Angry Planet - Inside the Congressional Nuclear Bunker

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/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.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. 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 Fallout because it's been a big hit. Yeah. And we're going 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. Cool. Bridge the Gap. I know that you've been writing and researching about the aesthetics of American apocalypse. Got name minus on my paper.

Oh, really? That's wonderful. Yeah, it was great. But yeah, so for the one of the publications I write for that. magazine newspaper County Highway. They sent me down to the Greenbrier Hotel in White Silver 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. It's beautiful, golf like ski shooting.

It's owned by the governor of West Virginia, Jim Justice, who also owned. like 70 mines and a bunch of like 40%. Don't quote me on this. I'm probably wrong. But like 40% of the arable farmland on the East Coast is somehow owned by him. And he owns like a doomsday bunker now because there's a giant doomsday bunker that Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson signed off on back in the good old days of the 50s when like things made sense in America.

back when we could still build things. We used to build giant bunkers in this country. And now we've offshored those. They're going to New Zealand. They're going to Greenland. They're going to, where else have we heard about Hawaii? I guess it's not. It's off-cones.

Islands in the Pacific where they're not thinking long-term logistics in an apocalypse. Yeah. That's poor Marshall Islands, man. That sucks. We had a bunch of Marshall Islanders that live out in Arkansas because we took their land and nuked it and then brought them here to be chicken farmers. Which like, that sucks.

That's not good. Would you be happy with that? Like, oh, here's your like paradise. And the Navy, the goddamn Navy sent like, and I love the Navy. My dad's a sailor, you know. blah, but they sent like artists, painters

over there to like paint the nuclear explosions and like the aftermath of it. It's pretty good. You can see it on the Navy's website. Operation Crossroads, paintings should get you there. But yeah, so I've become very interested in all this. The thing that they,

the big concrete thing that they built out there is broken and leaking now, by the way, too. Well, that's good. Yeah, that's great. Let's back up for a second. Can you introduce yourself and tell me about your lovely website where you write about this stuff? Yes. My name is Matt Farwell. I'm a writer and combat infantry veteran. I served in Afghanistan. Military brat, I write depressing stuff about soldiers and spies for the most part. I wrote a book called American Cypher, Bo Bergdoll and the U.S. tragedy. in Afghanistan, which Penguin Press put out in 2019. And I currently write the substack, The Hunt for Tom Clancy, which is a failed book proposal that talks about, initially talked,

went through all of Tom Clancy's books and talked about how he was working PR for the U.S. government and did that like through, you know, archival research and stuff, document-based. things like I do any of my other reporting going out and talking to people. And then it's kind of morphed since I got through all the main Tom Clancy over to however the hell you say that word.

Ovois is what I've said. Ovoa. Ovo. Yeah, that's like the worst for my American mouth. Yeah, I see. It's hard, man. You know, monolingal.

But, yeah, so I write The Hunt for Tom Clancy, which you shall subscribe to. It's well worth your time, and money, there are, like, 77 archive dispatches you can go through and read, where I talk about everything from dinosaur parks to nuclear bunkers to the Army's forays into ESP and remote viewing, all sorts of weird fun stuff, UFOs pop up every once in a while, as they should. So I wanted to focus on this last piece.

Is the thing out for, is the thing about out that is just about the Greenbrier? No, that'll be coming out for County Highway's first anniversary issue, which I think drops in June or July. So it should be out shortly. And then there's this, which was kind of a, it was an academic piece I wrote for one of my classes that could, I thought could translate over where I got into some things that I didn't cover in the, in the piece where I, the piece where I, I go there, I narrate my visit. I talk about some weird features of the bunker. You learn more about it. But some of that stuff is also present in this one.

So we can dive right in. I got it pulled up right here next to me. To make the fallout connection real quick for the audience, and we can dive a little bit deeper in a little bit later in the conversation. But the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, Fallout 76, the latest entry, is set in West Virginia, and the Greenbrier, I think they changed the name

for reasons when they made the game, but it is one of the major settings of that particular game. And when you go to the Greenbrier and you stay there and you understand its history, which we're about to talk about,

you really understand why. So can you tell me about where this hotel, why is there, I can't like you said, I can't stress enough how beautiful and empty so much of West Virginia is. And then there, right there on that border is this magnificent, almost builtmore-esque hotel. Where did it come from?

Well, so the site itself, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia was, you know, like a spring site for the indigenous people that were there. and then when the English settlers first arrived, it became like Thomas Jefferson used to go down there. And they would take the waters because the waters were good for you. And from there, it just kind of built out to be this southern resort complex for basically like the southern aristocracy. I mean the whole like American aristocracy, which does. doesn't exist, but does exist. Well, so it's not that far from D.C., right?

No, it's a five-hour train ride for if Congress wants to get on it, which they killed, Congress racked up a body count in 2019 when they were going down to the Greenbrier and their train struck a garbage truck, their congressional train, and killed one garbage man, or two sanitation workers, as I believe they like to be called now, and injured another. Everyone on Congress was fine. A couple of them got taken to UVA hospital to be checked out. They were all down in the green bar having martinis, you know, that night.

