The Greenbrier Bunker: Congress’s Secret Cold War Shelter and Its Blast Doors

The Greenbrier bunker is a Cold War fallout shelter built for the whole United States Congress under a luxury hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. It was kept secret for about 30 years, until a Washington Post article exposed it in May 1992. We tell its story through its doors.

The Greenbrier bunker at a glance

Sources for the table: the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, Peter Carlson’s history for HistoryNet and the Associated Press report of 30 May 1992;¹²³ the end of the lease from the Center for Land Use Interpretation;⁴ the doors and the dates are set out in detail further down, where the sources disagree.

Why Congress needed a bunker in West Virginia

If a war came, where would Congress meet? In 1955 Eisenhower told the Department of Defense to draw up emergency plans for it, and the Army Corps of Engineers went looking for a site.¹ The military already had its own hideaway, Raven Rock in Pennsylvania, working since 1953. In March 1956 Eisenhower met Walter J. Tuohy, president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, which owned The Greenbrier. On 28 March four congressional leaders wrote to Tuohy that they “will appreciate any cooperation you may give us”.²⁵

The resort made sense. It was about five hours’ drive from Washington,³ on the railway, and it had served the government before: the Army took it over in September 1942 and ran it as Ashford General Hospital, with 2,000 beds.⁵ It also had an airstrip. Bob Conte, the hotel’s historian, told NPR that locals used to ask why a town of 3,000 people needed a 7,000-foot runway.⁶

It was never meant to take a direct hit. The AP’s 1992 report said plainly that the shelter “was not built to sustain a direct nuclear strike”.³ The design assumed a blast some distance away: 15 miles in Carlson’s account, 15 to 30 miles according to the museum.²¹ Its real protection was that nobody knew it was there. The Greenbrier is one of several hidden government shelters of the period, and our guide to Cold War bunkers puts it alongside the others.

Building it in secret

The cover was a hotel extension. The Greenbrier announced a new wing in 1957, and when digging started in 1959 the hole was explained by the wing’s large underground Exhibition Hall.² The Center for Land Use Interpretation describes the works as disguised as the new wing and a golf course expansion, and from outside all anyone saw was the deep foundation of a new building.⁴⁷ Britain hid its regional bunkers in much the same way: Kelvedon Hatch in Essex is entered through what looks like a bungalow. About 50,000 tons of concrete went in, with walls three to five feet thick.² Everyone on the project was investigated by the FBI and signed a non-disclosure agreement.²

The money went the same discreet way. Roughly $14 million was paid to the C&O Railway, not to the hotel; the railway hauled freight for the military, which gave it a reason to have government contracts.²⁷ The press got close once. In 1959 the Charleston Gazette asked about a bomb shelter for the President, and the hotel’s vice president replied, “I know nothing about a bomb shelter for the President.”² Strictly speaking, he may have been telling the truth: it wasn’t for the President.

We couldn’t settle the construction dates, because the sources don’t agree with each other. Here’s what each says:

Our reading: the authorisation came in 1956 to 1958, the big dig in 1959, the shelter was structurally complete in 1961, and the hotel side opened in 1962. The museum’s exact date, 16 October 1962, puts the finish just before the Cuban Missile Crisis.^3264158

The blast doors: Mosler steel behind a wallpapered wall

This is where a safe site gets interested. The bunker had four doors, all made by the Mosler Safe Company in Hamilton, Ohio, and sent to the Greenbrier by rail.¹⁸ Two were huge vehicle doors, known as GH 1 and GH 3. According to Mosler’s own order reports, quoted by the Independent, GH 1 was 12 feet 3 inches wide, 15 feet high and weighed more than 28 tons; GH 3 weighed more than 20 tons. Both were 19.5 inches thick, and each hung on two hinges that weighed 1.5 tons on their own.⁸ A Mosler works photograph from about 1960, published by the Brookings Institution, shows one of them: 19.5 inches thick and over 20 tons.⁹

The other two were smaller: a hatch about 3 feet by 3.5 feet and a personnel door the Independent gives as 7 feet wide by 8 feet high.⁸ The doors were so large that they had to travel by train standing up, tilted, or on a special low wagon.⁸ For all that weight, GH 1 and GH 3 needed only about 50 pounds of force to swing.¹¹⁰ If you want to know how a door that heavy hangs and seals, our guide to how bank vault doors work covers the hinges, bolts and frames.

