#ARE WE IN DEFCON 2 FULL#

Had Air Force One been attacked, and had the White House been hit by United Airlines Flight 93 as the terrorists intended, the list of who would be in charge turns into a tangled mess. “You would destroy half of Bossier City with the explosions,” Al Buckles, Strategic Command’s watch officer that day, revealed to the Omaha World Herald last week. during a school visit in Sarasota, Florida., by Andrew Card, his chief of staff, and informed that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center. President Bush is interrupted at 9:07 a.m.

Barksdale, where Bush was headed, was one of the primary B-52 bomber bases in the world.

The game had turned “real world,” as the military likes to say, with war planners considering the various scenarios - the scariest of which was a terrorist plane attacking one of the airbases hosting nuclear warheads. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which was overseeing the war game, had pulled the plug on the exercise as soon as he heard the news of the attacks in Washington and New York, according to an interview published this week in the Omaha World-Herald. The Bush national security team finally selected Barksdale Air Force Base outside Bossier City, Louisiana, as a place to put down temporarily because it had a secure area for refueling.Īdm. His plane was low on fuel, and had no firm destination. Three dozen real nuclear weapons had been loaded onboard intercontinental bombers in North Dakota, Missouri, and Louisiana.īecause of intelligence of a specific terrorist threat to “Angel,” the codename for the President’s plane, Bush was sent essentially into orbit.

#ARE WE IN DEFCON 2 FULL#

Perhaps the biggest newly uncovered secret is that on the morning of 9/11, when Al Qaeda struck New York and Washington, the Pentagon’s annual “Global Guardian” war game was in full swing. After all, the plan had to be revised after glitches in the response to the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981 and again after a 1983 war game that the Russians mistook for the real thing, only to be swamped by the confusion of Sept. Sean Adair / REUTERSīut past experience suggests that the “continuity of government” protocol may still be difficult to execute in the event of another crisis. 11, 2001, hijackers attacked New York City's World Trade Center. A new, secure communications system has been built in Wyoming that can keep top officials connected 24/7 should an emergency arise.Their locations are not disclosed and they are moved regularly. A number of mobile missile batteries are deployed around the Washington area.There is a new hardened bunker for top White House officials in the Washington, D.C.

made several changes to its continuity of government protocol and its security preparations in the event of another attack on the capital. He rented a car and drove back to Washington.īecause of the confused response on 9/11, the U.S.

Education Secretary Rod Paige, 16th in line to the White House, was left on the tarmac in Sarasota, Florida.

Attorney General John Ashcroft was in a government plane and tried to return to Washington, but was turned away by the FAA.

But that left him out of touch with all other top government leaders.

Now-disgraced Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, third in line, observed protocol and was taken to an underground bunker in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Most of the top 10 people in the president’s line of succession, including Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, either refused to follow the protocol and go to their designated secure sites, or were out of the country, or were never contacted.

After Bush left Florida, where he had been reading a book to schoolkids, his plane was low on fuel but for hours had nowhere to land.

was preparing to go to DEFCON 3 - but the White House couldn’t put him through to Air Force One. Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to speak to Bush to know why the U.S. officials couldn’t talk to each other or to anyone else.

Because of inadequate communications equipment and procedures, top U.S.

Air Force bombers at three airbases when al Qaeda struck New York and Washington.

Three dozen live nuclear weapons were aboard U.S.

Based on a review of newly unclassified documents, memoirs and other published accounts, and interviews with U.S.

Are we in defcon 2