1952-1958: Government Constructs Underground Bunker Mount Weather

A roughly 200,000-square-foot facility known as Mount Weather, codenamed “Operation High Point,” is constructed deep within an isolated strip of the Blue Ridge Mountains, approximately 50 miles west of Washington, DC. The installation, finished in 1958 at the cost of more than $1 billion, will serve as the flagship of a secret network of nuclear resistant shelters currently being constructed around the nation’s capital (see 1950-1962). Mount Weather is designed to be the headquarters of a post-nuclear government in the event of a full-scale war with the Soviet Union. Construction of the facility is authorized under the highly classified Continuity of Government program, meant to ensure the survival of the federal government in times of extreme emergency. The enormous complex resembles a miniature city, capable of supporting a population in the thousands for months at a time. Mount Weather is equipped with its own streets and sidewalks, dormitories, offices, a hospital, television and radio studios, reservoirs of drinking and cooling water, dining halls, stockpiles of food, a power plant, a sewage treatment plant, a crematorium, government and military command posts—everything needed to sustain and run an underground government during and after a nuclear war. A parallel executive branch will be stationed at Mount Weather to take over the functions of the federal government in the event of a disaster (see March 1976). In the 1960s and 1970s Mount Weather will develop a “Civil Crisis Management” program, designed to monitor and manage potential resource shortages, labor strikes, and political uprisings (see 1967-1976). Mount Weather will be accused in the 1970s of spying on US citizens (see September 9, 1975). In December 1974, a passenger airliner will crash into the mountainside, drawing public attention to the secret installation for the first time (see 11:10 a.m. December 1, 1974). [Progressive, 3/1976; Emerson, 8/7/1989; Time, 12/9/1991; Time, 8/10/1992]