There are many politicians and Presidents that claim to believe in fundamentalist Christianity. Has there ever been a contingency plan for the biblical apocalypse/ rapture at the Federal level or otherwise?

I mean, the U.S. government probably has contingency plans for the morning we wake up and everyone's turned purple.

But that tells us more about the government than about the societal impact of purple people eater phobia--or, as it were, premillennial dispensationalist (PMD) hysteria.

But the related question of whether people have worried about whether the government has a continency plan for premillennial dispensationalists' concept of Armageddon, and what those worries have been, shifts the focus from bureaucracy to God's Disney Villain Song, which is what I hope most of the people reading this thread are here for. ;)

There are a couple of different ways that Americans (as the Petri dish for PMD-Armageddon hysteria) have publicly addressed the question of U.S. government preparations for a fundamentalist apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, the biggest difference is whether the media figure is themself a PMD or not--but not just for the obvious reason.

You see, the PMD version of the apocalypse is not only not a literal interpretation of Revelation, but it's not even just Revelation or all of Revelation. It mashes together out-of-order bits of Revelation, Daniel, Ezekiel, and random verses elsewhere in accordance with some acid-trip "Bible code" theology arising out of the 19th century. This is relevant here for two reasons. First, a lot of the supposed pre-Rapture (also not really a biblical concept as such) international political warning signs come from Daniel and Ezekiel, not Revelation. Second, it means that the actual progression of Armageddon is a code--a code known only to true believers. So non-fundamentalist Christians can't see the same warning signs that PMDs do; they can only bring their own ideas of apocalypse and project those ideas onto apocalypticists.

First we're going to look at a PMD perspective.

Once upon a time, believe it or not, the apocalypse was slated to start on August 23, 1939. You might recognize that date as the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that is, the neutrality treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Yes, Germany and Russia, those well known biblical antagonists.

To 1930s PMDs, of course, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as a herald of the apocalypse had nothing to do with the fact that Hitler and Stalin were evil. If you know ~~Cthulhu~~ Rapture mythos, you probably see the names of two countries in the context of Apocalypse Soon and jump to Ezekiel's Gog and Magog right away. The PMDs certainly were. Russia had a long-established role as either Gog or Magog probably going back to medieval Alexander legends, but it was in full force by the 1930s:

No other nation on earth does so completely ft into the divine portraiture of a completely anti-God nation as does modern Russia. If, as all signs clearly indicate, we are at the closing hour of Gentile domination on this earth, than what other nation could possibly be the 'Gog' of Ezekiel’s prophecy if Russia is not?

Make no mistake: other people's fears of Communism and fascism aside, PMDs were gleeful about the alliance. They believed it prophesied their longed-for apocalypse, which has a spiritual function in fundamentalist Christianity we shouldn't ignore, but is also a sharp-edged triumphalist, exceptionalist weapon--a way to delineate Us and Them in the most cosmic way possible, and in advance of the Rapture, a way to say "nanny nanny boo boo we were right."

Fundamentalists reading their own ideas into the actions of international leaders isn't the same thing as identifying their government as making plans to deal with God's Anti-Prime Directive. But the chance to brag about being right flipped the lever here. L.A. pastor and author Louis Bauman wrote, "The unregenerate of this world’s intelligentsia have long assured us that Germany and Russia could never march together to battle." In other words, governments had no preparations for the apocalypse.

Others were more explicit. Preacher Harold John Ockenga exulted that only true students of the Bible had long warned of a Germany-USSR alliance that would make Armageddon "closer than we expect." And Dan Gilbert went so far as to lament that "if only" governments had been aware of what the Bible truly said, they could have prepared for the pact and the divinely-driven devastation that would follow. (Not, of course, the actual and very human devastation that in fact followed.)

So in this case, we can see the PMD method of biblical interpretation--reading into events--combined with triumphalism resulting in the public position that the government did not have any kind of plans to deal with Antichrist.

At this point in time, PMD theology was a fringe belief in the sense of it being numerically small but also in terms of its public discourse presence. On the other side of Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth and during the Cold War presidency of fundamentalists' darling Ronald Reagan, however, the public voice of PMD theology echoed everywhere.

Nuclear weapons are, like Germany and Russia, another matter with a dazzling prevalence throughout the Bible. But (at least prior to global warming becoming a horrible and very human-caused actuality), the post-World War II popular idea of apocalypse meant nuclear bombs. And so, believe it or not, Armageddon became a pressing issue in the 1984 presidential election.

Journalists pressed Reagan again and again about his nuclear proliferation policies, giving voice to what they presented as a public worry that he was actively maneuvering to bring about Armageddon. The New York Times worried about his references to Russia (always Russia!) as "satanic", and mentions of a "final battle." And from an NBC interview:

Reporter: Your Pentagon and your Secretary of Defense have plans for the United States to fght and prevail in a nuclear war. Do you feel that we are now heading, perhaps, for some kind of nuclear Armageddon? And do you feel that this country and the world could survive that kind of calamity?

Reagan: I think what has been hailed as something I’m supposedly, as President, discussing...he prophecies down through the years, the biblical prophecies of what would portend the coming of Armageddon and so forth. And the fact that a number of theologians for the last decade or more have believed that this was true, that the prophecies are coming together that portend that. But no one knows whether Armageddon—those prophecies—mean that Armageddon is a thousand years away or day after tomorrow. So I have never seriously warned and said we must plan according to Armageddon.

Most people since have concluded that even if Reagan's religiosity was as sincere as conservative Christians make it out to be, he was categorically not trying to bring about Armageddon in his own lifetime, much less under his watch as president. He's on record elsewhere of suggesting--in actual biblical fashion--that we can't know when God will end the world, and the role of Christians is to fight evil.

But even that, I think, is less revealing than the manner in which non-PMD reporters addressed the possibility of apocalypse. Not by reading a pre-existing mythology into world news, but looking at world news and identifying things that could be apocalypse--then projecting those ideas onto a particular apocalyptic mythology. And that while our 1939 PMDs relished the coming destruction and being proven right, these reporters were more concerned for, you know, people dying.