But, you know, it's good. They claimed a soul for the legislative branch. So, sorry. Okay, so this thing gets built out. When does the actual hotel get built? So the hotel gets built around the turn of the century when a lot of those big, you know, before air conditioning, right? Like, people wanted to get out of the city.

And so this was a place where when it was summer in New York, you could come down to White Sulfur Springs. And so, like, I got a nephew that's playing the flute. He's like a flute prodigy and he's playing Carnegie Hall up in New York in August. And I was telling somebody, I was bragging about him down at the Greenbrier. And one of the ladies is like, oh, is he playing the Carnegie Hall down here? And I was like, what? And she's like, oh, Andrew Carnegie built like four Carnegie halls because he, wherever he vacationed, he wanted to be able to go and hear music in the way that he thought it should be heard.

So there's one at the Greenbrier, there's one in New York. There's one in like Winter Park, Florida. There's one somewhere else like Jackal Islander, you know, one of those places. But it's, I mean, there's this, there's this, and this is something I don't talk about in necessarily either of the articles, but I found really fascinating about that whole thing is, like, this place has been around since the turn of the century. It's where like the Vanderbilt's and the aster's would go down and hang out. It's where George Marshall had a 60th birthday. It's where Robert E. Lee went in 1868 with a bunch of other Confederate generals to like, and like, like, you know, weirdly enough, the Ottoman ambassador, who knew? But, and they issued, like, the White Sulphur Springs manifesto, which was kind of, you know, Lee saying, like, the Civil War is done, you know, and this was 1868, but kind of, and, you know, it wasn't all, it wasn't like a good manifesto, but, you know, it was something that happened there.

And then, so then in the 1940s, the hotel is built out World War II starts. It is at first the place where all of the Axis diplomats are imprisoned. So think of like everyone from Italy, Germany, and Japan, and some of the other affiliated countries that were in D.C. We're all put on trains, sent down there and given like basically like, and border guards to like keep them in line. And then once they were all like that was done and they were shipped off, it became a hospital for, you know, like rehabilitating wounded GIs. And then after the war, it got some money poured into it first by like private, you know, wealthy people. And they hired a designer named Dorothy Draper, who basically, if you were like super,

loaded in the 1940s and 50s, you just went from some place decorated by Dorothy Draper to some other place decorated by Dorothy Draper. It's like, you know, like big of ultra-rich holiday ins. They're all different, but they're all kind of the same. Is that where the word drapes come from? I don't know, but her husband was named Dawn Draper. No. Yep, she divorced him or he divorced her.

And then she'd grown up in Tuxedo Park, like, you know, life. of luxury. She winds up in a tenement building in the Lower East Side with three kids, but she's still like Spunky and she convinces like all these, she basically just worked with all these industrial magnates to redo their Newport beach houses and then eventually got into like the hotel business. And it's, so it's jarring when you go in there because it's like Lily Pulitzer on acid shit, right? Like I and I didn't do. It still looks like that. Right. Oh, yeah. No, it's still, it's still very much the, like, think of you took like a baden, boden style spa, right? And then you put that in a Vegas style casino that was decorated to look like a combination of Versailles and the Library of Congress. And that's kind of the look of the greenbriar. It's very, it works. Like it's actually, I thought it was cool.

But it's jarring and weird. And then it's more jarring and weird to realize like behind one of those bright paneled like walls, somebody if they got a phone call could reach up there, unlatch the thing, pull back the false panel on the wall, open, like take a blast door that's like two feet thick and close it on the convention center because unbeknownst to all the executive. who would be having like conventions down there at the drop of a hat this place could become a nuclear bunker for congress and dudes with the forsyth corporation which was like congress's militia down there bust out with like shotguns revolvers and stuff batons chase the guests out chase anyone else out and like get the property ready for i think they had space for like

850 some odd people down in the bunker. So like, picture 535 members of Congress and then like their most attractive staff members would all be down in the bunker. So how does this happen? How does this place become a congressional bunker? Well, President Eisenhower really like to golf there. And so people really like to go there too. And it was owned by the railroad. And the railroad could be trusted. And so like three executives with the CSX corporation or the, I don't remember what it was called then, but it was, you know, the railroad back then. And now it's CSX, signed on. They basically, like, to keep it completely secret, they laundered the payments to the railroad company. the railroad company bore all the costs up front, but then got them back, and the railroad company owned the property.

And then in the event of an emergency, they had a secret lease agreement with the government where, you know, when the phone call was made and the conditions were activated, the government all of a sudden was leasing the property and it became like a federal reserve. And the plan was literally to chase out the guests with shotguns and revolvers should the worst happen? Yes, and also that would keep the West Virginians out, too, theoretically. I didn't really like, and my tour guide said I was the first person asked this question, but on those blast doors, you know, like doors open and close, and they have hinges either on the inside or outside, right? These hinges were on the outside. They were big-ass hinges. We're talking, like, you know, foot and a half, right?

