 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
 Public tours of the former fallout shelter at JFK's Florida vacation home recall life on the brink of nuclear war. April 2001
Of all the presidents who served during the Cold War, Kennedy was the strongest proponent of sheltering citizens from atomic attack. Before the Cuban missile crisis, as one story goes, Kennedy called navy assistant secretary Paul Fay to ask if he had built a bomb shelter for his family. "No," Fay answered jokingly, "I built a swimming pool instead." "You made a mistake," JFK responded. As Fay recalled, "He was dead serious." On Peanut Island, near Palm Beach, Florida, a five-minute helicopter ride from the former Kennedy estate, one can imagine life in the atomic age at its most terrifying extreme: when nearly one-eighth of the Strategic Air Command's nuclear force was airborne and loaded, the nation's armed forces were on standing five-minute alert under DEFCON2, and anywhere--even the president's vacation home--was a potential target. In December of 1961 the U.S. Navy Seabees came to this tiny "spoils island"--formed out of dredge material in 1919--to covertly build an emergency fallout shelter for Kennedy and his family. These days the bunker is leased by the Palm Beach Maritime Museum and open for weekend tours. On a bright December day, the air sagging with moisture, I travel to Peanut Island on a small pontoon boat with Bill Rose, a museum tour guide and scuba-diving instructor. As we slowly motor to the island, with the north tip of Palm Beach off to one side and the more rambunctious Port of Palm Beach to the other, Rose reflects that during the missile crisis more than 200,000 military personnel came to Florida. "You think it's crazy down here in the season?" he cackles. "Luxury hotels were told to send their guests home--and the military moved in." The shelter lies a few hundred feet past the old Coast Guard headquarters, an expansive white colonial building opened in 1936 and shuttered in 1996. Its entrance--a blunt, tunnel-like aperture with a door and two round openings--peeks out from the side of a small ridge where, as Rose notes somewhat conspiratorially, "the trees are shorter than all of the other ones." The shelter's official cover was as a munitions depot; Rose pokes through a tangle of mosquito-clotted underbrush to show me a weathered sign announcing the same. A few pieces of evidence, however, announce the structure's true nature, the first being the adjustable air valves that flank the door. In the event of an explosion the valves would have been shut, allowing for weeks of self-sustaining, presumably fallout-free underground living. Inside, down a length of corrugated hallway, comes another telltale bit of Cold War architecture: a drain on the floor of a small chamber just before the main room. In shelters like the former "Congressional relocation facility" at the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, the decontamination shower is the symbolic welcome mat, the first thing one sees past the blast door. The main room is somewhat anticlimactic: picture a musty Quonset hut with a few scattered pieces of furniture and radio equipment, and a three-foot waterline still visible on the wall from a severe flood in 1995. No flickering global wall maps, no hints of any poststrike opulence. At the far end of the room, a ladder leads to an escape hatch above. The bunker, which Rose describes as "one of the worst-kept secrets in Palm Beach County," was a near ruin when the museum acquired it in 1995. "It literally became home to homeless people for a while," he says. Thus the museum has taken great license in attempting to re-create the flavor of those doomsday days: the red "hot line" phone on a desk is not authentic, nor is the desk or the presidential seal painted on the floor. (In fact, Rose observes, the hot line wasn't established until after the Cuban missile crisis.) What is real are the infrastructural remnants that divulge the site's real purpose: a carbon-dioxide air filtration system (similar to those used on submarines) and its overhead piping, and the structure itself, buried under ten feet of dirt and coated with lead. John Grant, president of the Palm Beach Maritime Museum, tells me later that even the Kennedy Library was not aware of the bunker's existence, nor will the organization acknowledge it now. But Grant has proof in a collection of testimonials and documents--including a set of Seabee construction orders describing the project as "Detachment Hotel." "It was definitely a fallout shelter," he says, noting that Kennedy spent "about every weekend" in Palm Beach--including the one before his assassination. Built in seven days, the site has become a historical footnote, so secret that there's hardly anyone to remember it. "I talked to [Kennedy speechwriter Theodore] Sorensen, and he didn't know about it," Grant says. "There's supposed to be another one for Kennedy up in Nantucket." So can George W. Bush expect similar digs--perhaps a shelter buried somewhere on his Texas ranch? Bush will have recourse, as all presidents since Eisenhower have had, to Virginia's legendary Mount Weather. A reputed "underground city," the site was completed in 1958 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of the so-called Federal Relocation Arc of structures to which the various branches of government would repair in the event of a national catastrophe. The "special facility" is now managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which uses the site as an emergency management and conference center. (The agency politely declines any comment on its link to presidential survival.) But things have changed since Kennedy's day, notes defense policy analyst John Pike. With the cessation of the Cold War, places like Mount Weather have seen their budgets cut; the Federal Reserve's bunker in Culpepper, Virginia--would-be home to the postapocalyptic economy--now belongs to the Library of Congress. Now that anyone with Internet access can sneak a glimpse of Mount Weather or Area 51 via satellite imagery, many view such secret redoubts as strategically obsolete, like hulking mainframe computers in an age of distributed networks. The planning now, Pike says, is "much more focused on things like an anthrax attack on the Washington Metro subway system rather than an 11,000 megaton lay-down general nuclear exchange." But Pike suspects that contingency planning is still in place for a nuclear attack. "I mean, think about it--how could it be otherwise?" he says. "The U.S. government is about the single most expensive thing there is. How could they not have a backup copy?" There is a small White House bunker, Pike notes, and many national parks near Washington could serve as emergency relocation centers, now that the necessary communications hardware can fit in a fleet of trucks. Then there's the legendary National Airborne Operations Center, housed in a "militarized" Boeing 747 known as an E-4B. Boeing describes it as "a survivable command post for control of U.S. forces in all levels of conflict including nuclear war." But don't bet on any personal fallout shelter for President Bush in his favored vacation retreat of Boca Raton, Florida. "The challenge for emergency war operations is not to ensure the survivability of the president," Pike says. "The challenge is to ensure the survivability of a president." Hence the line of designated successors: "It doesn't matter what the guy's name is, doesn't matter what his title was one minute before the war started. The only question is: Can we find somebody who is the current commander in chief?" As the once occluded underground chambers of the Cold War are brought to light--their blast doors open for all to see--there is the lingering suspicion that there are other undiscovered places where the executive body could ride out a nuclear or other threat. "I don't necessarily assume that we've found all of the big Cold War bunkers," Pike says. One site at the National Communications System complex, in Warrenton, Virginia, a Cold War--era facility that's home to such activities as intelligence cryptology, still puzzles Pike. Station B, on top of a mountain, looks strikingly familiar to him: "When I look at aerial imagery of the thing, it sure looks like Mount Weather to me. But is there a bunker in there? Nobody knows." |
