In the beautiful Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia is The Greenbrier — a luxury resort where well-heeled tourists have visited for relaxation and networking since 1778. It is also the location of an enormous underground bunker created during the Cold War that could house the entirety of Congress in the case of a nuclear attack.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower commissioned the Greenbrier in the 1950s as he stepped up the Cold War. Although the bunker was supposed to be secret, construction workers at the time did wonder what 110 separate urinals and an amount of concrete vast enough for an area the size of two football fields, with two levels, could have meant otherwise. The fact that the facilities were 720 feet underground was probably another giveaway.
Features of the bunker included four heavy doors marking different entrances. Two of the doors even had names — “GH 1” and “GH 3”, which required 50 pounds of force to open. The entire bunker could be sealed with enough air to last 72 hours, enough food for 60 days, and housed beds for 1,000 people. The cafeteria even had fake window decorations picturing scenic vistas. This attempt to mimic normalcy seems especially grim considering some of the other contents of the Greenbrier bunker. For instance, there was a “pathological waste incinerator” to cremate bodies. Also, there was a pharmacy stacked with lots of anti-depressants, and a small jail with plenty of straightjackets in the case that “congressmen went bonkers”. Ulp.
The Greenbrier bunker was decommissioned in 1992 when a _Washington Post_ reporter exposed its existence. By that time, everyone knew that such a bunker would never be able to safely house the federal government in a nuclear attack anyway, the newer bombs moving way too fast for Congress to evacuate there.
It is, however, open to the public nowadays for tourism. 🤯🤓☢️
Sources: Https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/greenbrier-bunker
