During the Cold War, the US built a huge secret bunker under the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia where the government could function during a nuclear war. It lasted from 1958 until it was exposed in 1993, by which time the Cold War was over. Canada had a similar scheme in Ontario called the Diefenbunker, although its purpose was a secret during just a blip on the timeline of history.
Officially called the Emergency Government Headquarters, the Diefenbunker took its nickname from Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who authorized its construction in 1959. A truly massive structure, the Diefenbunker stands four storeys deep, covers an area of 9000 square meters, and was poured from 32,000 tons of reinforced concrete. Designed to shelter the Prime Minister and 564 Cabinet members, staff, and military personnel for up to a month without resupply, the facility is equipped with its own Diesel generators, air filtering equipment, decontamination facilities, a three-bed hospital with surgical suite, a dentist’s office, a TV broadcast studio for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or CBC, a jail, and even a vault to store the Bank of Canada’s gold reserves. The whole structure is suspended on massive springs to damp out shock waves while the 1-meter-thick steel entrance doors are built into the wall of a long tunnel running through a hill, allowing the blast wave from a nuclear explosion to blow harmlessly past. As-designed, the Diefenbunker was intended to withstand a nuclear blast of up to 5 Megatons 2 kilometres away.
As you can tell from the headline, toilets gave away the secret. Read how that happened, and what has become of the Diefenbunker since then, at Today I Found Out.
(Image credit: Z22)