Like, but you could blast through those things. You get, like, you go down, strip some copper from the, like, dome that covers the original, like, white sulfur springs. like spring. It smells like shit, has a statue of the Greek goddess Hebe, who is the goddess of the youth, I believe, up on top. But it's covered in copper. You can take some copper off that, stuff it in a paint can, you know, put some explosive behind it and melt right through that.

That's what the Iranians taught us in Iraq. So I asked the, like, tour guide, I was like, hey, you got to be, like, pretty trusting on, like, perimeter security here because you could, like, blasts. through those doors. He's like, no, you couldn't. I think you could. But yeah, I don't, I don't know. Also, the ridiculousness of this shit. Again, 535 members of Congress all down in one big open bay style like dormitory with bunk beds. Yep. Did you get to go into the bunker itself? Yeah, parts of it. I think it's still an active bunker. They heavily hinted that it is. This is just like one more level of cover. But there's,

There were parts of it that are at data center now owned by CSX Corporation, or CSX IP is the subcorp. But yeah, so we could, like for 50 bucks, you can go like tour the bunker. And the guy's really nice. The tour guy I had. It was great. And it's a weird experience, you know? Like they were going to go down there and hang out while like everyone else burnt, you know? My favorite part was the, um,

I've been as well. I've stated the Greenbrier as well. Is the, uh, the exercise bikes with ashtray attachments? Oh, it rules, doesn't it? It's so good. It's like, I, I mean, I have no, I love staying at the hotel, by the way. I'm like, I'm not in any way, shape, or form, like giving, I like nice, you know, I like nice, fancy hotels, especially when, like, other people are paying for him. And, um, yeah, did you swim in the pool? No, that I didn't do.

I had a pre-packed schedule when I was there. That pool is incredible. If you get back there, I highly recommend it. It's like that mineral water, so you're more buoyant, you know? Nice. Okay. How many people could fit in a bunker? Well, in that one, like, could they bring their wives, children? No, it became a point of contention, actually, that, like, it was only 850-some-odd people.

So basically, like, Congress and then staff. and eventually they amended that to be, yes, you could bring your families, but they would have to stay in the hotel. So they wouldn't be in the bunker, but they would be in the valley. Oh, so you could find their corpses easily after the bomb. Well, and what you were hoping, now this place was obsolete to almost the moment it was built, because they were building it for bombers when they figured they would have, you know, eight or nine hours of warning. And then ICBMs come along and they're like, oh, we don't like have any warning whatsoever. But they kept it active.

And they said it almost went like operational on during the Cuban missile crisis and then almost again on 9-11. Well, it was already, was it already at, when did that was it Washington Post that finally figured it out and kind of exposed it? Yeah. Yeah, it was Ted Gup. So I think, you know, he was their chosen leak for that. but I think it was already about ready to be burnt, you know. But I highly recommend reading his article on it. It's really interesting.

And he talks, too, about kind of the absurdity of some of this shit where, like, you think those construction crew, those like concrete dudes down in West Virginia that were supplying the concrete didn't know what they were doing? They're like, this is like four times as much concrete as we need for any, like, anything. Right. It's an enormous project. hard to hide. Giant.

And part of it was hiding it in plain sight, right? Right. They're building the conference. It's time when the aesthetics, like everyone was thinking of bomb shelters anyway, right? Right. And you had civil defense pamphlets coming out, you know, on how to build like your backyard fallout shelter. Because the other thing we should in the context of fallout talk about is the Greenbrier is not actually a bomb shelter. The Greenbrier is a fallout shelter. Which is different.

Cheyenne Mountain is a bomb and fallout shelter because it's deep enough that they figure it could, you could launch a nuke theoretically at Cheyenne Mountain and not bug the like windowless city that's suspended inside a bubble, you know, inside of the granite there. Right. What's the, what's the distinction between a fallout shelter and a bomb shelter? So with a fallout shelter, you're expecting to be within like the zone where like you might get the effects of the blast, the fallout from it. I mean the after effects, not the initial like explosive force, but you might be like downwind from it or something. So it has to have air purifiers and scrubbers.

And I don't know. The doors seemed so thick, partially to, like, keep people out as much as to keep bombs out. How did you get in? Because when they took us in, it was like, there's like a tunnel outside of the main hotel that is that. That's the service tunnel. We went out that way. We went in through the, like, original conference center opening, which is over in the, I think it's the West Virginia wing. And it's just like you're kind of walking past where some of the movie theater stuff is. And then you come to what would just look like a flat panel wall and another door into a big conference room that's windowless and seems kind of austere. It seems like a hanger. And that's kind of what it is.

Right. Is this what you've got the photo of in your piece? Yes. Yeah. Of the entrance to that. where it's got kind of that yellow pattern thing and that's just a false panel. Yeah, it's a really great. Everyone should go read this piece.

