Inside Congress' top-secret nuclear shelter

The Cold War was wild, y'all.

(The Greenbrier)

I spent the last 48 hours at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

On its face, it’s a lot like other really nice hotels around the country. The rooms are beautiful. The service is top notch. (The food, I will note, is very mediocre. Disappointing!)

But, the Greenbrier has a secret — or HAD a secret for the better part of three decades (from the early 1960s until 1992): It was where Congress would gather in the event of a nuclear strike on the nation’s capital.

Yes! And I got to tour it! It was totally and completely fascinating.

Ok, first some history.

The nuclear bunker was the brainchild of then-President Dwight Eisenhower. He had visited the Greenbrier during World War II — the hotel was converted into a recovery hospital for injured American soldiers during the war — and in 1956 Eisenhower held the North American Trade Summit at the hotel.

Eisenhower arrived a day early, which, at the time, no one thought much about. But, Eisenhower used that day to plant the seed of constructing a nuclear bunker with the head of the C& O Railroad, who owned the property at the time.

Nuclear armageddon — following the bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — was very much on Ike’s mind.

He wanted a way to ensure the continuity of government even if the worst happened: A nuclear strike in Washington, DC. For Ike, the Greenbrier made all the sense in the world as the site for this bunker. It was far enough from Washington, he thought, to avoid nuclear fallout (this was the 50s — the knowledge of radiation and how a nuclear cloud moved was, um, limited) but close enough that members of Congress could get there before a strike happened

(Back in those days, nuclear weapons could only be delivered by plane — meaning that the U.S. would know a bomb was on the way hours before it was actually dropped. The Greenbrier, for what it’s worth, is about a four hour drive from downtown Washington.)

And so, in 1957 a deal was struck to build the bunker — although it was done in absolute secrecy. (The bunker would not be built to withstand a direct nuclear strike so its location had to be kept secret from almost everyone in the government, with the exception of the president and Congressional leaders.)

By 1962, it was completed. Two stories tall. More than 700 feet underground. More than 112,000 square feet. At a cost to the government of $14 million.

And yet, it was hiding in plain sight. The Greenbrier continued to function as a resort hotel — Eisenhower liked that the workers at the bunker could be hidden as employees of the hotel — and even part of the bunker functioned as a public space for business conventions and the like.

But, hidden just behind a folding wall was a massive 15-ton bunker door — that could be closed by a single person in the event of a nuclear strike. (It’s one of three massive doors that sealed the bunker off; one weighed 25 tons!)

This is what it looks like:

Unbeknownst to all but 60 (or so) Greenbrier employees — all of whom had to sign non-disclosure agreements — there was a fully staffed government-in-waiting working just out of sight.

There were beds (bunks!) for Members of Congress. A full service dining area. (They had food enough for sixty days.) The bunker had its own water and air supply. A communications room where Member could have communicated with the outside world in the event of a nuclear attack. (My favorite part? They had White House and Congressional backdrops where broadcasts could be made — and they could change the backdrops to reflect a change in seasons!)

(Bunk beds where Members of Congress would sleep)

There were even two conference rooms where the House and Senate would meet in formal session. Fun fact: The signs outside each room lied about the maximum occupancy because the government was worried that someone might get suspicious if they saw one room with a maximum occupancy of 435 and the other with a maximum occupancy of 100.

One more thing: The bunker had its own operating room — with doctors and nurses standing by!

Remarkably — particular in this age of social media — the bunker stayed a secret from 1962 to 1992.

On May 31, 1992, a reporter named Ted Gup wrote a Washington Post magazine cover story entitled “The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway” that exposed the Congressional bunker beneath the Greenbrier.

Gup wrote:

Unlike other government relocation centers, built mainly to house military and executive branch officials who would manage a nuclear crisis and its aftermath, the Greenbrier facility was custom-designed to meet the needs of a Congress-in-hiding, complete with a chamber for the Senate, a chamber for the House and a massive hall for joint sessions. Its discovery offers the first conclusive evidence that Congress as a whole was even included in government evacuation scenarios and given a role in postwar America. Today, the installation still stands at the ready, its operators still working under cover at the hotel -- a concrete-and-steel monument to the nuclear nightmare. The secrecy that has surrounded the site has shielded it both from public scrutiny and official reassessment, and may have allowed it to outlive the purpose for which it was conceived.

Gup’s report made national — and international — news. With the bunker’s secrecy compromised, the government immediately began plans to decommission it, eventually pulling out completely in 1995.

Without the government paying to keep the lights on — literally! — the Greenbrier started to give tours of the bunker. But, those didn’t cover the costs of the massive structure so, eventually, they leased it to a data storage company.

Which is sort of a bummer because the company doesn’t allow ANY pictures of the bunker to be taken. (You have to put your phone in a locker before you enter!)

But, even despite that, I CANNOT recommend the bunker tour the Greenbrier offers highly enough. It is a relic of our Cold War culture — and of a time when keeping secrets was a whole heck of a lot more common!

For more check out this video on the bunker: