discussion of PD-58, Odom noted that it provided for the “establishment of ten small surrogate White Houses at the ten Federal Regional Centers,” a point that is also withheld in the FRUS version.