It's a really striking photo. Yeah, I think there was because how many people took that tour with you? Was it just you? No, it was me in about like nine or ten other people. Again, they do them like twice a day. You don't have to stay at the hotel to go there. If you're in D.C. or like Virginia, it's right on the train line. I drove down there, but you could just.

take the train down there, hang out and take the train back. Yeah, I think it was because in the context that I was there, there were so many of us. They were trying to usher through because I was there for the video game release party essentially. Oh, yeah, yeah. They were, they ushered like

a whole bunch of us through the service tunnel. We're just trying to ram all of us through the whole thing as quickly as possible. So I guess there's maybe the most packed of those rooms have been in a while. It was weird because we did the it's like the one place that you're in the bunker itself that there's like an auditorium to seat a bunch of people. Yes.

The Senate chambers. Where they had like, they're like, yeah, the guys can go get the podiums and stuff like from the back and bring them out here. But otherwise, it just seems like it's like a convention center. Exactly. Isn't that neat? Did you get his, did you see like the media room too where they had two big murals like one was of the White House like in the back year like. in the back in the Rose Garden, the other ones, the Capitol building, like you're, you know, standing right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, where they would film something in front of it, yeah.

Yeah, and they had like filters to put over the camera. So if they were filming it and, like, fall, it would look like there were fall leaves if they were filming it. Like, this is the kind of shit they were thinking through. It was about, like you say in the piece, it was about, it's a continuity of government space, right? It was meant to, and I'm sure, like, that kind of thing would play much different on a television in the 1950s and 60s. than it would now. I mean, I think people would be pretty pissed right now. It's like, hey, you're where?

You're at the greenbriar? Well, just that you would be able to fake a rose garden and fall leaves, right? With that kind of tech. Oh, that's true. Yeah, that's like we don't think, we think of that as like kind of primitive now, but that would have been like, whoa. Yeah, but right, but TVs also didn't have the resolution and almost. all of them if not all of them were in black and white, right?

And if it's in the, I don't, when did color TV come in? Actually, it was the 50s. 1560s. Yeah. Anyway, but yeah, it would be much easier to fool people. But this is all like part of this thing that you're talking about in this piece where there is this period that begins after the bombs drop, where we, where America's especially is thinking about how to, like, the, the analogy.

use is really good because it's you have these things that are projecting the aesthetics of apocalypse yet still need to be useful. Oh, are you talking about like a doomsday weapon is not much of a deterrent if the public doesn't know about it. However, balance and that knowledge is critical.

If the public does know about it, they might fear it so much that society fails to function. Right. So you have this weird period right after the bombs drop and you capture it really well. there's this great piece from Bloomberg that you quote, where you're like you're talking about the way that Las Vegas handled the bombs. Oh yeah, they had like tourism.

Oh yeah, and true Las Vegas style city capitalized on the atomic spectacle. Chamber of Commerce printed up calendars advertising detonation times in the best spots for watching casinos like Binion's Horseshoe in the Desert Inn, flaunted their north-facing vistas, offer a special. atomic cocktails and dawn bomb parties were crowds danced and clothed until a flashlit the sky. Women decked out as mushroom clouds vied for the Miss Atomic Energy crown at the sands. The best thing to happen to Vegas was the atomic bomb. One gambling magnate declared, that's actually true.

Like, Vegas, can you imagine being like a cement dude in Las Vegas in like the 1940s? Man, you are set up. well yeah and you have to put all the bodies in there too you know right i toward no i do i mean all the gangsters go into the concrete well and into the nevada test site itself i toured the nevath the doe will let you tour the nevada test site because i don't know why but um they won't let you bring a geiger counter uh and you have to sign up on a list and like you got to be an american or a brit we had a couple of british drone pilots that were on my tour they are operating out of Creech.

So if you guys didn't know, they're Brits flying drone missions from Nevada that are sometimes unilateral. But the tour guy, the guy that was running the, like, radioactive waste disposal portion of the Nevada test site, which is basically just a big hole

where they put connexes full of, like, radioactive shit from Oak Ridge offices. You know, something like Oakridge dude brings back, like, uranium to his office, and the whole thing gets radioactive,

they'll pack up the whole office and send it out there. And the guy was like, yeah, this is also where Jimmy Hoffa is. And he said it as a joke. But then I was like, wait a second. No, that probably is where Jimmy Hoffa is. It'd be a great place, right? It's perfect. No one's going to go digging around in the nuclear waste.

No, and at this point, the mafia is running Las Vegas, right, supplying all the concrete to the federal government to build the Nevada test. and all those underground cities, I think they could get it done, honestly. Once again, we used to be able to build things in this country. We used to be able to bury people in this country properly, and they couldn't be found. Now it's not that cares.

