An order to activate the EBS at the national level would have originated with the president and been relayed via the White House Communications Agency duty officer to one of two origination points – either the Aerospace Defense Command (ADC) or the Federal Preparedness Agency (FPA) – as the system stood in 1978.

"[8] This "grave national emergency" message recording and script above was not in use by individual stations or published in any known FCC document.

A nationwide activation of the EBS was called an Emergency Action Notification (EAN), and was the only activation that stations were not allowed to ignore; the Federal Communications Commission made local civil emergencies and weather advisories optional (except for stations that agreed to be the "primary" source of such messages).

[citation needed] A properly authenticated Emergency Action Notification was incorrectly sent to United States broadcast stations at 9:33 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on February 20, 1971.

[14] Many stations didn't receive the alert but more importantly, those that did either ignored it (convinced it was false because it came at the time of a scheduled test), canceled the EAN prematurely with or without any coded indication that the alert was erroneous,[14] or didn't have EAN procedure documents readily accessible to them, so they had no indication of what to do.

[15] This false alarm was sufficiently disruptive to move the FCC to temporarily suspend the use and testing of Emergency Action Notifications (EANs) by codeword effective February 25, 1971.

In the meantime, a national EBS activation (actual or test) would be routed through news service broadcast desks, then authenticated with the White House communications center, introducing a delay of approximately one minute.

After numerous safeguards were put in place, the FCC voted to resume automatic national activation of the EBS using EANs in mid-December 1972, almost 20 months after they were suspended.

[8] FCC publications ultimately removed Message 2 attack warning functions from EBS, following the 1971 incident.

Adding somewhat to the confusion, the confidential plan called for distributing prerecorded warning messages through Priority Four channels.

[18] Citations to this confidential plan presently remain limited to a 1981 Reagan White House memo[18] and the actual recorded[7] attack warning announcement itself.

[18] In the event of a national emergency, the White House Press Secretary would be expected to report to the FEMA Special Facility at Mount Weather and order the playing of prerecorded messages.

These tapes contained scripted attack warnings, recorded siren sounds and other emergency information for use in the event of nuclear war.

[6][7] As official information began to emerge from various sources, non-primary stations were to broadcast it according to the following priority list: A presidential message was always required to be aired live during an EAN.

Lower priority official programming - such as an address by a State Governor - was to be recorded for the earliest available rebroadcast unless it were to be an "unusually long" message, in which case it would be carried live.

[20] Participation in EAN emergency broadcasting was done with the "voluntary cooperation" of each station (as noted in the classic test announcement).

"[19] Since FCC rules disallowed unofficial or non-governmental news, information or entertainment programming during EBS operations, the federal government established a newsroom at Mount Weather.

President Ford's White House Press Secretary, Ron Nessen, confirmed the existence of the news center in his book (page 237).

As a result, the requirement for non-primary stations to shut down during an activation of the system was dropped, and the message became: Stations could also list emergencies that the EBS would potentially be activated for (i.e. tornado warnings, flash flood warnings, hurricane warnings and/or earthquakes); at least two stations - WRTI-AM-FM in Philadelphia and WXYZ-TV in Detroit - infamously made explicit reference to an attack on the United States as being a possible scenario for an EBS activation in their test scripts.

[29][30] In the late 1980s and early 90s, several television stations in the Los Angeles area had specific test scripts that emphasized earthquake preparedness.

The purpose of the tests was to allow the FCC and broadcasters to verify that EBS tone transmitters and decoders were functioning properly.

These tests showed that about 80% of broadcast outlets nationwide would carry emergency programming within a period of five minutes if it had ever become necessary to activate the EBS at the national level.

The weekly broadcasts of the EBS attention signal and test scripts made it a significant part of the American cultural fabric of its time, and became the subject of a great number of jokes and skits, such as the sung versions of the announcement in the mid-1970s.

In addition, many people have testified to being frightened by the test patterns and attention signal as children, and even more so by actual emergencies.