Exclusive — Cliff Sims: U.S. Government Has ‘Contingency’ Plan and ‘Doomsday’ Bunkers in Case of Emergency

The United States government has “contingency” plans in place for the “continuity of government” in case of an unexpected attack or emergency, Cliff Sims, who served as the deputy director of national intelligence under former President Donald Trump, said during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday.

When asked about the U.S. government’s “doomsday” bunkers, which Sims talks about in his newly released book, The Darkness Has Not Overcome: Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power, Sims confirmed that the government has plans in place for these doomsday bunkers.

“You know, you probably always wondered, I know I did, ‘Does the government really have plans for all of these things?’ And what I learned when I got to the office of the director of national intelligence is, well, sure enough, we do,” Sims said. “And there are these series of locations around the country, a lot of them built during the Cold War, that were made to survive various different doomsday scenarios.”

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“One of the things that the government does on a fairly regular basis is they do a continuity of government or continuity of operations planning and exercises. So, we — one day, while I was in the office of the director of national intelligence — were taken to one of these locations, and I had to get clearance to even talk about some of it in the book. But, what I lay out is basically: we show up at this location, and a giant metal blast door opens in the side of a mountain, and we go inside this kind of cool, dark, damp tunnel with moisture on the walls from rainwater trickling down hundreds and hundreds of feet above, and we’re on golf carts, basically going into an underground city.”

“When we get there, there are office spaces there. There are living quarters there. There are computer systems there. There are video monitors kind of monitoring things all over the country. Anything you could possibly imagine to be able to respond to one of these disaster scenarios or an attack or anything like that is at our fingertips. And, also, anything that we would need to live for an extended period of time. There was even a made-to-order grill with a full staff, full kitchen, and everything where you could order hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, I mean, anything that you could possibly imagine to try to have some semblance of normal life under such scenarios,” Sims added.

Sims added that during his tour of the doomsday bunker, he got to see the living quarters that he would be in if there were a disaster or an attack and ran through different types of scenarios and exercises.

“It was a really, really fascinating experience. It was basically, like, prepping on a whole other level. It was just like an unimaginable level of prepping going on there. But, there are staffers in the U.S. government, who, every single day, go to these various locations around the country, and basically stay prepared 24/7 for any potential eventuality, and a lot of these locations have not been activated in decades. The one that we went to had not been activated since 9/11. They don’t get used very often by people that are at the top levels of the national security bureaucracy, but there are people in there every single day going to work, and so, it was a fascinating, fascinating experience.”

“There’s certainly contingency planning for continuity of government (COG), a warning that makes sure that no matter what happens that there is a way for our government to continue functioning and getting, as quickly as you could, essential services back online and being able to respond militarily if we needed to. So, there are these locations kind of scattered throughout the country, some of them within a quick flight or even a drive, in some cases, from the seat of power in Washington, DC, and others who are spread out in other places around the country,” Sims said.

Sims explained that the scenario that was “the most worrisome” was one called a “bolt out of the blue attack,” which was an attack that came “out of the clear blue sky.”

“This is not a kind of slow escalation, this is, like, out of the clear blue sky, one day, you know, some unstable regime around the country or something is stolen or taken over by elements inside a rogue government, so to speak, launches an attack. That’s a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack. And, that’s the scariest scenario of all because, one researcher — as I was writing The Darkness Has Not Overcome, I looked at a lot of the open source reporting around this, too — one researcher suggested there may only be a six-minute window between the president finding out about an attack and having to make a decision on what to do in the event of an attack. And that’s where the nuclear football comes into play.”

“There’s this idea that there’s, like, a giant red button inside of there, that just, like, you crack the thing open and just, like, push the button and turn another country into glass. That’s not really it. The first and foremost purpose is to verify the president’s identity. So, everywhere the president goes, he carries with him a laminated card — we call it the biscuit — and it has what we call gold codes on it. And those codes are built to verify the president’s identity, and they change constantly. So, in the event of a kind of worst-case scenario and the nuclear football is cracked open, communications are opened up to the national military command center, and the first thing that happens is you have to verify that it is, indeed, the president, and that’s what those gold codes are for.”