All right, Angry Planet listeners, we're to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, welcome back, Angry Planet listeners. Can you talk about then Doomtown and, like, how this optimism and this kind of enwrapping, this kind of rapture that we have with the nukes turns into something else i'm actually so happy to do that because it was one of my favorite spots to go to on the tour was the place where like there was doom town which was like they built a bunch of houses and put mannequins and

shit in there like having breakfast and then exploded nukes you know just see what what would happen and it's like not good you know stuff blows up shocker um but then you kind of see like this laboratory where everyone in the government was just like, how can we, how can we, like, test stuff out here? And so there are destroyer like substructures that would have been on the surface, just kind of out there. There are, there's a bank vault from the Mosler Safe Corporation who also made the like doors for the Greenbrier. And the thing with that was they wanted to see, you know, how would a million dollars in cash stand up to a nuclear explosion? And the answer to that, apparently, is it all incinerates without a trace. It just all goes away because they did

actually do a test where the safe was just fine. It was, you know, knocked off its hinges and everything a little bit. But mysteriously, all of the currency inside was just burnt. It was just gone. That was strange. And meanwhile, some, some test- workers were driving around in Ferraris. My favorite one of these is in 1955, they were, they would just nuke food to see what would happen to it. They'd like position a bunch of beer bottles out on the, like the edge of the test range and then detonate something and then go and see how irradiated the beer was afterwards,

see if we would be fine and how deep we needed to go. I mean, they were having fun with it, you know? like I one of the other things I'm doing at UVA right now is going through the papers that are held in special collections of Frank Wisner

who was the kind of original OSS office policy coordination and CIA like covert action guy and at one point the Navy like at the Atomic Energy Commission invites him out to see a nuke detonation and like it was just

like it was in Las Vegas, for government officials, it was like, if you got like a VIP ticket to go out to a nuke explosion, like you were a big deal, you know? I mean, this was like, it was, it's always so weird to me because they're feverishly working towards and getting excited about like making these better and better bombs while also being like terrified that the Russians and the Chinese are doing the same thing to the extent that one of the other like one of my other, like, one of my other favorite, or, you know, not favorite, but great, like, stories about this is when CIA went and put a monitoring station in the Himalayas that was going to, like, be able to detect Chinese nuclear tests and report back information on them.

They did this with the cooperation of the Indian government, and they sent up Mountaineers, and they put this thing in place. And the power cell, you know, this was 60s, the power. power cell for it was a four-pound ball of plutonium. Now, an avalanche comes along, sweeps this away. And there's either a four-pound ball of plutonium sitting in a glacier at the headwaters of the Ganges, just like waiting to be melted and, you know, go into the holy waters of the Ganges, or Indian intelligence stole it shortly after helping CIA put it up there because that's four pounds of plutonium. So we kind of hope it's the latter,

but it might be the former. Every story about early nuclear America is like this. No, it's, well, and I'm sitting, I'm sitting right now in southern Idaho, which is where if you eat at McDonald's or if you've eaten at McDonald's, you've eaten potatoes grown around here because that's where all the French fries from McDonald's come from right around here. Also, if you've eaten sugar in America or dairy, you might have eaten something from around here. Now, the only problem with that is 200 miles south of here is one of the impact areas for the Nevada test site. And wind and dust blows, right? So there's a place down in Paul, which is 20 minutes from here, called Cancer Ridge, where a bunch of people got cancer.

And I don't know. I mean, I'm not a scientist, but I got to think it's bad to grow some of your staple agricultural products in dust that has been, I think there were 400 above ground nuclear tests in Nevada before they stopped them and went underground. and then they stopped them entirely in 92. But that seems bad, right? You're just paranoid. Just paranoid. You could have, like, perhaps a B-47 was flying over the state and dropped a nuke accidentally and no one was ever able to find it?

That might also be bad. Yeah, or if that happened in Spain, too, but with a B-52. Yeah, well, the one in Spain was particularly bad because it burst open. like right there in the right there on the like where one of the tributaries is right and like spread a bunch of nuclear material all over. Yeah, they had to truck out like tons and tons of soil.

And that was when Spain said no more flying over our airspace and it was kind of part of the end of strategic air command which was that period where we had America had pilots like fucked up on speed flying in the air 24 hours a day. ready to drop a nuke over somewhere in the entire planet, right? But we'd build ICBM silos by then, so it was okay. I mean, still sad, though. Well, it's nice to have like a bunch of twitchy 18-year-old kids buried underground for months

at a time. That's probably safe. Oh, okay. So with those silos, you know, the Air Force, and I heard this, like, this hearsay, friend of a friend kind of thing. But a friend of a friend's dad was one of those like nuclear weapons officers down in one of the silos. And the Air Force would do. What's that?

A missileer. I think they're called. A missileer. Yeah, what a cool name, huh? Yeah, it's great. And so they do like tests where, you know, they want to see if you'll push the button, man. And like only actually only about 10 to 15 percent of like Air Force nuclear weapons officers actually like push the button. And my friend, you know, asked your dad, like, well, do you push the butt?

