Quote:Keep in mind that this information, while inspired by actual government plans and programs of the 1960s to 1980s, has changes and assumptions for use in our role-playing game.

The Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan was a U.S. Department of Defense proposal from 1961. The plan initially was for emergency transport of "certain personnel necessary to maintain strategic direction and control of United States Armed Forces and resources during a national emergency" (for example, if the armed forces went to CONUS DEFCON 1). By the late 1970s, the program included various priority levels for transportation.

    "Other emergency assignees ... not earmarked for helicopter relocation, will proceed as soon as possible to their respective sites. Means of transportation will be an individual responsibility."  For most cabinet officials and members of Congress, they were to report to the nearest FBI field office for directions to their evacuation point; within the National Capitol Region they could expect to be picked up by official vehicles. This provision resulted in a large number of persons -- legislators, non-military government officials, current and retired FBI and Secret Service agents, etc. -- with detailed knowledge of supposedly-secret shelter locations, especially the Alternate Military Command Center (Raven Rock) and "High Point Special Facility" (the Mount Weather complex in Virginia). The printed "instruction cards" were especially a security issue.

  Continuity of government plans called for hundreds, or even a few thousand, sites that could be used by "presidential successor support teams"; most of these sites were resort hotels and other remote, rural, self-sufficient facilities. These were not bunkers, but had emergency generators, food supplies, radios, and other items.

  The lack of security about shelter locations led the government to construct ten small bunkers in the early 1980s, as part of the JEEP system itself. Another eight existing bunkers were given JEEP functions as the program expanded. Keep in mind that all of this is part of a larger web of related government programs. The majority of the ten new bunkers were within two hours drive of Washington, D.C.

The JEEP system had three levels of evacuees:

CRYSTAL-1: critical national leaders, usually around 40 or 50 persons. These would be evacuated by helicopters and the Secret Service, to Mount Weather or to the Greenbrier bunker, various airborne command centers, or other major survival shelters.

CRYSTAL-2: a few hundred less important officials would be contacted with directions to a bunker or an FBI field office. In the Washington DC area there was some effort to convoy (e.g, rideshare) these persons.

TREETOP: former officials, corporate leaders and other persons considered "capable of exercising national government after a nuclear war." These, too, would have to transport themselves, or catch a ride with a convoy.

  All persons to be transported by the JEEP program were issued Federal Emergency Identification Cards. These had the FEMA logo and Latin motto, the holder's name, photograph, blood type, thumb print, and text on the back requiring, "... all authorities shall provide full assistance and unrestricted movement" to the holder. In theory, they allowed access to most military posts, etc. -- in practice, few security guards even knew these cards existed. Also, duplicating  the card was against the law (per Title 18, US Code Part I, Chapter 33, Section 701).

Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was an important part of the White House planning staff for continuity of government issues, from 1981 until he was dismissed from the National Security Council in 1986. The JEEP plan would bring people to the following locations:

[23 locations]

Designated Survivor Program

Since 1980, the concept of a "designated survivor" led to programs to protect at least one senior administration official at all times.

The Survivor would have a card (the "Sealed Authenticator System" or SAS) with identification code words, sealed in an envelope. Communication systems would be made available to the Survivor in some circumstances, including a simple videoconferencing network.

  While not a first choice, placing a Survivor in a JEEP bunker was an option during a sudden attack.

CHIPP Vaults

In the early 1980s, when there was a renewed interest in continuity of government, bunkers-for-the-brass, and preparing for nuclear war, the General Services Administration sent out a circular memorandum to all the Cabinet-level departments of the Federal government, asking them for a list of culturally or historically important items that should be preserved in case of nuclear war.

Some of the JEEP bunkers, along with other government sites not listed, were part of the Cultural Heritage Imperative Preservation Program. They will have a room labelled:

GSA CHIPP Vault
No Survival Supplies Within
Authorized Access Only

Cryogenic Sleep Berths

In the summer of 1989 the American government gained access to 150 cryogenic sleep berths; twenty of these were assigned to continuity of government functions. Each bunker with one or more cryogenic sleep berths also has a radio-isotopic thermo-electric generator -- a small nuclear power plant. These were placed in the compartment which had contained the well-pump.

