The hotel started offering a tour in 1995 for its guests, and was opened to the general public in 2006. It remained a military secret until 1992, when Ted Gup revealed its existence and location in a Washington Post article. At the start, visitors learn a little history: construction of the bunker was begun by the Eisenhower administration in 1957 and completed just in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The tour is hugely popular, attracting 33,000 people in 2007, according to the longtime manager of bunker tours, Linda Walls. And here, the public can see how the government prepared to preserve representative democracy after a nuclear war. Here they could live for sixty days, continuing the work of governing the country: debating the issues, passing laws, somehow communicating with the executive branch sequestered elsewhere, and addressing the public-or whatever was left of the public. Here, a five-hour drive southwest of Washington, D.C., behind a blast door that weighs 25 tons, all 100 senators and 435 representatives were supposed to take refuge during a nuclear attack. Cold War tourist sites, and the most expensive to visit ($30), is the Greenbrier Bunker, underneath the legendary Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. Thus we can visit the Nevada Test Site, the Titan Missile Museum, and the fallout shelter exhibit at the Smithsonian. “All wars end in tourism,” writes Tom Vanderbilt-even the Cold War. The Graceland of Cold War Tourism: The Greenbrier Bunker Jon Wiener ▪ Fall 1984 The Graceland of Cold War Tourism: The Greenbrier Bunker
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