When America Was Under Attack: Everything Failed (Of Course)

This September 11, as Biden shuffles remorselessly toward taking the “proxy” out the ongoing war with Russia, most recently with a green light for the despatch of long range ATACM missiles to Ukraine, its worth remembering what happens when America comes under direct attack. As you may already have guessed, the answer is…chaos.

According to a detailed exposé by William Arkin and Robert Windrem of NBC News in 2016, senior officials found they could not communicate with one another. The commander of ­NORAD moved US nuclear forces to a higher stage of nuclear alert and closed the blast doors at Cheyenne Mountain for the only time since the end of the Cold War. Putin, alarmed by these developments, wanted to call Bush to ask what was going on, but Air Force One, which was running out of gas and looking for a secure place to land, could not receive phone calls. When the plane did land, at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, it was parked next to a runway littered with nuclear bombs—­STRATCOM had been in the middle of a nuclear exercise when the hijackers hit the first tower and was now, while ­NORAD increased the level of nuclear alert, canceling the exercise and hurriedly unloading the active nukes from their bombers. Almost none of the senior officials in line to succeed the president followed their assigned procedures for evacuation to secure locations. One who did, Dennis Hastert, who as Speaker of the House was third in line for the presidency, took shelter in a secure bunker in Virginia, out of contact with the rest of the government. The education secretary, Rod Paige, sixteenth in line, who had gone with Bush to Florida, was left there when the president’s party rushed to the plane. He eventually rented a car and drove back to Washington.