JEEP Sites

Quote:Idaho National Guard Deploys Helicopter Company To DC Area

The Idaho National Guard deployed 10 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and more than 80 Soldiers to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, Jan. 10-11 on a year-long mission to support the Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan (JEEP) in the National Capital Region.

The JEEP is a recurring mission shared by National Guard and active-duty units from across the nation. Company Bravo, 1-183rd AHB will provide airlift capabilities to official personnel in the National Capital Region.

Quote:A judge sentenced disgraced former Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., to 11 years in prison on Wednesday, concluding his trial for a "long-running bribery and foreign influence scheme of rare gravity."

The sentence is the harshest ever handed down to a U.S. senator. Breaking down in tears, Menendez pleaded with U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein for mercy in a New York City courtroom.

"I have lost everything," he said. "Other than family, I have lost everything I care about. Every day I am awake is punishment. I am far from a perfect man… in half-century of public service, I have done far more good than bad."

Before handing down his punishment, Stein said: "I take no pleasure in this sentence."

"You are quite right about your work. You worked your way up to a senator, to the chair of foreign relations committee," Stein told Menendez. "You were successful, powerful, stood at the apex of our political system. All letters are proof. Somewhere along the way, you lost your way."

Defense attorney Adam Fee told Stein to give Menendez credit for his lifetime of public service, asking for a sentence of no more than eight years.

"Despite his decades of service, he is now known more widely as ‘Gold Bar Bob,’" Fee said.

Prosecutors had requested a 15-year sentence for Menendez, 71, after he was convicted in July 2024 on 16 counts of bribery, extortion, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. He is the first U.S. senator in American history to be convicted of working as a foreign agent. His co-defendants, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, were also sentenced to eight years and seven years, respectively.

"As proven at trial, the defendants engaged, for years, in a corruption and foreign influence scheme of stunning brazenness, breadth, and duration, resulting in exceptionally grave abuses of power at the highest levels of the Legislative Branch of the United States Government," prosecutors wrote.

Prior to the announcement of his sentence, Daibes, 67, tearfully told Stein the jury verdict had left him "borderline suicidal," and requested leniency so that he could care for his 30-year-old autistic son.

Hana told the judge, "I am an innocent man."

"I never bribed Senator Menendez or asked his office for influence," he said.

The judge, though, said the jury's verdict was "very, very substantial."

A third businessman pleaded guilty and testified against Menendez at a trial last year.

Outside the courthouse, Menendez proclaimed his innocence, calling his prosecution a "witch hunt" by the Justice Department.

"President Trump is right. This process is political and it's corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system," he said.

Menendez's conviction came after a nine-week-long trial. The former Democratic lawmaker was accused of accepting gifts totaling more than $100,000 in gold bars as well as cash.

The disgraced Democrat was accused and convicted of participating in a years long bribery scheme involving the governments of Egypt and Qatar. Menendez’s wife, Nadine, who is set to go on trial on March 18, also allegedly participated in the scheme. She is accused of receiving paychecks for a job that did not exist.

The indictment against Menendez came after co-defendant Jose Uribe — who allegedly gifted Nadine a Mercedes convertible — accepted a plea deal and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

"Menendez, who swore an oath to represent the United States and the state of New Jersey, instead put his high office up for sale in exchange for this hoard of bribes," prosecutors wrote ahead of the sentencing.

Quote:People outside of UK might not be aware of this, but before BBC News was not the first to start its 24 hour news channel. Sky News was the very first 24 hour news channel exclusive to UK and later on in Europe.

It was a quick success, relying on filling the void that existed in UK in the 24 hour news space. The massive success of CNN had made 24 hour news channels indispensable. People all over the world wanted dedicated news channels. Sky fulfilled that need even before BBC or ITV began to.

