John Washington III: Government Built Bunkers for Its Leaders — What Did It Build for the People?

Presidential candidate John Washington III is pressing a question he says the Cold War left behind: the federal government built underground bunkers to protect its own leaders, so what did it build for the people? In a written statement, John Washington III noted that during the Cold War the United States invested millions of dollars constructing underground facilities designed to protect government leadership and preserve military operations in the event of a nuclear attack, and he asked what the government built to give the American people that same level of protection.

John Washington III laid out the historical spending facility by facility. The Greenbrier bunker in West Virginia, designed to shelter members of Congress, cost approximately $14 million, he wrote. The Raven Rock Mountain Complex in Pennsylvania had reportedly cost $35 million by April 1954. The Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado cost approximately $142 million to construct during the 1960s. Mount Weather in Virginia became another major federal emergency facility, although its complete historical construction cost is not readily established in the public records he reviewed.

For ordinary Americans, John Washington III wrote, the record looks different. The federal government established a public fallout shelter program, identified existing buildings that could provide protection, and distributed emergency supplies. A Government Accountability Office report documented approximately $122 million in food and emergency supplies purchased for public fallout shelters in the early 1960s, he noted, and the government also funded some shelter construction and improvements — but much of the public program depended on buildings that already existed rather than on dedicated underground facilities comparable to those serving government leadership.

“And that is where my concern begins,” John Washington III wrote. His statement poses the contrast directly: a government that recognized the danger of nuclear war strongly enough to build specialized underground facilities for its leadership, he argues, never made a matching investment in protecting the public it serves.