Inside the top-secret facility experts say could house the US government in case of nuclear attack: Report
by Mike Brest, Defense Reporter |
October 15, 2022 12:40 PM
In the event of a nuclear strike, President Joe Biden could be rushed to a little-known complex inside a mountain near Blue Ridge Summit, which sits along the Pennsylvania-Maryland state line, according to Newsweek.
The Raven Rock Mountain Complex, which is near Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, "is this massive, hollowed-out mountain. It's a free-standing city ... with individual buildings, three-story buildings, built inside of this mountain,” journalist Garrett Graff, the author of the 2017 book Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself — While the Rest of Us Die, told NPR in 2017. “It has everything that a small city would — there's a fire department there, there's a police department, medical facilities, dining halls."
The bunker dates back to the 1940s and wasn’t completed until the 1950s, all under the backdrop of the Cold War. “Site R,” as it’s nicknamed, was designed to ensure the continuity of government in the event of a nuclear attack.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of the Army Thomas White, and other Department of Defense officials were evacuated to Raven Rock on 9/11 after one of the planes hit the Pentagon, Graff said.
"Everyone knows the mountain is there," then-Fairfield Mayor Robert Stanley told Fox 43 in Sept. 2018. "Most people have no idea what’s inside." Stanley, whose town is 6 miles southwest of “Site R,” spent nearly four decades working for NASA and spent time in the Navy, though he wouldn’t say whether he’d ever been inside the bunker.
"I'm not going to bite," he responded to questions. "I had a very high-security clearance in the Navy and NASA, and when I retire, that security goes away."
Russian President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine is raising the concern among Western officials that he could deploy a low-yield nuclear weapon without incurring a nuclear retaliatory response from them. The worse his losses on the battlefield get, the higher the concern goes because officials fear he has less to lose and fewer options left on how to win the war.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan warned last month of "catastrophic consequences" should Russia launch a nuclear weapon, while President Joe Biden has said that he doesn't believe Putin will, saying that if he does, it could lead to "Armageddon."
"First time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use (of a) nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going," the president said. “He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming."
Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 agreement that's designed to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon in 2018, while the Biden administration has expressed its desire to reenter the deal since its infancy.
“I think it is very clear, the Iranians have made very clear that this is not a deal that they have been prepared to make,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said this week. “A deal certainly does not appear imminent. Iran’s demands are unrealistic. They go well beyond the scope of the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action]. Nothing we’ve heard in recent weeks suggests they have changed their position.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/inside-bunker-biden-nuclear-war-pentagon-putin