Surprisingly, Sky wasn’t interested in profit, in fact, for its $ 40 million investment; it didn’t see profits in the first few years. Murdoch went against the wishes of many when he decided to continue Sky News, despite the suggestions that it would be better to shut down. The network continues to air for free of charge and therefore looks to gain profit from other sources.

By 1991, Sky was no longer declaring loss and was well established, providing live coverage of important events to UK round the clock. It was appreciated by many and had a major following in UK and Europe where its only competition was CNN International.

Being partially owned by 21st Century Fox did raise some concern when Fox News started to gain notoriety. Many people started to fear that Sky News would start to mimic Fox News, which was blatantly a right-wing, republican and very conservative. Sky has to operate under the strict guidelines for reporting in the UK that insisted on neutrality and unbiased coverage.

However, these fears were laid to rest when Sky continued to report news in a clean, impartial manner, taking nothing from Fox News and maintaining its neutral stance. No clear political or social agenda was apparent in Sky’s reporting and the network successfully remained untarnished by the reputation of its wayward sibling.

Sky News SuccessStory

Quote:The fact that Clancy had once murdered the entire Vikings team was forgiven and forgotten. In The Sum of All Fears, Syrian terrorists partially detonated a nuclear bomb at a Super Bowl in Denver(!). The Chargers were winning, but the Vikings were making a furious comeback when the thing blew. "An embarrassing coincidence," Clancy said of the Vikings' fictional vaporization.

On Feb. 3, 1998, Clancy's bid was announced as the winner. The vote was 8-0 among the outgoing ownership group. Clancy took the owners out for lunch, the Pioneer Press later reported, but when the check came he told them he had lost his wallet.

The very next day, the first complication arose. Team president Roger Headrick raised his bid, claiming the franchise's bylaws gave him the right to match any offer. The matter went before the NFL, but Minnesota was solidly behind Clancy. A local columnist called him the perfect owner. A TV station's poll found that 98 percent of viewers wanted Clancy to own the team.

On March 19, commissioner Paul Tagliabue ruled in favor of Clancy. But a month later, things started going to hell. Tagliabue announced that "preliminary indications on the ownership structure and financing raise serious questions for us."

The NFL was concerned that Clancy didn't have enough money to follow through on his purchase, even after he claimed to secure $100 million worth of additional financing from Citicorp. He had also brought in as a partner Rockets owner Leslie Alexander, who many Minnesotans believed wanted to eventually buy out Clancy and move the team to Houston. Clancy moved to reassure fans. "Having witnessed the damage done in Baltimore when the Colts left," he said in a statement, "I would never inflict that on the Twin Cities."

The real problem was in a courtroom. Clancy was in the middle of an acrimonious divorce from his wife of 29 years. Not only was Wanda Clancy seeking 50 percent of the proceeds from Jack Ryan Enterprises (named after Clancy's recurring protagonist), in which she owned an equal share, but she wanted her half of future earnings from the Jack Ryan character. A Los Angeles Times article explained her reasoning, and his comeback:

Mrs. Clancy has never claimed the role of Clancy's muse. But it is noted in the divorce papers that she supported him by working as a nurse in the early years of the marriage and rearing the couple's four children. Clancy has counterclaimed that she was never supportive of his writing. His court papers state that "Mrs. Clancy contributed nothing to the development of his books, that she opposed his literary efforts, and that the value of the marital property is due solely to his efforts unaided and often opposed by Mrs. Clancy."

Clancy skipped a scheduled meeting with the NFL Finance Committee—he claimed he was on a press tour for the recently published Rainbow Six. He asked for a week's extension; the NFL gave him two days. "It appears to me quite clear that Tom Clancy does not have the resources to be the owner of the Minnesota Vikings," an outgoing co-owner told the AP. "That much has come through loud and clear in the last 24 hours."

On May 20, the deadline to present his finances to the league, Clancy announced he would withdraw his bid. The dream was dead. The rest of the ownership group quickly collapsed. San Antonio businessman Red McCombs, whose initial bid had lost to Clancy's, stepped up with a revised offer. And even better, he told the Pioneer Press, "I've got that cash in my hip pocket."

