The Government Built a Doomsday Bunker Beneath a Luxury Hotel. For 35 Years, Almost No One Knew It Was There.

It was part of a Cold War realization: Nuclear war was a governance problem just as much as a military problem. The nuclear bunker at the Greenbrier was the legislative branch’s piece of that problem. So in 1973, the government undertook a major expansion of the Greenbrier’s bunker. Eventually Bugas became one of the Greenbrier bunker’s most knowledgeable tour guides. Kleisner told him the bunker had always relied on secrecy and that Greenbrier officials assumed the Soviets never knew about it.