nuclear-news

As Darling pointed out, only a select few are allowed into a presidential bunker, turning social hierarchy into a matter of life or death. Still historians say bunker building is a necessary part of governmental business.

“You have to maintain a chain of command,” says Randy Sowell, an archivist at the Truman President Library in Independence, Missouri. “Or there’d be complete chaos.”

The construction of shelters and bunkers, whether for presidents or ordinary people, serves another purpose – they make it easier for Americans to talk about atomic or nuclear warheads and help make the unthinkable – global nuclear war – thinkable.

President Harry Truman oversaw the establishment of a federal civil defence administration in the 1950s. The overall message from the government, said Christian Appy, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, was that “nuclear war wasn’t necessarily an apocalypse for everyone”.

The civil defence agency helped create the idea of “nuclear citizenship”, says Appy. The US government wanted civilians to adjust to a new reality, he says, paving the way for their “acquiescence to the nuclear arms race”.

A US strategic bombing survey found about 30% of those who died immediately in the US atomic attack on Nagasaki would have been saved by fallout shelters, says Sowell, explaining the rationale behind Truman’s civil defence programme.

Officials at the agency tried to set up a nationwide shelter system. Some shelters were built for government employees and members of the public. Officials oversaw the construction of a large facility in Los Altos, California, in the 1960s, for example.

Mainly, though, private individuals built their own bunkers. Thousands were constructed, as Laura McEnaney, a history professor, discovered while researching her book on the subject. “Nuclear war,” she says, became “the responsibility of the nuclear family”.

One of them, an heiress named Marjorie Merriweather Post, built her bunkers under her estate – the Mar-a-Lago, in Florida.

In the early 1950s, Post was worried about the Korean War and its potential for escalation, and so she built underground shelters. They were dug into the earth below Mar-a-Lago’s main building, according to a US interior department surveyon historic buildings.

Trump bought the property along with the bunker in 1985. He later described the underground facility as sturdy, “anchored into the coral reef with steel and concrete”.

The ceilings are low, says Wes Blackman. The 6ft 5in former project manager had to duck while visiting the place with Trump years ago.

“It was like we were on an archaeological exploration,” he says………

Mount Weather, a 1,754-ft (534m) peak near Bluemont, Virginia, was turned into a giant bunker for the president, his advisers and others to hide in case of nuclear attack.

Members of Congress would be taken to a bunker at Greenbrier resort near White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The facility had a code name, Project Greek Island, and operated for decades – until its existence was revealed in the media in 1992 when the bunker was “decommissioned”.

Mount Weather is now run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and was “activated” after the al-Qaeda attacks in September 2001, a Fema director testified to Congress in October of that year. He didn’t provide details. ……
In the autumn of 1961, construction began on another presidential bunker. This one was created for President John F Kennedy in Florida. It’s not far from Mar-a-Lago – the US Navy’s Seabees built the bunker on Peanut Island, a 10-minute journey from a Palm Beach house where Kennedy often stayed. The bunker was known as Detachment Hotel, and it cost $97,000 to construct, according to a 1973 report to Congress. …….http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42969877