Why the door weights don’t match

Read five accounts of the Greenbrier and you’ll find five door weights. Most of the difference comes from which door is being described and whether the figure comes from the maker or from a tour guide.

We’d trust the order reports: 28 tons and 20 tons for the two vehicle doors. The 25 tons you’ll hear on the tour looks like a rounded figure. The 30 tons turns up in the Orlando Sentinel and at the top of the Independent’s “18 to 30 tonnes” range for all four doors, which can’t apply to a 3-foot hatch.⁸²⁶¹¹

Hidden in plain sight

The doors weren’t locked away in some service yard. They stood in the hotel’s public corridors, behind movable walls.⁷ The wing’s vehicle and pedestrian entrances could be sealed quickly by blast doors.¹² When the false wall in the photograph is unfolded it covers the door completely, and hotel guests walked past it on their way into the Exhibit Hall, as the photographer’s notes on Wikimedia Commons explain. The designer in us likes the detail that the false wall is papered in the same bold yellow pattern as the rest of the corridor, so a door of more than 20 tons simply disappeared into the décor.

Mosler had a sales story ready for doors like these. The company claimed its vault doors could survive an atomic blast, pointing to a test on one of its doors at the government’s Nevada Test Site in 1957.⁸ Our history of Mosler safes covers those tests and the Hiroshima vault claims behind the company’s Cold War reputation. The confidence was old. In 1894 the firm, then Mosler, Bahmann & Co., ran an advert for jewellers’ safes joking that one would come to no harm even if it fell while being hoisted up a building.

The big doors weren’t built for constant use. Conte told a visiting writer in 2011 that tour groups used to swing the large door at the end of the vehicle tunnel until “we discovered that this was cracking the concrete”. It’s now kept fixed in place.⁷

Inside the bunker

Behind the doors lay 112,544 square feet on two levels, under more than 20 feet of earth.¹² Carlson counts 153 rooms. Arriving members of Congress would have come in through a 433-foot tunnel and gone straight to decontamination.²

The two chambers belonged to the same Exhibit Hall complex.¹² Governor’s Hall, with 440 seats, would have served the House of Representatives, and the Mountaineer Room, with 130, the Senate; the Independent gives the larger room about 470 seats.¹⁸ The rest was a small town underground: a 400-seat cafeteria, a 12-bed hospital with an operating room and a pharmacy, a television studio, a radio and communications room, and soundproofed telephone booths fitted with cryptographic machines.¹²⁸ There was also a Congressional Record Room, which held files and, according to the museum, the bunker’s only weapons.¹

Keeping a thousand people alive needed plant. There was an underground power station with three diesel generators carrying six weeks of fuel, three 25,000-gallon water tanks and an air system: sealed, the bunker had enough air for 72 hours, after which filters would take in air from outside.²¹³¹ The incinerator could burn 500 pounds of rubbish an hour, and the Independent notes it could have served as a crematorium.²⁸ Those cipher booths were the bunker’s secure communications; our explainer on what a SCIF is covers how classified work is shielded in purpose-built rooms today.

Forsythe Associates: the television repairmen

Someone had to keep the place ready for a war that might start on any afternoon. That job went to a small team of government employees who worked at the hotel as Forsythe Associates, a television repair company nominally based in Arlington, Virginia.¹¹² Guests in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s saw them going in and out of doors at the back of the exhibition space; the management said they looked after the resort’s audio-visual equipment.¹³ They really did fix the televisions. A resort spokeswoman told the Orlando Sentinel in 2006: “They were great TV-repair guys.”¹¹

How many of them there were depends on who you ask. Paul Fritz Bugas, the former superintendent, told the Atomic Heritage Foundation there were 12 to 15 permanent staff, spending about a fifth of their time on hotel work and the rest on the bunker.¹ Carlson puts it at about six employees, and the Independent quotes Gup’s 1992 article as describing a seven-man team.²⁸ The numbers may simply belong to different decades. The spelling wobbles too: NPR wrote “Forsyth”.⁶

The routine was unglamorous. The diesel generators were tested every Wednesday night, and food was rotated for 30 years, from C-rations to freeze-dried food to MREs.² The figures for the larder differ: enough for 535 people for 60 days in Carlson’s account, for 1,000 people for 60 days according to the museum, and “a six-month supply of food, periodically refreshed” in Conte’s interview with NPR.²¹⁶ By the late 1980s, Conte estimated, maintenance cost well over $1 million a year.²

