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In The Event Of Attack, Here’s How The Government Plans ‘To Save Itself’

In Raven Rock, Garrett Graff describes the bunkers designed to protect U.S. leaders in the event of a catastrophe. One Cold War-era plan put the post office in charge of cataloging the dead. 

From Graff’s interview with Terry Gross:

“The post office was the agency that would’ve been in charge of registering the dead and figuring out who was still alive. In part, because the post office knows where people live, they understand who was left. So you would arrive in the refugee camps, after your cities had been destroyed, and you would’ve been handed Form 801 from the post office, which were pre-printed in millions and millions of quantities and located in post offices around the country through the Cold War in the event of an emergency. And you would’ve filled it out with your name and family members that survived with you at the camp, and then the post office would’ve sorted through these cards and figured out who was still alive and where everyone was to begin the process of reuniting families.

The Parks Service, for instance, would’ve been the agency that would’ve actually been running, in many cases, the refugee camps, because the thinking was that park service land would be largely untouched by nuclear war.

[The Dept. of Agriculture] worked for years with Nabisco to come up with this special survival biscuit. … They pre-made about 160 million tons of this Nabisco survival wafer that were manufactured and boxed up in tins and then hidden away in government fallout shelters around the country. This was a whole strange, shadow post-apocalypse government that existed just out of sight through the Cold War.”