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, men and women who are reassessing their mission and that of the massive bunker they have maintained through more than three decades of nuclear threat.

. Designed to survive the unthinkable and completed in 1958, the year after the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, Mount Weather stands as a monument to a potential nightmare. Few in the U.S. government will speak of it, though it is assumed that all along the Soviets have known both its precise location and its mission; defense experts take it as a given that the site is on the Kremlin's targeting maps. Yet Mount Weather remains an integral part of the U.S.'s "Continuity of Government" plan, under which senior officials are to be whisked away in case of an imminent nuclear strike so that they can set up a kind of Administration-in-exile, directing every order of business from retaliation to recovery.

Mount Weather is operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which for years has fended off inquiries about the installation with a firm "no comment." Jokes Bob Blair, a FEMA spokesman: "I'll be glad to tell you all about it, but I'd have to kill you afterward." Officially, the Mount Weather bunker does not exist; it is not mentioned in FEMA's published budget. "Even I don't know much about it, and I'm head of FEMA's congressional affairs," says David Cole. "A lot of it is in the black ((secret)) program."

In FEMA's internal telephone directory, Mount Weather is referred to simply as SF, for Special Facility, and that is what it is called by all who are assigned there. "I was ((at the agency)) for almost two years before I heard the term Mount Weather," says Julius Becton, who headed FEMA from 1985 to 1989. The installation has no street address, merely a post-office box in Berryville, Va., a sleepy hamlet eight miles away.

Tucked into a heavily wooded mountain ridge straddling Loudoun and Clarke counties, Mount Weather remains largely invisible. On Loudoun County's tax map, parcels covering some 434 acres are simply designated "United States of America." Area residents nod knowingly at mention of the facility. "For years residents of Loudoun County have quietly smiled to themselves that if all the other roads in the county were choked with snow and ice, that one road would be practically dry," says Rob Montgomery, a county employee. "Care was always taken that people could get in and out of there."