Inside the Congressional Nuclear Bunker
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2024
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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We used to build things in America, things like fallout shelters. There’s a luxury hotel on the border between Virginia and West Virginia that’s been a favorite retreat of the D.C. elite for generations. After the fall of the atom bombs in World War II, Washington commissioned an addition to the hotel: a secret fallout shelter that would house Congress in the event of a nuclear war.
Matt Farwell of The Hunt for Tom Clancy is here to tell that story and others from the golden age of Atomic America. There was a time when Las Vegas casinos sold tickets to watch nuclear tests. It was an era when the concrete flowed like water and America built bunkers under a hotel and a military base in the heart of a mountain.
We might even talk about Nazis and aliens. It’s a wild one. Join us.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast support this show through the a cast supporter feature |
| 0:05.1 | It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. So I'll call this Fallout 1.5, because we've been kind of Matt we've been doing episode we did an episode about the video game |
| 0:27.6 | fallout because it's been a big hit yeah and we're to do another one in the summer with like a DC policy wonk guy that also plays fallout for some reason and as a nuclear arms expert. |
| 0:41.0 | But to bridge the gap. |
| 0:44.0 | I know that you've been writing and researching about the |
| 0:46.9 | aesthetics of American apocalypse. |
| 0:50.0 | Got name on it's on my paper. |
| 0:51.7 | Oh, really? |
| 0:52.3 | That's wonderful. Oh, really? |
| 0:52.7 | That's wonderful. |
| 0:53.7 | Yeah, it was great. |
| 0:54.7 | The, uh, and, but yeah, I, uh, so for the, one of the publications I write for that magazine |
| 1:02.0 | newspaper, County Highway. for that magazine newspaper county highway. |
| 1:04.0 | They sent me down to the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, and like it's a massive Posh hotel kind of like in just 10 miles over the border from Virginia in the mountains. |
| 1:23.4 | It's beautiful golf like ski shooting. |
| 1:26.8 | It's owned by the governor of West Virginia, |
| 1:28.7 | Jim Justice, who also owns like 70 mines and a bunch of like 40% don't quote me on this I'm probably wrong but |
| 1:37.8 | like 40% of the arable farmland on the East Coast is somehow owned by him |
| 1:42.4 | and he owns like a doomsday bunker now because there's a giant |
| 1:48.1 | doomsday bunker that Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson signed off on back in the good old days of the 50s when like things |
| 1:56.7 | made sense in America and they just back when we still build things. We used to build giant bunkers in this country. |
| 2:06.0 | And now we've offshored those. |
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