Hotel Atomic

Joanne Freeman: Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and the Robert and Joseph Cornel Memorial Foundation.

Ed Ayers: From Virginia Humanities, this is Back Story.

Brian Balogh: Welcome to Back Story, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Ed Ayers: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians. Each week, we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

Joanne Freeman: Now, picture a luxury hotel. Attentive staff buzz around serving drinks to thirsty golfers who’ve just come in after playing 18 holes; but behind a false wall, there’s a blast door intended to keep out radiation from a nuclear bomb. Nobody who works here knows, but this is where the American president, senators, and congressmen will hide out if America comes under attack by nuclear weapons. Sounds like a James Bond movie, right?

Joanne Freeman: We’re going to start off today by going underground to a secret facility standing by not far from here.

Garrett Graff: … I ever went to was the Greenbrier bunker, which would have been the congressional bunker and relocation facility during the course of the Cold War.

Brian Balogh: This is the writer and historian, Garrett Graff.

Garrett Graff: It was this bunker hidden under this very fine golf resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The resort is still used as a annual congressional retreat. Through most of the Cold War, it was used regularly by members of Congress who never knew that underneath the facility was a bunker where they would have ridden out nuclear Armageddon. What’s so funny about the Greenbrier bunker is it is actually buried in the hill adjacent to the resort itself. It’s probably the only bunker in the world where you take an elevator up in order to get into the bunker. You sort of walk back through this passageway in the hotel, and you then take an elevator up. They had basically a fake folding wall that you could pull out, and then there was a massive blast door behind it that would have actually let you, and still does let you into the bunker itself.

Garrett Graff: What was sort of so interesting about it was part of the bunker doubled during the Cold War as conference facilities. There were sort of two very large public conference rooms. One of which had seating for 435 people, and would have been the fake emergency House of Representatives chamber. Then, the other had seating for 100 people, and would have been the emergency Senate chamber. All through the Cold War, there were people sitting in these conference rooms going to their regular boring trade association meetings, never realizing that they were seating in the midst of the congressional bunker.

Brian Balogh: Oh come on, so you’re saying the National Association of Realtors on a golfing junket would have their conference in a nuclear bunker, and they didn’t even know it?

Garrett Graff: Absolutely. Then, in order to transform it into this nuclear bunker, you would have pulled out this fake wall and closed this massive blast door to seal that whole part of the chamber behind it.

Brian Balogh: That is just incredible. How many people, civilians, do you think ended up conferencing in this facility?

Garrett Graff: There were thousands of them. It was used for 40 years as a regular hotel conference center. Through that entire time, the number of people who knew it was actually the congressional relocation bunker was really just in the few dozen. The hotel had this sort of separate AV contractor company known as Forsyth Associates that was a secret government front company. All of these AV techs, their actual job was to run the bunker. I tell the story in my book of one of the hotel executives taking over the hotel in the early 1980s, and he’d come from another property, and hadn’t been read into the secret bunker that he was responsible for. He was going over the employee rolls, and-

Brian Balogh: [crosstalk 00:04:49] He’s going to cut this excess fat.

Garrett Graff: He’s like, ‘It seems like we have about four times as many AV techs as we actually should need. What’s with all these employees?’

Brian Balogh: [crosstalk 00:05:00] This is excess fat. Right, exactly. … Yes, I’m sure the first thing he did was offshore them. …