
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 19, 1994                   TAG: 9404190148
SECTION: NATL/INTL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

DOOMSDAY PLAN DEAD

After spending 11 years and $8 billion searching for ways to keep the government running after a sustained nuclear attack on Washington, the Pentagon will shelve its project as a high-tech antique of the Cold War, according to military officials familiar with the program.

The Doomsday Project, as it was known, sought to create an unbreakable chain of command for military and civilian leaders that would withstand a six-month-long nuclear war, which was regarded as a plausible length for a conflict.

``That was the requirement: six months,'' said Bruce Blair, a former Strategic Air Command officer assigned to analyze nuclear war plans in the early 1980s. ``And at the end, we had to have a cohesive chain of command, with control over our remaining nuclear forces, that would give us leverage over the Soviets.''

The nuclear tensions of that era subsiding, the project has less than six months to live. ``On Oct. 1, it's history,'' a Pentagon official said.

Like many other Cold-War programs, its details remain top secret. And from accounts given anonymously by Army officers and government officials, it is clear that this secrecy itself was a major stumbling block - in some ways as great a challenge as the technological hurdles.

A Pentagon agency, the Defense Mobilization Systems Planning Activity, was given the task of making plans to glue together a shattered government. But the planners found it impossible, even in peacetime, to coordinate the White House, Pentagon, CIA, State Department and other agencies.

For the project was an amalgam of more than 20 ``black programs'' - so highly classified that only a handful of military and civilian personnel knew of them.

``That raised the bureaucratic nightmare to the nth power,'' Blair said. ``No one knew what anyone else was doing. It was hard to find out even the technical characteristics of some of the plans. You had all the difficulties of creating command-and-control networks cutting across bureaucratic lines, combined with the secrecy of black programs - even the bureaucrats running it were handicapped.''

Plans for surviving World War III date to very early in the nuclear era. Among the many possible courses of such a war foreseen by planners was a continuing and controlled exchange of small numbers of weapons that would last for weeks or months, rather than an all-out Armageddon that would be over in hours or days.

Presidents since Harry Truman have been briefed on the Pentagon's plans, which relied on two huge underground shelters built in the 1950s, one beneath Mount Weather in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, 50 miles northwest of Washington.

by CNB