One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture

4 Taking Government, Business, and Schools Underground

c h a p t e r 4 Taking Government, Business, and Schools Underground The survivability of nuclear war was not only an issue for individual Americans, it was also widely debated by those in government, business, and education.The question could be reduced to a simple proposition: Would there be enough left after a nuclear war that would still be recognizable as “America”? While many maintained that any belief in a “recovery” from a nuclear war was illusory, nuclear survival and restoration was official Cold War doctrine for much of this era, and the rest of America was encouraged to adopt a similar view.The argument that with the proper preparations American institutions could both survive a nuclear attack and resume their ordinary functions at its conclusion appears on the surface to be a curious denial of the nuclear facts of life. But a number of elements were at work here, not least of which was the incomprehensibility of nuclear war itself.Without precedent on which to draw, civil defense officials in effect did what the military is often accused of doing—they prepared for the last war rather than the next one. Civil defense planners had seen the British taking shelter and surviving the Blitz during World War II, and the Germans digging out from under the rubble at the war’s conclusion and producing an economic miracle. Surely hearty, 113 determined Americans could do the same in the next war. While many civil defense officials might privately admit that World War II would bear the same resemblance to a thermonuclear war as World War I did to the Seven Years’ War, they might also insist that making some preparations, however inadequate in the face of nuclear war, was preferable to the feeling of helplessness and despair that was the alternative. From an early date, the federal government calculated that one of the essentials of surviving a nuclear war would be military and industrial dispersal , and in 1947 the joint Munitions Board of the Army and Navy asked amateur explorers to identify caves that might be useful for dispersal purposes .1 The Truman administration also expressed concerns about the survival of the government should Washington be subject to nuclear attack, and in 1950 asked Congress for money “to insure the continuity of essential functions of Government in event of emergency.” In an era of congressional wrangling with the executive branch, the request died in committee .2 The increasing power of nuclear weapons also complicated dispersal plans.A 1952 Department of Defense plan to disperse some essential activities from Washington to nearby Andrews Field and other local facilities was criticized by Tracy B. Augur of the National Security Resources Board as a proposal to “enlarge the Washington target rather than to disperse it.”3 By the mid-1950s plans were well under way to assure American political continuity, and by 1961 U.S. News was reporting that “an alternate structure of Government has been organized—and actually set up in skeleton form—to carry on if Washington is wiped out.” The article reported the existence of “94 secret centers” in a “federal arc” extending three hundred miles west of Washington, D.C., that were being readied to serve as government offices should Washington be destroyed.4 Perhaps the most spectacular of these “secret centers” was a bunker hidden under the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs,West Virginia, built between 1956 and 1962.The existence of this shelter was classified until 1992, when Washington Post reporter Ted Gup investigated what by then had become a very poorly kept secret. Designed to house the 535 members of Congress and 565 staff members and to “permit the continuation of the American form of constitutional government in the event of nuclear war,” the facility at Greenbrier had separate chambers for the House and the Senate, and a hall large enough for joint sessions.5 Constructing such an elaborate facility was a massive undertaking, and those who built it were not told what it was they were building. Randy Taking Government, Business, and Schools Underground 114 Wickline, for instance, who hauled an estimated fifty thousand tons of concrete to the site, was never told the purpose of this large quantity of concrete. But with walls two feet thick and a concrete roof buried under twenty feet of dirt, there was little doubt as to the function of this facility: “Nobody came...