He's like, yeah, of course I pushed the butt. Like, like, duh, it's my job. And she was like, oh, my God. But I like that. And then I also like this other guy I knew was down there. And his favorite activity was like, because they never got drug tested because they're in the middle of nowhere. And they knew when drug tests would come in. So, and they have to have a certain amount of water down in their,

to like displace the rocket, you know, if the rocket goes off, there has to be like a pool of water to some, you know, I don't know what the thing is. But anyways, see, you just like go up and like smoke a big fat joint and then go like swim in the water in the silo. And I was like, what a great job, man, you know? No, actually I'd hate that job. Well, yeah, I mean, that's why they're smoking weed and,

because you're just sitting in a high GILI rate too. They have a really high DUI rate too Because they're in the middle of like nowhere in Montana Yeah, because they're in one of the What do they call those? The nuclear sponge states Yes Yeah, that's where they built all of those

Missile silos. So yeah, you're sitting down there for hours and hours and hours And your entire job is just to push a button If the worst thing in the world happens. I think I'd be smoking weed too. Yeah, and your job is just to make it a little bit worse. Yeah, you're just to make it a little bit worse. Yeah.

Your job is just to make it. The world has already happened. It's your job to make it worse. We're just here to, we're not here to do that. We're here to finish the job. So how does like, okay, so these doom towns, America sees these pictures of them, right? Like this kind of becomes part of the tapestry of how America thinks of nukes, right? Yeah.

And I think like they built them partially out of hope. that like it would be a good look you know they'd be able to like bring something reassuring to the American public but instead it's like oh yeah no we're all a we're this is going to kill us all if it happens so um anyways hopefully it doesn't happen we're going to get involved in some more wars so how did like is that when the boom for is that when the concrete sales start doing really well kind of across the country and like the the home kits from the civil defense stuff for building a fallout shelter yeah yeah that's like like 60s is kind of late 50s and and early 60s up especially past the Cuban missile crisis because then

like America is also like oh shit like that actually can happen um you have that and then you get kind of a like post-vietnam strain of like oh this is really bad and scary. You know, think of like the nuclear explosion scene in Terminator or like the whole conceit of Terminator in pop culture. Right. That actually I think that's deleted

scene where she's grabbing onto the it's funny because whenever we think of Terminator we'll think of it now when she's grabbing onto She's having that dream fence. Yeah. Yeah. And she gets kind of washed away by the nuke. But the the Doomtown stuff was like an early version of that, basically.

Because they were showing these films. Reels. Of like the Apple 2 house, just... Yeah, here's a nice American suburban street. And here it is completely obliterated by this weapon that, oh, by the way, the Russians have now. And they don't like us very much.

This is why, Matthew, I just have to say, I think the fact that we keep doing shows about nuclear weapons to try to raise people's consciousness is also the same thing as making people like shut down. more crazy than they already are. What are you going to do? I'm just saying.

I'm just saying because I'm not saying we shouldn't do the shows. It's more like, I mean, do we bring back the concrete sales? And if we do start bringing back the concrete sales, do we get a cut? That's the real question. We should really be thinking about sponsors here, not just, you know, conversations. That's a good point. Semex is not, you know, they got deep pockets, man. Yeah, and all you need for good concrete is like some sand, you know, some rocks and some blood.

Yeah, we'll be in the pocket of big concrete. I think that sounds great. I mean, it's the most honest about being a blood-driven industry. No, I mean, I don't know, too. It's something where I was at a New Year's party in Las Vegas. with my ex-wife who was like my girlfriend at the time. And for some reason, I just kept checking this website that would like show me the like nuclear blast radiuses.

And I would put like, yeah, like, and I would put like wear a suit like, because we're on one side of town. And so I'd put like, yeah, what happens if like a suitcase nuke goes off at Fremont Street? You know? And all right, well, I'm dead. But if it goes off here, like maybe I'm all right. And yeah. It's not like, it's not the best thing to bring up at parties.

And also, like, if you think like DOD or CIA or any of those are crazy, then you go look at Department of Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission. And you're like, holy shit, you know, because they get up to everything those guys get up to and more. Right. Luselma does have armed guards, right? And they're serious. All of them have armed guards. And they're all pretty serious about it. Delta Force tends to like kick their asses in a security exercises that I've seen.

But they shoot a lot. I mean, there's a national lab up here in Idaho. And those guys shoot more rounds. I talked to one of them. They shoot more rounds than my infantry platoon shot before we went to Afghanistan. So, but like they're like a football team that never gets to play a game. Because, you know, no one's like breaking on to steal nuclear material. except for those Catholic worker and the nuns, the old people that were guided by the hand of God to get into the Y-12.

