When asked if the United States will “get through this decade without another massive attack on the homeland,” former vice president Dick Cheney replied that he thinks something even worse than the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks is coming.
“I doubt it,” Cheney said. “I think there will be another attack and the next time I think it’s likely to be far deadlier than the last one. You can just imagine what would happen if somebody could smuggle a nuclear device, put it in a shipping container, and drive it down the beltway outside Washington D.C.”
Hewitt wondered if the government could continue in such a scenario and Cheney recalled a Cold War era plan for constitutional government in the event of a nuclear attack.
“Basically, it involved having a government in waiting if you will ready to go in the event of nuclear attack on the United States so that we could always maintain the constitutional-based governmental authority,” he explained. “We operated and actually trained under circumstances of how would we go about providing for a government to survive if we were having nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union falling all over the country.”