The Clancys finalized their divorce in January of 1999. Wanda retained her half of Jack Ryan Enterprises. As part of the terms, she also received half of Tom's share in the Baltimore Orioles. Her attorney told reporters that Wanda was always the baseball fan of the couple.

How Jack Ryan Kept Tom Clancy From Buying The Minnesota Vikings

Quote:Some toys in the museum’s collection tell us what was in the minds of parents who bought them and children who played with them. This toy was manufactured in 1955 during the height of the Cold War, when families dug fallout shelters in their backyards and children practiced taking refuge under their desks at school to save them from potential atomic attacks.

A 2013 Atlas Obscura article stated that “One of the more curious trends in children’s toys is how they respond to war.” One can imagine kids gleefully throwing these plastic “bombs” at each other on the sidewalk after school and celebrating when the caps on the tips made a loud cracking pop. We can also visualize concerned parents at the toy store who needed to be reassured by packaging explanations that these “giant atomic bombs” were actually “safe and harmless.”

Quote:Each rocket held a cap on its tip that “exploded” when it struck a hard surface.  Children could throw them at each other, with a loud crack as they hit the sidewalk, and role play the effects of atomic warfare. The packaging, which reads “A safe, harmless cap shooting giant atomic bomb,” both exudes the thrill of ultimate destruction, and reassures parents that the toys don’t really contain radioactive materials. The box was designed to open as a counter-top store display, allowing children to purchase just a single bomb, or arm themselves with an entire arsenal.

Atlas Obscura

Quote:At Fort McNair, meanwhile, about 150 National Guard members secured the entrances to the base, which was being treated as a continuity of government site since the Congressional leaders were there. They were getting the extra protection typically provided when the country was under attack.

Fort McNair is indeed a designated COG site for the relocation of Congress, and a relocation of Congress there was actually rehearsed back in 2004.

Quote:The myth of the 1970s tends to blur three moments into one: the power cuts as a result of the 1972 miners’ strike, the implementation of a three-day week by Edward Heath’s Conservative government during a subsequent coal dispute in 1974, and the spectacle of dead bodies lying unburied as rubbish piled up on British streets during the 1978–79 “Winter of Discontent.” The power of organized labor, whether in the form of industrial action or the bloc votes wielded by so-called union barons at Labour Party conferences, looms large in these stories.

We have to disentangle the 1972 miners’ strike from these hackneyed associations in order to understand Britain’s first national coal dispute since the 1926 general strike, when private coal owners had locked out the miners. The strike opened up a crucial phase in postwar British history, when it seemed as if working-class radicalism might transform the country’s social order.

...

Reginald Maudling, the Conservative home secretary, later recalled the symbolic importance of Saltley Gate:

    The number of strikers involved was so great, and feelings were running so high, that any attempt by the relatively small body of police who could be assembled to keep the depot open by force could have led to very grave consequences. Some of my colleagues asked me afterwards why I had not sent in troops to support the police, and I remember asking them one simple question: “If they had been sent in, should they have gone in with their rifles loaded or unloaded?”

In her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher tersely described her feelings on the subject: “For me, what happened at Saltley took on no less significance than it did for the Left.”

Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that Lord John Widgery was so anxious to whitewash the Bloody Sunday massacre by the Parachute Regiment in Derry, which had happened just a few weeks before the miners’ strike began. Over the course of the 1970s, right-wing politicians and journalists openly discussed the idea that it might be necessary to use British soldiers in order to contain social conflict on the home front.

...
Half a century after the miners’ 1972 victory, we should understand what drove a workforce to its first national strike action since the 1920s, and why they were successful. It was frustration rather than destitution that motivated the miners. They felt that the Coal Board was not rewarding their efforts justly and feared for their economic security.

They also had the industrial power necessary to demand justice.

The miners won another major victory in the 1974 strike, which led to the fall of Edward Heath’s government after the Tory prime minister called an election posing the question “Who rules Britain?” But they subsequently lost their capacity for unified national mobilization and their position of strength within Britain’s political economy.

