The Cold War was a weird time. Whole generations of people, now parents and grandparents, grew up convinced their lives were about to be snuffed out by an atomic blast from the godless communists/decadent capitalists (delete as appropriate) – and, more times than we can really be comfortable with, they were almost right.
But what would have actually happened, if the bombs had started falling? For whoever happened to be in Congress, at least, the answer was a program known as Project Greek Island.
What was Project Greek Island?
Well, first things first: Project Greek Island was neither Greek, nor located on an island. In fact, as luxurious as the name makes it sound, the best description of Project Greek Island might be one written by Ted Gup in the original 1992 Washington Post exposé of the program: “an endless river of concrete […] poured into the cavernous hole that had been excavated beside the posh Greenbrier hotel in White Sulphur Springs, [West Virginia].”
It was, in short, a secret government bomb shelter, designed in the late 1950s to house every member of the US House of Representatives and Senate in the event of nuclear Armageddon. For thirty years, it stood right under the noses of American holidaymakers.
“Thousands of people [have] walked in and out of a secret bunker not knowing they were in a secret bunker,” Bob Conte, official historian of the Greenbrier hotel since 1978, told NPR in 2011. That “was part of the original design.”
On a day-to-day basis, the Greenbrier hotel was your average luxury resort, hosting industrialists, heads of state, and various other ultra-rich vacationers, along with (for the time) high-tech exhibition centers that could handle hundreds of visitors and a reportedly “unlimited” weight limit for displays.
It was one of quite a few features that hinted at the resort’s double use. Behind the ritzy veneer stood a concrete fortress: “A warren of rooms and corridors,” described Gup; “The walls were two feet [0.6 meters] thick and reinforced with steel.”
“Later, the entire structure was covered with a concrete roof and buried beneath 20 feet [6.1 meters] of dirt,” he wrote. “At each entrance, cranes hung humongous steel doors, as if giants were to inhabit the underground structure.”
The Greenbrier Bunker
So you’re a US national politician and your country has just become a nuclear wasteland. What should you expect?
Well, first on the agenda will be a four- or five-hour drive – less if you fly, of course – from your office in Washington DC to White Sulphur Springs, a tiny city about 402 kilometers (250 miles) to the southwest of the nation’s capital. Then, you’d be corralled with all of your coworkers through a colossal blast door – 15 feet (4.6 meters) high, 12.25 feet (3.7 meters) wide, and 19.5 inches (49.5 centimeters) thick – and into the decontamination showers.
With the doors closed, every link to the outside world would be cut off. The bunker would be already equipped with enough food and water to support a full cohort for about 6 months, and enough air for 72 hours – after that, the vent system would kick in, filtering out radiation and biological contaminants from the air outside and circulating it through the shelter.
After showering, your clothes would be taken and disposed of; in return, you would be given what Bill Geerhart – the Cold War history expert who infamously coined the name “Graceland of Atomic Tourism” for Greenbrier – termed “bunkerwear”. Next, you’d pass the euphemistically-named “pathological waste incinerator” – and yes, as dystopian as that title sounds, it is a euphemism, because the “waste” in question was likely meant to be the bodies of those who died from radiation exposure on the way over – on your way to the dormitories.
Now, your sleeping quarters would probably be a lot more spartan than you’re used to: despite being located under a luxury hotel, the bunker’s accommodation was more like army barracks than anything else. Each of the 18 dorms held 60 thin metal bunk beds, and, Conte told NPR, “all they had for private items that you could lock up were a small drawer, right underneath the beds, you could put your personal items in here.”
“For 30 years, every one of these 1,100 beds was assigned to somebody,” he added.
Continuing Operations
Now you’re settled in, it’s time to get to work. And luckily – or unluckily, if you were hoping that this whole “nuclear Armageddon” thing might be a good excuse for some personal leave – the Greenbrier was well set up to cope with government business.
“You had meeting rooms for the House of Representatives and for the Senate,” Paul Fritz Bugas, a former on-site superintendent at the bunker, told PBS in 2000. “In the same general area you had the clinic, you had some lounge space and your rest rooms.”
“On the second level was storage support area as well as the leadership office work area for the Senate, and the same for the House of Representatives at the far end,” he continued. “These were quasi or semi-private facilities where the leadership could conduct meeting and conferences.”
In a nod to the dystopian world for which the Greenbrier was intended, the designers of the bunker even included a TV studio, fully equipped with a fake backdrop of the Capitol, for blasting out transmissions to any survivors.
(Un)fit for purpose
The Greenbrier bunker took years to build; it was extensively and intricately equipped, and scrupulously maintained over the course of three decades. But the real question is this: would it have actually worked?
“The utility of the Greenbrier [was] facility questionable from the beginning,” Gup wrote. “In the decades since it was conceived and built, the number of nuclear weapons has vastly multiplied and their accuracy has been greatly enhanced.”
On top of that, the potential bombs that could be sent our way are fast – and not just the modern ones, either. When construction started on the Greenbrier in 1959, the USSR had already developed the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7, capable of delivering a 5.5-tonne thermonuclear warhead some 8,800 km (5,468 miles) across the globe well before anyone could make it from Washington DC to the bunker. But “just how Congress was expected to reach the Greenbrier is unclear,” Gup pointed out. “It is at least a five-hour drive from the Capitol.”
Since 1962, a nearby airport runway was extended – but even then, the flight from DC would take an hour, Gup wrote. “And because very few members of Congress have been aware that the facility exists, it would take far longer than that to round them up,” he added.
“The installation only made sense if the planners anticipated evacuating Congress many hours, if not days, before a crisis turned from rhetoric to attack,” he surmised. “Yet mobilizing 535 members of Congress and evacuating them to a resort area 250 miles [402 km] away in the middle of such a crisis would almost certainly draw unwanted attention to the site.”
And doesn’t that just raise an interesting question: over 30 years, and enough infrastructure to support a small town – how did Project Greek Island remain secret for so long?
How to hide a secret nuclear bunker
In retrospect, it seems surprising that the program lasted as long as it did without being discovered. After all, look at the Greenbrier with a discerning eye, and a few clues to its secondary use might just present themselves to you: the twin meeting rooms, for example, one with about 440 seats and the other with about 100, might strike you as a strange choice; so too might the surfeit of toilets in the resort, overwhelmingly for men.
“Nobody came out and said it was a bomb shelter,” Randy Wickline, a construction worker who helped build the bunker back in 1960, told Gup, “but […] a fool would have known.”
Despite these, um, tiny hints, though, Bugas and his colleagues believed the secrecy of the project was secure. Not only was it built with a ready cover story – “The Greenbrier happened to be extending its guest facilities and was constructing a wing,” he told PBS. “The facility was built directly underneath the West Virginia wing and was constructed at the same time that the wing was being built” – but resort staff were, according to Gup, unfailingly loyal.
How that loyalty would be rewarded in the case of nuclear war, however – well, let’s just say we’re glad they never had to find out.
“There would have been enough room to get a few dignitaries in there,” Wickline told Gup, “but us poor folks would be left standing outside.”
“It kind of made me think about it – and hope it never happens.”
Source Link: Project Greek Island: The Secret Nuclear Bunker Designed To Save Congress From Armageddon