Without being tested, we don't know U.S. ballistic missile defence works: historian
Residents of Guam are feeling pretty nervous these days as recent threats by North Korea have prompted public safety officials to distribute a guide to prepare islanders for a nuclear attack.
North Korea said earlier this month that it's examining a plan to create an "enveloping fire" with medium to long-range ballistic missiles in areas around Guam, a U.S. territory that is home to Andersen Air Force Base. The statement is in retaliation to the tough talk coming out of U.S. President Donald Trump's White House.
Military solutions are now fully in place,locked and loaded,should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!
—@realDonaldTrumpAnd it isn't just Guam that's worrying about the nuclear threat posed by North Korea. Opposition parties in Ottawa called for an emergency meeting of the House of Commons defence committee on Aug. 22 to discuss whether the country should rejoin the U.S. ballistic missile defence system.
The problem is, says Cold War historian Garrett Graff, there's no certainty that the system works, despite billions of dollars in research through the decades.
"We've never tested it and we hope never to have to test it in real life," he tells The Current's host Matt Galloway.
"There is probably no military system in the world that a government has spent more money on with less knowledge of whether it would ever actually work than ballistic missile defence."
Graff says that almost every U.S. presidential administration dating back to the 60s tried to push the missile defence system forward — Ronald Reagan most famously with his Star Wars initiative in the 1980s, and then again with George W. Bush at the helm in the early 2000s.
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Graff, whose recent book is called Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself While The Rest of Us Die, suggests if the U.S. ballistic missile defence system did work, it would be "better suited to face something like a North Korean threat than it ever would have been with the Soviet Union or Russian threat."
The reason why, he explains, comes down to the fact there's a "much smaller number of nuclear missiles … a half dozen or even fewer, that a ballistic missile defence system might be able to intercept."
Cold War continuity plans
Preparing for an attack also involved a series of plans developed during the Cold War known as "continuity of government" that Graff says are still enforced today. The plan details on how to proceed minutes and hours after a nuclear attack occurred — including who would be in charge, who would launch missiles, who would be evacuated and where they would go.
"And then also the much broader set of plans about how the government would try to begin rebuilding," Graff adds.
"The National Park Service, your friendly park rangers, were actually the people who were going to run the refugee camps because the thinking was that the national parks would be largely untouched by nuclear war and would be a safe haven for people fleeing the devastated cities," Graf explains.
"These plans were incredibly detailed. I mean, the Internal Revenue Service in the United States had a whole set of plans about how the U.S. government would levy taxes on nuclear damaged property because not even nuclear war stops the need for taxes."
CBC's role in Cold War continuity plans
Canada was — and is — closely related to the U.S. continuity plans through NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command)," Graff says.
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Canada had it's own set of bunkers during the Cold War. About 35 minutes west of Ottawa, a massive hidden bunker known as the Diefenbunker was commissioned by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in 1959. It looked like a small radio operation, but, Graff explains, 75 feet underground was a 100,000-square-foot facility where most of the government and the RCMP would have relocated during the Cold War.
"But it also had a fully equipped CBC radio station to broadcast after nuclear war," he tells Galloway.
"The CBC radio studio in the doomsday bunker had a fully stocked library of vinyl records of jazz favourites, so that even after doomsday in Canada, you would be able to still listen to Duke Ellington and the Wayne King orchestra."
Here's one from CBC's doomsday playlist:
Listen to the full segment including a historian based in Guam near the top of this web post.
This segment was produced by The Current's Howard Goldenthal, Idella Sturino and Samira Mohyeddin.