And they got in very easily. That's what I love about that story. It's the best. I know. I mean, I was not being facetious when I said that. Like, I'm like, yeah, that probably makes sense. It was because there was that, again, there's all these weird little periods in nuclear history where it's not top of mind. And they kind of got to slip in during one of those periods where it was an issue that they cared to.

very deeply about and the rest of the country had stopped paying attention to and the DOD had stopped paying attention to quite frankly. Well, and yeah, I mean, the, and I know Delta was able to take, like, many, many pounds of fissile material out of Los Alamos because they went and got one of those, like, carts from Home Depot, you know, like the, I used to have one. They're like wheelbarrows, but they have four legs. Yeah, yeah. Gorilla carts.

They got a gorilla cart. And like, because they had made a rule that they could only like, you know, whatever they can pack out. So they just went and got a gorilla cart and stole like 200 pounds of plutonium and got it out during it during an exercise. So it was all given back. Well, that's nice. That's good to hear. Sleep tight, America. All right.

tell me about kind of to contrast as you do in the piece, the Greenbrier, the place where function and form are together.

Tell me about the old command the old Cheyenne Mountain. I've never been in Cheyenne Mountain. And if anyone is listening to this who wants to bring me into Cheyenne Mountain,

please do. I would be happy to go. So this is all based on like, you know, documents and other people's writings. But Cheyenne Mountain is wild. Okay, it's a granite mountain in Colorado. Like the whole mountain is granite. And so they tunnel to like basically like think of, they did one tunnel one way and then another tunnel 90 degrees perpendicular to it. Right. So those

things form a cross. And then at the center of the cross, they excavated like or there might have in a natural cavity there, but they have this giant like dome. On that, they built, they put in thousands of like these huge steel springs and then put a foundation on that and then built like, was it 11 or 15 buildings? I sometimes have all this stuff in memory and sometimes I don't. But 11 to 15 buildings, and I can find it here, that are all. all made completely out of steel. They call it a windowless city. But it's like driving on to a small military base, except you drive into it. And I don't think you actually drive into it. You park in

the park lot and go up and get in the shuttle. But you're ushered into it in a way. You're ushered into it. I mean, and again, this is like most of my, most of my look and feel of it tends to be from either Stargate or, um, or, or, war games, which fortunately, actually, like, this is one of those feedback loops that I've been interested in the whole time with The Hunt for Tom Clancy, but someone at NORAD watched war games and was like, their command center looks cooler than ours. We need one like that. And so they rebuilt the nuclear command center to better reflect what they had seen in a Hollywood rendition of a nuclear command center.

It's like Monty Python where remember the sketch where they wheel in, there's someone, they're doing surgery, and they say, let's get the machine that goes beep. Oh, we have to have the machine that goes beep. And what about the one that goes, boom? That's meaning of life, right? I think you're right. I think it's the opening scene for meaning of life. Yeah, you've got to have, it's funny the way, at,

I don't know if this happens in other countries, but it definitely happens in America where we rush to meet the pop culture we've designed. Yes. Right? You see this a lot with tech companies all the time. A sci-fi story comes out that's a cautionary tale against the torment nexus. And then five years later, a CEO says, I guess big news, everybody, Torment Nexus coming out next year.

Everyone get very excited about this. What is it about us that we do this? Why do you think this happens? Like Americans or just humans? I mean, I think there's something specific. There's something maybe I'm wrong and I'm being deeply ignorant of other countries. But it seems like in America, the aesthetic dream precedes the reality pretty awesome. I mean, I think that's the story of America itself, though, right?

Yeah, I would say so. It's a place populated by, like, you know, people who were too big a lunatics for the countries they were originally from and decided to come here. You know? Like, it's, I think, I think we remake our reality to fit the culture, or, like, the coolest version of the reality we can see, largely because that's, what we're a made up nation of like multiple made up separate interests that somehow like have this pretend reality we all share so yeah i mean i don't i don't think necessarily um actually i'm working on this documentary project with this dude that's doing a doc on mraps and he went over to south africa and you'll love this he was talking to a south african mercenary who had like been active

using MRAPs in like Rhodesia or something like that. And he was showing him like pictures of what American police look like now, like the militarization of it. And the guy was like, oh, I really

like, that's wild to see. Like, I didn't think America was like that. I just really didn't think it was like that. With like, he still had the, you know, your Barney Fife type cop. And I just, I thought that was interesting too because the, the police, like, looking the way they do is an example of that. You know, they see all of, like, all the, my cohort that went off to war and got kind of unjustifiably lionized for it for like many years. Um, because, you know, the wars didn't go very well. And many people in the military are good people. Many people in the military are like total dirtbags. Um, and, you know, you got to balance the two out. But, but. And, you know, you got to balance the two out. But.

for a while in this country, like, if you were an army dude, like, you were super cool. And the police wanted a little bit of that. Oh, I have to jump off, but I'm going to be a total pedant and just point out that Zimbabwe is Rhodesia. Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe. A country, no, I was saying that he was using it back in, yeah. Back in the day. Now, now I'm clear.

I'm clear. We're all right. Okay. And you should be. Just trying to avoid the letters. Just trying to avoid the emails. And Botswana, I had a roommate for Botswana. He's awesome.

