“One of the awkward questions we faced,” said one of the participants, “was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them.” When George H. W. Bush was elected president, he continued the program, but with the Cold War over, President Bill Clinton decided to end it.
Shortly after taking off in Air Force One, however, Bush made his decision to reinitiate part of the plan. So secret was the decision that no one in Congress—and only Vice President Cheney and a very few within the executive branch—were notified of the establishment of an invisible shadow government. Not even Majority Leader Dennis Hastert or Senator Robert C. Byrd (D–W. Va.), the president pro tempore of the Senate, the officials who were by law the first and second in line of succession after the vice president, were informed.
Within a few hours of the decision, the first steps were taken. According to intelligence officers, nearly one hundred officials, some very senior, quietly began disappearing from Washington and turning up at the two key “doomsday” sites in Virginia and Pennsylvania. They were forbidden from telling even their spouses where they were going.
The Virginia site was located eight miles from the sleepy hamlet of Berryville, on a snaking stretch of County Route 601 deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Although originally code-named “High Point,” President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first chief executive to visit the facility, referred to it simply as “the hideout.” It was there, during a “doomsday” rehearsal in May 1960, that Eisenhower first read Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s speech denouncing his administration for sending a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union. The lying and cover-up by Eisenhower that followed, in an attempt to conceal his role in the intelligence disaster, became the biggest scandal of his presidency.
Today this bunker is known as the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center and is operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It is about forty-eight miles—twenty minutes by helicopter—from downtown Washington. Completed in 1958, the year following the Soviet Union’s successful launch of its Sputnik satellite, it cost more than a billion dollars. To protect the 600,000-square-foot command post from powerful blasts, the entire complex rests on a series of giant, nuclear-shock-absorbing steel springs; roof areas are reinforced with 21,000 iron bolts pounded eight to ten feet into the rock.
The high plateau that became Mount Weather gained initial fame as the place where wireless telegraphy was born. In 1868, a Massachusetts dentist, Mahlon Loomus, attached a kite and wire to a telegraph key and flew it into a building cloud at the same time a colleague, nine miles away on another high ground, did the same thing. With both kites in the cloud, an electrostatic charge formed between them, linking the two telegraph keys. At the turn of the century, the U.S. Weather Bureau set up a small meteorological research observatory there, thus giving the mound its name. Later, following presidential approval, the hunk of granite was turned into a presidential command center.
On September 11, 2001, entrance to the secret seat of government was made through a guillotine gate and five-foot-thick, ten-foot-tall, twenty-foot-wide blast doors that weighed thirty-four tons. Like a small city, the underground world is made up of an emergency power plant, dormitory space for several thousand people, a hospital, radio and television studios, storage tanks capable of holding 500,000 gallons of water, and even a reservoir for fresh water. A series of side tunnels accommodates a total of twenty office buildings, some of which are three stories tall. Other tunnels accommodate computer complexes that maintain redundant electronic databases for the continuity of government. For those who die in the strange cement bunker, the
Shortly after taking off in Air Force One, however, Bush made his decision to reinitiate part of the plan. So secret was the decision that no one in Congress—and only Vice President Cheney and a very few within the executive branch—were notified of the establishment of an invisible shadow government. Not even Majority Leader Dennis Hastert or Senator Robert C. Byrd (D–W. Va.), the president pro tempore of the Senate, the officials who were by law the first and second in line of succession after the vice president, were informed.
Within a few hours of the decision, the first steps were taken. According to intelligence officers, nearly one hundred officials, some very senior, quietly began disappearing from Washington and turning up at the two key “doomsday” sites in Virginia and Pennsylvania. They were forbidden from telling even their spouses where they were going.
The Virginia site was located eight miles from the sleepy hamlet of Berryville, on a snaking stretch of County Route 601 deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Although originally code-named “High Point,” President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first chief executive to visit the facility, referred to it simply as “the hideout.” It was there, during a “doomsday” rehearsal in May 1960, that Eisenhower first read Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s speech denouncing his administration for sending a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union. The lying and cover-up by Eisenhower that followed, in an attempt to conceal his role in the intelligence disaster, became the biggest scandal of his presidency.
Today this bunker is known as the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center and is operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It is about forty-eight miles—twenty minutes by helicopter—from downtown Washington. Completed in 1958, the year following the Soviet Union’s successful launch of its Sputnik satellite, it cost more than a billion dollars. To protect the 600,000-square-foot command post from powerful blasts, the entire complex rests on a series of giant, nuclear-shock-absorbing steel springs; roof areas are reinforced with 21,000 iron bolts pounded eight to ten feet into the rock.
The high plateau that became Mount Weather gained initial fame as the place where wireless telegraphy was born. In 1868, a Massachusetts dentist, Mahlon Loomus, attached a kite and wire to a telegraph key and flew it into a building cloud at the same time a colleague, nine miles away on another high ground, did the same thing. With both kites in the cloud, an electrostatic charge formed between them, linking the two telegraph keys. At the turn of the century, the U.S. Weather Bureau set up a small meteorological research observatory there, thus giving the mound its name. Later, following presidential approval, the hunk of granite was turned into a presidential command center.
On September 11, 2001, entrance to the secret seat of government was made through a guillotine gate and five-foot-thick, ten-foot-tall, twenty-foot-wide blast doors that weighed thirty-four tons. Like a small city, the underground world is made up of an emergency power plant, dormitory space for several thousand people, a hospital, radio and television studios, storage tanks capable of holding 500,000 gallons of water, and even a reservoir for fresh water. A series of side tunnels accommodates a total of twenty office buildings, some of which are three stories tall. Other tunnels accommodate computer complexes that maintain redundant electronic databases for the continuity of government. For those who die in the strange cement bunker, the
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