WV Trip, Day 5, The Cold War

Ward, Wally, Theo, and I are vacationing for a week in West Virginia. If you want to catch up with our other days, here are links. Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four.

Today, Sunday was the fifth day of vacation, and we were suffering from vacation fatigue. Thus, we cut back our planned activities for the day. After a slow start to the morning, we spent the afternoon in White Sulfur Springs, WV. White Sulfur Springs is a small town in Greenbrier County, WV, and home to the world famous resort, The Greenbrier. 

The Greenbrier

We didn't go to visit the Greenbrier, per say, but what's under it. The Bunker. The Bunker was a fallout shelter for Congress to be used in the case of a nuclear attack. It was completed in 1962, during the height of the Cold War with Russia, and was the idea of President Eisenhower. Eisenhower thought it was close enough to Washington, DC, that it could be reached quickly in an emergency by car, train, or plane, but isolated enough in the WV mountains that it wouldn't get a direct attack. Thus he approached C&O Railroad, owners of the Greenbrier, with a deal that the government would build the hotel a new wing if they could build the bunker under it. By having new hotel construction, no one would be suspicious that they were building a secret hideaway underneath the mountain. 

The shelter could hold 600 people (Congress and support staff) for 30-40 days. It was totally self-contained including power sources, water, food, a hospital, decontamination chambers, and meeting rooms for the Senate and House of Delegates. The planners seemed to have thought of everything including riot gear in case problems broke out with that many stressed people living underground in close quarters.

Bunk beds in 1 of 18 dormitories in the complex.

This is one of the 25-ton blast doors protecting the facility.

The secret bunker became public knowledge in 1992 after an article in the Washington Post exposed it and suggested that it was no longer necessary since the Cold War was over.  It was decommissioned over the next couple of years and today it is used for cloud data storage. Luckily, it never got tested to see how well it would have worked.

The tour lasted about 1 1/2 hours and was excellent. Jonathan, our tour guide, was knowledgeable and had the logistics of maneuvering a group of people through the bunker down to a science. We were not allowed any electronics on the tour, so the bunker pictures you see here are from postcards they gave us at the end. 

Even though, Ward and I had gone on the tour years ago, we all found it very interesting. We realized that Jonathan was right when he said that even though the Cold War was an important part of history, there aren't many actual places that you could visit that were directly connected to it. The Bunker was one of those.

We explored The Greenbrier and were properly impressed before heading back to the Vrbo for some reading, game playing, and puzzle working. 

We have a plan for tomorrow, our last day before heading home, but we are flexible, so we'll see what we end up doing.

Until next time...