The 1992 exposé

The secret ended with a hotel booking. Ted Gup, who had already written about the government’s Mount Weather facility, asked for a room in the West Virginia Wing. The hotel checked him out and found “a respected journalist and attorney”. When he checked in he asked whether the Greenbrier had a nuclear fallout shelter; Ted Kleisner, the hotel’s president, called the idea “preposterous”.¹⁴ Kleisner later tried to talk him out of publishing. Senior congressional aides assured him the story would be “a non-event”, and the government wouldn’t intervene on the hotel’s behalf.¹⁴

Others tried harder. House Speaker Thomas Foley and other congressional leaders asked the Post not to run the story.³² According to Dillman’s 1997 account, Brent Scowcroft, President Bush’s national security adviser, appealed to Katharine Graham, head of the Post, who replied: “Don’t worry. We’ll do what we believe is right.”¹⁴ The Washington Times then ran a shorter, less detailed version on Friday 29 May, before the Post’s Sunday magazine reached readers, and the shelter’s existence was confirmed the same day.³¹⁴ Gup’s article, “The Ultimate Congressional Hideaway”, appeared in the Washington Post Magazine on 31 May 1992.²¹ The Greenbrier’s own tour page calls it “The Last Resort”.¹⁵

That line is the heart of it. The doors were real, but the shelter’s defence was its address, and once the address was in print the doors weren’t enough. The congressional leaders said in a joint statement, “We regret their decision to do so”. The House Majority Leader, Richard Gephardt, was blunter: “This is a relic of the Cold War which probably ought to be mothballed.”³ The Post’s executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., argued the shelter’s usefulness was already doubtful, built on 1950s assumptions, and Gup has said the same: “The warning time was many hours. We’re now talking minutes, if not less.”³¹ Not everyone agreed. Bugas, who went on to consult for the hotel, said: “I feel that Ted did a great disservice.”¹⁴

Timeline

• Sep 1942 The Army takes over The Greenbrier as Ashford General Hospital.
• 28 Mar 1956 Four congressional leaders write to the C&O’s president asking for his cooperation.
• 1957 The hotel announces a new wing.
• 1959 Digging of “the big hole” begins.
• 1961 The bunker is complete; the wing’s public rooms open in April 1962.
• 29 May 1992 The Washington Times runs a short version of the story.
• 31 May 1992 Ted Gup’s article appears in the Washington Post Magazine.
• 1995 The government ends its lease; tours for hotel guests begin.
• 2006 After two years of renovation, tours open to the general public.

Timeline sources: e-WV, HistoryNet, the AP, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the museum and the Orlando Sentinel.^5234111

After the secret: decommissioning and data storage

A shelter whose location is in the newspapers is no longer a safe place for Congress in wartime.¹³ The phase-out followed, and the government ended its lease with the hotel in 1995.⁴¹⁴ Sources word this differently: e-WV says simply that the facility was closed after the Post article, and West Virginia Tourism dates the bunker’s declassification to 1995.⁵¹⁰ We couldn’t find an official government statement on the closure itself.

The space didn’t stay empty. In 2006 the resort said it planned to rent parts of the bunker for storing companies’ backup files and intellectual property, and by 2011 NPR and HistoryNet reported that much of it held climate-controlled corporate records.¹¹⁶² There’s a neat symmetry in that. Built to hold the government’s people, the old vault now holds somebody’s paperwork. If you like your vaults odd, our list of the world’s strangest vaults has more. It’s also the opposite of Fort Knox, whose gold vault is famous precisely because everyone knows where it is.

Visiting the Greenbrier bunker today

You can go inside. The Greenbrier runs guided tours of about 90 minutes from the Trellis Lobby, near the Lobby Bar, and asks you to check in at least 15 minutes early and wear comfortable shoes.¹⁵ The rules are strict, as they were for the bunker’s own staff:

Source: The Greenbrier’s bunker tours page, which also lists occasional closure dates.¹⁵ Prices include West Virginia sales tax and a historic preservation fee, and they’ve risen over the years: $30 for adults in 2011.⁷ Check the resort’s page before you travel, and plan to take your memories home in your head.

Greenbrier bunker myths and facts

Sources: the AP and the museum on the blast design, the Independent on the doors, NPR on its use, and Ed Wetschler’s 2011 visit on families.³¹⁸⁶¹³

Frequently asked questions