History
A Continuity of Operations Plan (or Continuity of Government Plan) has been a part of government operations since at least the Cold War, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower provided (via executive order) various measures designed to ensure that the government of the United States would be able to continue operating after a nuclear war.
These measures included construction of underground facilities such as "Mount Weather", a hollowed-out putatively nuclear-proof mountain in western Virginia with a mailing address in Berryville, Virginia. The public can now tour one such facility, intended to house the entire United States Congress, on the grounds of the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Other provisions of the plans included executive orders that designated certain government officials to assume Cabinet and other executive branch positions and carry out the responsibilities of the position if the primary office holders are killed. There has been a formal line of succession to the presidency since 1792 (currently found in the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, 3 U.S.C. ยง 19). This runs from the Vice President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, President pro tempore of the Senate, and then through the Cabinet secretaries in a sequence specified by Congress.
Continuity of government plans are not limited to the federal government. The majority of states have constitutional provisions that provide for the succession of government in the event of an "enemy attack."
Read more about this topic: Federal Executive Branch ''Continuity Of Operations Plan''
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“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
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“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
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“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)