could you describe a raven rock to me like what it is to what it's for no [Music] raven rock like area 51 remains one of the us government's most classified installations it's all part of a plan that was hatched 70 years ago in the 1950s the government came up with plans for a deep underground command center where the president and you know a few hundred staff members not only could take shelter but also could direct a nuclear war the plan is called continuity of government or cog at any moment we could see thousands of members
of the government completely wiped out but there's a secondary government a shadow government that is ready to take over at a moment's notice [Music] riven rock is an underground backup pentagon it's the most unbelievable place you can imagine you're 768 feet below the surface don campbell spent three and a half years at raven rock as part of the president's communication team he's never spoken on camera before about his time working in the secret bunker basically they carved out a city underground that could survive a direct hit from a nuclear blast after you go through the
security you walk in and it's basically an underground tunnel there's a glass door that was three and a half foot thick that weighed 30 tons you go through like an airlock and they had two of those doors and then you walk another half a mile a half mile deeper into the mountain is the bunker itself and you're going past five buildings those represent the five rings of the pentagon and each of those buildings are three stories tall and they probably have 50 to 80 offices per floor the buildings are mounted on springs to survive the
shock waves from a nuclear blast there's a common cafeteria capable of serving 3 000 people three meals a day for 30 days on lockdown they had a barber shop in there with one chair it's got massive reservoirs generators even a crematorium if needed post office medical facilities and emergency command and communication links to the us military all around the world as part of the white house team camel had access to the most restricted part of the bunker the presidential suite the presidential suite was a very secure area the other people in the site they had
no access and they were very very curious as far as what was behind the door the presidential bedroom was of course a king-sized bed then there was a separate kitchen set up in our suite to feed 30 or 40 people the presidential office overlooked the war room which had the same display that was a duplicate of what they had in the pentagon we would look down and of course they'd look up and they couldn't see through the glass because it was a one-way glass to understand why these bunkers were created you have to rewind to
the 1950s for some it was america's golden age but it was also the dawn of a ruthless fight for global supremacy the united states and the soviet union stand on the verge of direct military confrontation in which both sides built up an arsenal of spectacularly powerful weapons that meant the next world war would not last years but minutes there might be as little as 15 minutes notice of an attack that could wipe out much of civilization as we know it and so the eisenhower administration began an elaborate process of contingency planning and if we only
had a few minutes then they didn't want to have any sort of layers of review or approval that would slow down the process of responding to a major emergency to avoid mass panic the u.s government created a nationwide civil defense program we all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous since it may be used against us we must get ready for it growing up in the 1950s there were fallout shelters places where you would go if the nuclear war occurred and in those fallout shelters there was water there were prescription drugs the notion really was
that you could go there and survive the government starts telling americans that not only can they survive a nuclear war but they could go on living their lives as long as they come together in an unquestioning mass not in color this family knows that even a thin cloth helps protect them even the newspaper can save you from a bad burn but while the public was being told to build shelters and duck under their desks the government elite were going to hide under tons of rock and reinforced concrete there was an awareness at the highest level
of the american government that these civil defense drills were really window dressing this was a massive massive propaganda effort that bore almost no relationship to reality whatsoever president eisenhower knew that this was all he said things like if nuclear war comes there aren't going to be enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets
