Joanne Freeman: Major funding for Back Story is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and the Robert and Joseph Cornel Memorial Foundation. Ed Ayers: From Virginia Humanities, this is Back Story. Brian Balogh: Welcome to Back Story, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Brian Balogh. Ed Ayers: I'm Ed Ayers. Joanne Freeman: I'm Joanne Freeman. Ed Ayers: If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians. Each week, we explore the history of one topic that's been in the news. Joanne Freeman: Now, picture a luxury hotel. Attentive staff buzz around serving drinks to thirsty golfers who've just come in after playing 18 holes; but behind a false wall, there's a blast door intended to keep out radiation from a nuclear bomb. Nobody who works here knows, but this is where the American president, senators, and congressmen will hide out if America comes under attack by nuclear weapons. Sounds like a James Bond movie, right? Joanne Freeman: We're going to start off today by going underground to a secret facility standing by not far from here. Garrett Graff: ... I ever went to was the Greenbrier bunker, which would have been the congressional bunker and relocation facility during the course of the Cold War. Brian Balogh: This is the writer and historian, Garrett Graff. Garrett Graff: It was this bunker hidden under this very fine golf resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The resort is still used as a annual congressional retreat. Through most of the Cold War, it was used regularly by members of Congress who never knew that underneath the facility was a bunker where they would have ridden out nuclear Armageddon. What's so funny about the Greenbrier bunker is it is actually buried in the hill adjacent to the resort itself. It's probably the only bunker in the world where you take an elevator up in order to get into the bunker. You sort of walk back through this passageway in the hotel, and you then take an elevator up. They had basically a fake folding wall that you could pull out, and then there was a massive blast door behind it that would have actually let you, and still does let you into the bunker itself. Garrett Graff: What was sort of so interesting about it was part of the bunker doubled during the Cold War as conference facilities. There were sort of two very large public conference rooms. One of which had seating for 435 people, and would have been the fake emergency House of Representatives chamber. Then, the other Transcript by Rev.com had seating for 100 people, and would have been the emergency Senate chamber. All through the Cold War, there were people sitting in these conference rooms going to their regular boring trade association meetings, never realizing that they were seating in the midst of the congressional bunker. Brian Balogh: Oh come on, so you're saying the National Association of Realtors on a golfing junket would have their conference in a nuclear bunker, and they didn't even know it? Garrett Graff: Absolutely. Then, in order to transform it into this nuclear bunker, you would have pulled out this fake wall and closed this massive blast door to seal that whole part of the chamber behind it. Brian Balogh: That is just incredible. How many people, civilians, do you think ended up conferencing in this facility? Garrett Graff: There were thousands of them. It was used for 40 years as a regular hotel conference center. Through that entire time, the number of people who knew it was actually the congressional relocation bunker was really just in the few dozen. The hotel had this sort of separate AV contractor company known as Forsyth Associates that was a secret government front company. All of these AV techs, their actual job was to run the bunker. I tell the story in my book of one of the hotel executives taking over the hotel in the early 1980s, and he'd come from another property, and hadn't been read into the secret bunker that he was responsible for. He was going over the employee rolls, and- Brian Balogh: [crosstalk 00:04:49] He's going to cut this excess fat. Garrett Graff: He's like, 'It seems like we have about four times as many AV techs as we actually should need. What's with all these employees?' Brian Balogh: [crosstalk 00:05:00] This is excess fat. Right, exactly. ... Yes, I'm sure the first thing he did was offshore them. ... Brian Balogh: Today on the show, we'll be exploring the history and culture of the atomic age, when the mushroom cloud cast a long shadow over American life. ... Ed Ayers: We'll find out how the atom powered America's superheros, and listen to the voices of a female scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project. ... Joanne Freeman: Now, if you grew up in America in the 1950s, chances are you thought a lot about the possibility of a nuclear attack. School children were drilled to duck and cover under their desks. Many families built fallout shelters stocked with food, water, and medical supplies to survive the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. Transcript by Rev.com Ed Ayers: It was all to prepare for what felt like the very real chance that the United States might be drawn into nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Brian Balogh: But for some Americans, the thought of a nuclear bomb falling wasn't just an existential threat, it was also a fact of life. Speaker 1: Nevada, USA. ... This is the valley where the giant mushrooms grow. More atomic bombs have been exploded on these few hundred square miles of desert than on any other spot on the globe. Joanne Freeman: The valley where the giant mushrooms grew was known more formally as the Nevada Proving Ground. From 1951 to 1958, the US government would drop at least 100 atomic bombs at that test site. Some were more powerful than the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mary Wammack: The test site is located in Central Nevada. It was carved out of the old Las Vegas bombing range that was set up during World War II to train pilots and bombers. Joanne Freeman: That's historian Mary [Wammack 00:06:59]. Wammack says that the scientists running the tests, the Proving Grounds were the perfect location. Like the original test site in Trinity, New Mexico, the Nevada Proving Grounds were huge and remote. Mary Wammack: There were a few miners that lived there, little towns on the perimeter. Other than that, it's kind of a mix of high desert scrub and mountainous terrain. Because of the low population density in Nevada, and also in Utah, it was felt that the fallout would disperse before it got to any kind of major metropolitan area. Joanne Freeman: At the same time, it was also just a quick plane ride for scientists coming from nuclear research labs in Northern California and New Mexico to watch their bombs in action. Speaker 1: Little bomb. ... Big bomb. ... Within the last two years, 20 of these colossal blasts have echoed across the great barren stretches of the Southwest. This testing ground in our own backyard, just an aerial stone's throw from the Los Alamos Laboratory. Joanne Freeman: There was just one problem: it was also a stone's throw from a growing town of 25,000 people less than 100 miles to the South. Of course, you may have heard of it: Las Vegas. ... Joanne Freeman: For most of the 20th century, Vegas had been a sleepy vacation town. It was known mostly as a place where you could get a quick divorce. By 1951, when the first bomb was dropped at the Proving Ground, it was beginning to transform into an international gambling mecca. Transcript by Rev.com Joanne Freeman: The tests, while officially secret, were close enough that the explosions lit up the sky over Las Vegas. Mushroom clouds were clearly visible from downtown casinos. Some of the blasts were even powerful enough to shatter windows and short circuit the city's power grid. Many worried that the testing ground would end Las Vegas' boom years before they even began. After all, who would pay to come gamble while bombs that could level the city were being dropped on the horizon? Others saw the bombs as a golden opportunity. Mary Wammack: What they did was they sort of turned it into our own little circus. Joanne Freeman: Two of the city's biggest boosters were Hank Greenspun and Al [Cahlan 00:09:54], the publishers of the Las Vegas Sun and the Las Vegas Review Journal. Rather than trying to hide the tests, they publicized them. They encouraged local businesses to do the same. Remember those blasts that shattered glass downtown? Mary Wammack: What they did was they put the glass shards into a barrel, and then said 'Free atomic souvenirs,' and people walked by and that barrel was empty by the end of the day. ... Mary Wammack: All the casinos would do packed lunches for people who were visiting who might want to go out and look at the bombs in the desert. They provided maps to places that you could go watch the bombs go off. ... Joanne Freeman: They also quite literally hedged their bets when it came to nuclear blasts.