Civil Defense Doomsday Hideaway

It may well be that the cold war is over, that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are dismantling thousands of nuclear weapons, and that Moscow no longer poses the threat to the West it once did. But buried deep inside a Virginia mountain, a vast, top-secret installation -- one of the great artifacts of the cold war -- remains at the ready. Known as Mount Weather, it is a Strangelovian relic of yesteryear intended to shelter the President and other top U.S. officials in case of nuclear war. The 33-year-old facility is manned by a second generation of doomsday planners,...