The Greenbrier bunker is located in the Allegheny Mountains, 250 miles southwest of the nation’s
capital. Beginning in 1959, the Department of Defense spearheaded the construction of a
112,544square-foot facility eight hundred feet below the West Virginia wing of the fashionable five-star
Greenbrier resort. This secret bunker, completed in 1962, was to be the place where the president and
certain members of Congress would live after a nuclear attack. The Greenbrier bunker had dormitories,
a mess hall, decontamination chambers, and a hospital staffed with thirty-five doctors. “Secrecy,
denying knowledge of the existence of the shelter from our potential enemies, was paramount to all
matters of operation,” Paul Bugas, the former onsite superintendent at the Greenbrier bunker, told PBS
when asked why the facility was kept secret from the public. Many citizens agree with the premise.
Conspiracy theorists disagree. They don’t believe that the government keeps secrets to protect the
people. Conspiracy theorists believe the leaders of government are only looking to protect themselves.
The underground tunnels and bunkers at the Nevada Test Site may be the most elaborate
underground chambers ever constructed by the federal government in the continental United States. The
great majority of them are in Area 12, which is located approximately sixteen miles due west of Area 51
in a mountain range called Rainier Mesa. Beginning in 1957, massive tunnel complexes were drilled into
the volcanic rock and granite by hard-rock miners working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
To complete a single tunnel took, on average, twelve months. Most tunnels ran approximately 1,300 feet
below the surface of the earth, but some reached a mile underground. Inside these giant cavities, which
averaged one hundred feet wide, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense have
exploded at least sixty-seven nuclear bombs. There, the military has tested nuclear blast and radiation
effects on everything from missile nose cones to military satellites. A series called the Piledriver
experiments studied survivability of hardened underground bunkers in a nuclear attack. The Hardtack
tests sought to learn how “to destroy enemy targets [such as] missile silos and command centers” using
megaton bombs. Inside the T-tunnels, scientists created vacuum chambers to simulate outer space,
expanding on those dangerous late-1950s upper atmospheric tests code-named Teak and Orange. And
the Department of Defense even tested how a stockpile of nuclear weapons inside an underground
bunker would hold up to a nuclear blast.
Richard Mingus has spent many years inside these underground tunnel complexes, guarding many of
the nuclear bombs used in the tests before they were detonated. In Mingus’s five decades working at the
test site, these were his least favorite assignments. “The tunnels were dirty, filthy, you had to wear
heavy shoes because there was so much walking on all kinds of rock rubble,” Mingus explains. “The air
was bad and everything was stuffy. There were so many people working so many different jobs.
Carpenters, welders… There were forty-eight-inch cutting machines covering the ground.” Most of the
equipment was hauled in on railroad tracks, which is at least partially responsible for inspiring
conspiracy theories that include trains underneath Area 51—though the conspiracy theorists believe
they’re able to ferry government elite back and forth between Nevada and the East Coast. In reality,
according to Atomic Energy Commission records, the Defense Department built the train system in the
tunnels to transport heavy military equipment in and out. If employees wanted to, men like Richard
Mingus could ride the train cars down into the underground tunnel complexes, but Mingus preferred to
walk.
Unlike atmospheric weapons tests or the atomic tests in vertical shafts that made the moonlike
craters, for the T-tunnel nuclear tests, the bomb was one of the first items to arrive on scene. “The bomb
was cemented in the back of the tunnel, in a room called the zero room,” Mingus says. “That was about
three-quarters of a mile distance.” Sometimes, Mingus would stand guard with the nuclear bomb at the
end of the tunnel for eight- or ten-hour shifts, so he chose to walk in each morning “for the exercise.”
Mingus also disliked the assignments inside the underground tunnels because they reminded him of a
part of his early life he would rather have forgotten. “When I was a kid working the coal mines,”
Mingus explains. But as anxious as a man standing guard over live nuclear bombs might have been,
Mingus remained calm. He says the coal mines of his youth were far more dangerous. “There were no
electric drills back then so my brother and I drilled by hand. We’d get down on our knees in those little
tunnels — three and a half feet wide, not tall enough to stand up in. We’d use black powder as an
explosive, not dynamite. We’d set the powder in the hole, tap it with a rod, use a fuse that was like
toilet paper, light it, run out, and then wait for the smoke to clear. Some things you never forget even if
you want to,” Mingus says.ترجمة اريد ترجمة للغة العربية ترجمة فورية