Frankly, the nation would be in a lot worse trouble if all the garbage collectors vanished at once.
Well, presumably, most of the congressional aides and the like spend most of their time in Washington, so any scenario which kills the original elected officials (Washington getting nuked during the State of the Union address, say) would probably also kill most of the staff.
I always wondered what would happen if the IRS building were destroyed around April 15th.
There isn’t just one. There are many of them spread across the country. Medium and very large sized companies send their records regularly to companies like Iron Mountain that have roughly the same level of protection as the federal government uses with protection against almost everything including nuclear war.
These could be in paper form or electronic data. They mirror all electronic data in multiple secure locations and that is a big business. I assume that the IRS has some extreme failover protection for their data. I work for a large company with 60,000 employees and the level of backups and redundancy is absurd. Every month or so, all critical employees get a phone call describing a fake disaster scenario and the order to turn on our laptops immediately and log in to continue operations. Once you do that, you get permission to wear jeans the next day to work.
Upper management walks around the next day to see who is wearing jeans and who is not. You won’t get in trouble if you aren’t wearing them but it is a clever way to see how well the system is functioning. Critical failures happen all the time (one happened today). We just switch over to another data center somewhere else in the world and continue as normal. It takes about one hour to make that happen.
Keep in mind though, that some of the best “shelters” are actually airborne assets. Air Force One is a backup for the POTUS, and while not direct-hit capable, is hardened against nuclear/EMP strikes. I recall reading old SIOP-related instructions that in the event of a Soviet nuclear first strike, a couple of dozen flag officers were to be shuttled aboard airborne command posts to serve as some sort of command and control leadership should land/seabased command posts be wiped out.
Just food for thought.
Tripler
Besides, we all know where the secret bunker is; It’s Area 50. (Who’d think to look there?!?)
No he couldn’t. The Constitutionally required quorum for the House and Senate is a simple majority. Without at least 218 Representatives, the House can’t conduct business and therefore can’t elect a Speaker.
Yep.
Actually it is in area 42.
Protecting the president via one of the Air Force One planes would not be that hard as long as the White House was not a direct hit. However, the Green Brier bunker complex was meant to protect as much government as possible. They even had a pharmacy for prescription drugs kept current for everyone that was supposed to a arrive there in the event of the unthinkable. I have no idea how they thought they could get 500+ people there but there must be a plan.
I grew up in Northern Louisiana which is home to Barksdale AFB. We all knew that there were serious nukes there and I swear to God that planes routinely went supersonic over our elementary school even though people say that isn’t possible. Imagine being in 4th grade and having your whole building shake from a sonic boom every couple of days. The teachers just told us it was fighter planes breaking the sound barrier. This wasn’t just a few times, it happened all the time. You could see the B-52’s setting up an approach but they don’t go supersonic. There was some type of fighter that used our river as a training exercise but it was too hard to see them. You could only hear the sonic boom.
Barksdale AFB in Bossier City, LA is where they took Bush for a few hours during 9/11. There has to be some kind of command bunker there. I looked it up a couple of years ago and sources said that it has the highest concentration of nukes in the world. Second place goes to Minot, ND which accidentally flew a live nuke from ND to Louisiana a couple of years ago and heads rolled over that one.
You’ve got it backwards: Minot has the first highest concentration of nuclear weapons in the free world (150 Minutemen, and some dozens free-fall bombs for the B-52s), with F.E. Warren and Barksdale close to each other for second (Minutemen and Mark-You-Name-Its-for-B-52s respectively). I was stationed up yonder, and went to ROTC Basic Training down yonder. As I understand it, they’re still claiming that if North Dakota seceeded, it’s be the fifth largest nuclear power in the world. 
However, you are right, they did move Dubya to Barksdale, and IIRC, it was the closest military facility that could house that level of VIP and his airplane. Bunker? I dunno–most likely they sheltered him in the old SAC Alert Facility with Air Force One idling nearby.
I got to see some of the old Cold War plans for Minot. It’s interesting to note that yep, back in the day it was a “Collect, contain, and cover” strategy for our leadership. Now with the advent of the Innerwebs, fiber optics, and better communications relays, it’s far easier (and more prudent) to geographically distribute and seperate your leadership rather than put all your eggs in one basket. Granted, the Greenbrier was a hardened facility–but it was just one. The Congress would be sitting ducks for a second or third strike, after the first one shook things lookse (as would inevitably happen given an exchange).
Tripler
Come to think of it, I remember A-10s, F-16s, F-15s, etc. flying in and out of Barksdale.
Incidentally, after 9/11 there was some discussion of allowing for appointment of representatives if a certain percentage of the House was killed or incapacitated, but nothing came of it.
May be UL but . . .
I’ve heard that during the State of the Union address there is always one Representative and one Senator kept out of Washington DC to allow Congress to continue if someone took out everyone else.
I do recall one year, that while listening to the opening news commentary of the State of the Union, the anchor mentioned one specific individual was not present, and was watching the live broadcast in “a secret location.”
So yeah, anecdotal from another Doper, but I’ll concur with ya on this. I just can’t believe they’d broadcast such a thing to the whole world.
Tripler
Senator Saint Cad is posting this from a secret location located somewhere secret in the Cayman Islands. . . :smack:
PS. Fixed typo in thread title.
In order to answer the OPs question, I’m wondering if someone nuked DC and all 50 state capitals, the government would implode.
There have been proposals to expand the list of possible successors to the Presidency. One was to add the fifty state governors (if they were otherwise eligible) in order of state population. A 2007 bill was introduced in Congress that would have added the American Ambassadors to the United Nations, United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France (in that order) but it has not been passed.
That president line of succession is confusing…
How so? It seems pretty straightforward to me, except for the inclusion of the two congressional leaders.
They were originally added in order to prevent the President from appointing his own successor (e.g., a member of the Cabinet), before provision was made to appoint a replacement Vice President in the event of a vacancy in that office.
With that provision, inclusion of the congressional leaders in the line of succession has somewhat less logic, especially since they might often be of a different party from the President and Vice President.
I always assumed that the reason for having congressional leaders near the top of the line of succession was so that whenever possible, the nation would be led by people who were actually voted into office rather than merely appointed.
It’s also potentially unconstitutional. Article II specifies that Congress may designate which “officer” may act as President if there is no President and no VP, and there’s got to be a pretty good argument that members of Congress are not “officers” within the meaning of that provision.
Moreover, presumably there are statutes in place with respect to various agencies that specify that the Deputy Secretary (who is also directly appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate) shall exercise the powers of the Secretary if there is no Secretary. One could easily imagine a post-apocalyptic scenario in which a charismatic deputy cabinet secretary from a senior agency was vying to be the successor to the President, in competition with the Senate president pro tem.
Well, if there ever were such a thing as a charismatic deputy cabinet secretary. 
True, but as I said, since the 25th Amendment allows for an appointed, non-elected Vice President, that argument loses much of its force. Although Gerald Ford was a member of the House and Minority Leader when appointed VP, Nelson Rockefeller had no elective office at the time of his appointment.