![]() “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. 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.
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