Hey, Matt, so good to meet you. I'm sorry to see you longer, but. Yeah. Bye. Have a good one. The MRAP, I think, is a really, that's a really good example because it wasn't just that the DOD was kind of pushing this dream forward or like it wasn't even the DOD like at the head of this thing.

It's just the aesthetics of the global war on terror. But the Pentagon then also had a whole bunch of extra stuff that it could sell to a domestic audience, right? Literally like the MRAPs and the gear and all these things that get picked up by local police forces, right? No, I mean, I often think of like just how many times the Army changed its standard combat uniform throughout like those 20 years. And I mean, that made certain textile industries quite a bit of money, you know. And this stuff all, it's a good way to make a lot of people a lot of money. So speaking of, they don't use Cheyenne Mountain anymore, right? Well, they say they've discovered that the granite that is within Cheyenne Mountain is good at dealing with an electromagnetic pulse.

And so it may not be, they were supposed to have moved the whole, like, NORAD complex to Peterson Air Force Base. But now there's a bunch of computers down in there, and they said it's, last I read was, like, Raytheon's doing a $700 million upgrade to the site, which was 70% occupied by Air Force classified operations. So who knows? there could be that could be the alien cloning facility we don't know well if it ends up being the alien cloning facility will you come back on to well actually you know what let's get into this a little bit right here at the end if we can um what's the deal with all the UFO stuff that's going on right now yeah so I wrote another thing about this because I've been I've been interested in the UFOs

for for you know I don't like for a while they're interesting but um professionally interested since like it was kind of socially acceptable to become professionally interested and they wouldn't like think you were it i i mean they think i'm a total nut anyways but um i still am able to get work but if you weren't able to like it was kind of a bridge too far to get in you know but like i watched the x files i like the x files um the more i've gotten into it the more it seems like the UFO community and the larger UFO discussion writ large is kind of Trojan horsing a lot of Nazi ideology into the discourse.

And this may sound goofy until you think, like Eric von Dynakin, who if you've ever watched ancient aliens, was the guy that wrote Cherry to the Gods while he was at Davos, like while he was running a hotel in Davos. So let that activate all of you. your things. But

and then his draft wasn't good enough. So his publisher wanted it rewritten by a ghostwriter. And the ghostwriter they chose was a man named Uttz Unterman, who had been Hitler's favorite novelist and had edited like the Nazi newspaper for years.

So think about what incentive these guys would have to making a mythology where tall Nordic gray or tall Nordic white aliens are good and small gray aliens are bad.

I've rewatched X-Files recently. And it is really striking how much of its greater mythology is all pretty closely aligned with stuff that we consider like out of pocket now, right? like forcing a vaccine on large swaths of the population, essentially what is like interstellar miscegenation. Funkers in West Virginia that hold DNA of all the humans. Yep. Yeah, you've been tagged and cataloged.

Everyone has been forced breeding projects and like interstellar miscegenation as a form of staving off extinction. Like all that stuff. High-ranking government officials that smoke in buildings? We used to have a country. I mean, you used to, like, when I was in college, you could smoke in the Virginia legislature, like right out there in the ante rooms. They had ashtrays built right in. They were still, they were cleaning up most of those desks when I went to college.

That stuff was, that stuff was verboten by then. We could smoke in our dorm room at UVA in 2002. I had a hookah. And for the first three weeks, I just smoked regular tobacco out of it and then I put weed in it. And the guy across my RA was across the hall. And he'd later go on to be a Navy SEAL. But he couldn't tell the difference between like my weed hookah and my regular hookah. So you just got away with it all semester.

That's beautiful. All right. I think that that's a good place to end. That's a wrap. With the Navy, with a Navy seal being unable to tell the difference between tobacco and marijuana. It's the image you want to leave the audience. I believe he's living in Texas now.

Of course. Many such Navy SEALs doing the same thing. That's for freedom. He probably knows what weed smells like now, though. I would, I would, you know. Well, he's very Catholic, so he might not, actually. Well, depends on what kind of Navy SEAL he was, right? Sure.

What kind of business is he got into on the side? But that's a whole lot of podcast. No, I think he was probably pretty straight up and down. So he was a very good guy. Okay. Matt, where can people find your work? You can find my Twitter profile is at Huntlancy. my website slash substack

slash thing you can and should subscribe to is The Hunt for Tom Clancy. If you just Google that, it should pop up. You can find my work in major publications throughout America, or you can buy my book or steal it, whatever you want to do. American cipher, Beau Burkdal, and the U.S. tragedy in Afghanistan

from Penguin Press 2019. Thank you so much for coming back on to Angry Planet. Thank you for having me, sir. That's all for this episode, Angry Planet listeners. as always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, if you really like us, go to Angry Planetpod.com, sign up for $9 a month, get the newsletter, get the written pieces, get the bonus content, and get episodes early

and commercial free. Again, that is at Angry Planetpod.com. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an Angry Planet. Stay safe and tell them.