John Washington III Asks What Was Built to Protect the People While Government Built Bunkers for Its Leaders

John Washington III, a candidate for president in 2028, raised the question in a written statement that compared the Cold War facilities built to protect government leadership with the protection offered to the public. He wrote that the government invested millions of dollars constructing underground facilities designed to protect its leadership and preserve military operations in the event of a nuclear attack.

John Washington III cited the Greenbrier bunker in West Virginia, designed to shelter members of Congress at a cost of approximately $14 million; the Raven Rock Mountain Complex in Pennsylvania, which had reportedly cost $35 million by April 1954; and the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado, which cost approximately $142 million to construct during the 1960s. He noted that 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 the public, he wrote, the federal government established a fallout shelter program that identified existing buildings that could provide protection and distributed emergency supplies, and a Government Accountability Office report documented approximately $122 million in food and emergency supplies purchased for public fallout shelters in the early 1960s. Much of the public program, he wrote, depended on buildings that already existed rather than dedicated underground facilities comparable to those serving government leadership. "What did our government build to give the American people that same level of protection?" he wrote.