Attorneys, had trouble actually delineating who was responsible for what.īureau employees were encouraged to prepare their families for the worst, but had to keep secret the more in-depth plans for what the government would do if war did break out. Over the following months and years, Plan C would be adjusted as drills and meetings found holes in the defensive strategy: Communications were more closely held, authority was apparently more dispersed, and certain segments of the government, such as the U.S. Embassies would entered and searched for nuclear devices.ĭetails of this program were distributed to each FBI field office. Soviet diplomats and couriers would be taken into protective custody before being handed over to the State Department. Martial law would be declared, and 12,949 individuals would immediately be detained as likely threats to national security due to their ties to “subversive organizations.” The plan was to go into effect before actual war broke out, but when conflict with the USSR seemed imminent. Each of these sites was to have multiple communications links with the outside world.
Officials would designate certain personnel as essential, and develop secretive remote backup offices to be used in the event of an emergency. It was here that the broad details of Plan C were laid out: Held in the same room as the president’s usual press briefings, just across from the White House in the Executive Office Building, this briefing requested the presence of three top officials from every department, except the Department of Justice which was asked to bring four. It is an invitation to the Bureau to attend an afternoon meeting on April 19, 1956, organized by the Office of Defense Mobilization. The first known mention of this strategy was a memo released by the FBI to MuckRock under a Freedom of Information Act request. When activated, Plan C would have brought the United States under martial law, rounded up over ten thousand individuals connected to “subversive” organizations, implemented a censorship board, and prepared the country for life after nuclear attack. Starting on April 19, 1956, the federal government practiced and planned for a near-doomsday scenario known as Plan C.
(Photo: Columbia Pictures/Wikimedia)Ī version of this story originally appeared on.
MARTIAL LAW IN THE UNITED STATES MOVIE
The War Room in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie Dr.
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