Quote:HMS Dreadnought (Battleship, 1906-1922)

HMS Dreadnought, an 18,110-ton battleship built at Portsmouth Dockyard, England, represented one of the most notable design transformations of the armored warship era. Her "all-big-gun" main battery of ten twelve-inch guns, steam turbine powerplant and 21-knot maximum speed so thoroughly eclipsed earlier types that subsequent battleships were commonly known as "dreadnoughts", and the previous ones disparaged as "pre-dreadnoughts". The swiftness of her construction was equally remarkable. Laid down in October 1905, she was launched in February 1906, after only four months on the ways. Dreadnought was commissioned for trials a year after her keel was laid and was completed in December 1906. Her building, trials and early service were closely watched by the World's naval authorities, including the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence, the source of all of our photographs of Dreadnought.

The new battleship served as Flagship of the Home Fleet in 1907-1912 and remained part of that fleet thereafter. Dreadnought served with the 4th Battle Squadron in the North Sea during the first two years of World War I. On 18 March 1915, while so employed, she rammed and sank the German Submarine U-29. From May 1916, Dreadnought was flagship of the 3rd Battle Squadron, based on the Thames to counter the threat of bombardment by German battlecruisers. Placed in reserve in 1919, the once-revolutionary warship was sold for scrapping in 1922.

Quote:The first table below compares the building programs of Great Britain, Germany, the United States, and Japan in "Dreadnought," i.e. all big gun, battleships. The tradition of the Royal Navy had always been not to push innovation itself, which tended to devalue existing ships, but only to respond to innovations made by others. The lessons of the Battle of Tsushima between Russia and Japan in 1905, however, where long range fire had decided the battle, inspired the radical design of the British Dreadnought. Pre-Dreadnought battleships all had a main battery of four guns. The Dreadnought now had ten (though only a broadside of eight), and it was bigger and faster (21 knots, against 18).

....
Of the battleships built before the 1930's, i.e. before the North Carolina, BB-55, only one survives afloat. That is the battleship Texas, BB-35, which is moored on public display at the San Jacinto Battlefield outside Houston, Texas. A ship like the Texas is shown on the reverse of the series 1918 Federal Reserve Bank Note $2 bill. The note is consequently known as the "Battleship $2 bill." For many years, it was not clear whether the ship was intended to be the Texas or its sistership, the New York. Recently the Bureau of Printing and Engraving announced that the ship was supposed to be the New York. Why it was necessary to wait more than 70 years to do this, especially when the announcement would then look like a political snub against Texas, is not clear. Nevertheless, the Texas is the only battleship of its era that survives afloat anywhere in the world.

Dreadnought

1. Charles Alexander Eastman (the first certified Native American physician)
   
2. William D. Boyce (American newspaper man, entrepreneur, magazine publisher, and explorer)
   
3. Ernest Thompson Seton (Canadian & American author, wildlife artist)
   
4. Daniel Carter Beard (American illustrator, author, youth leader, Georgist and social reformer who founded the Sons of Daniel Boone in 1905, which Beard later merged with the Boy Scouts of America)

Quote:The use of Latin to conceal or encode sexually charged or controversial language has a long history (see, for example, our essay on Emmanuel Swedenborg’s erotic dreams). As one might expect, a no-nonsense 458-page treatise on the "science of sex-attraction" would present plenty of opportunity for such Latinate veiling and Bernard S. Talmey’s Love does not disappoint. In fact, so replete with Latin substitutions is the work (particularly in the sections on "pathological activities") that in its second edition Tolmey was urged to include some help for the persistent and curious reader who might not be so proficient in Latin. Enter a most unusual bilingual glossary. Ranging from the familiar (cunnilingus, fellatio, libido), to the expected (sugo for “suck”, lambo for “lick”, fricare for “rub”), to the distinctly worrisome (gallina for “hen”, canis for dog), to the plain intriguing (nono quoque die for "every nine days"), the list gives a fairly good sense of what’s to come in Talmey’s study of the varieties of human sexual experience.