• ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    Just… Why would they bother to hide a bunker a Washington DC? They’d just say they built a bunker in Washington DC. I don’t think anyone would be particularly shocked that they built a bunker for Congress in the general capitol region.
    Just like no one was shocked that they evacuated Congress through the capitol buildings egress tunnels on January six.

    I think the more surprising thing would be if they put a bunker under a prominent statue that would be a target in its own right.

    Not that they don’t have secret bunkers, I just don’t think they would put it under a target directly adjacent to where everyone would expect a bunker to be.

      • GoosLife@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        No, the Lincoln statue is actually going to stand up and sucker punch that baby right into Baltimore, where less important people live

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        I know a lot of bunkers are pretty robust and can handle just about anything short of a direct hit to the bunker with a decent sized nuke, but yeah, being in DC during a nuclear exchange is probably amongst the less ideal locations to be, along with “hiking on Cheyenne Mountain”, or “delivering pizza to the Pentagon”.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          5 months ago

          We used to rent a house in middle L.A. and someone had built a “fallout shelter” in the back yard back in the 1960s. It was a concrete box just below ground about the size of an average panel truck with a single light bulb outlet and nothing to sit on. You climbed down a rickety ladder after lifting the wooden door at the top.

          Why the hell anyone thought they would survive in that is beyond me.

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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            5 months ago

            That’s potentially not great for survival outside of a nuclear blast.

            To be fair, it might do an okay job protecting them from one part of a nuke if it was a moderate distance away, like the middle of LA wouldn’t be.
            A couple miles out the shockwave will be basically horizontal, so it being buried would potentially help you skip that part. That just leaves “firestorm making it an oven”, “ground vibration making the roof fall on you”, “suffocating due to no air circulation”, “fallout falling through the ceiling hole making you sick”, “dying of dehydration before enough fallout clears to leave”, and “sitting in a dark room with a bucket of your own feces for the rest of your life because your ladder broke”.

            A desk might actually have been a better plan.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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              5 months ago

              Maybe, but the couple of times I opened that lid of a door, I sure as hell didn’t want to go down into that spider-infested hole. I’ll take my chances with a hydrogen bomb. Ick.

              • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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                5 months ago

                Oh, I didn’t even think of the spiders, or how it’s probably damp and covered in mold. I only thought about the suffocation hazard.

  • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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    5 months ago

    IIRC there was originally a plan to have a big library or museum down there when the monument got built, but that got scrapped so they were left with an excessive basement space.

    Or, you know, aliens.

  • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    These people should read up on well known bunkers like Project Greek Island at The Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. A secret bunker was built at the resort during an otherwise routine renovation in the 1950s as a shelter for Congress. It was decommissioned in 1992 after The Washington Post revealed its existence.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 months ago

      I’m old enough to remember basement areas in places like high schools that had “fallout shelter” signs on them. This was the '80s and they weren’t used for that purpose, but in the 60s, they had this idea that people en masse could go to public fallout shelters and wait out the radiation. Unfortunately, they decided on rather random places (like the many-windowed stairwell at one of the buildings in my alma mater), so it wouldn’t have even work.

      Also, we had one of these as a trash can in my high school auditorium. All of my high school friends (and my former drama teacher who I’m in touch with on social media) remembered it fondly when I found another one in an antique store and shared a photo of it.

      They really thought everyone would just go down to the local schoolhouse basement, wait a week and everything would be back to normal.

      • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        The Post Office in the town I used to live in, only 10 miles or so from downtown Boston, still has its fallout shelter sign on it.

      • Timecircleline@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        They really thought everyone would just go down to the local schoolhouse basement, wait a week and everything would be back to normal.

        I looked this up because I remembered reading that nuclear bombs don’t have an excessively long fallout, since most of the energy is designed to be released during the detonation (as opposed to an accident like Chernobyl)

        Sources say minimum of 24 hours, after levels fall significantly but you should still wait for direction. Another source said 3-5 weeks. Hmm.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          5 months ago

          It’s really hard to know because the nuclear weapons we have now are far more powerful and use different materials than the only two ever used in wartime.

  • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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    5 months ago

    These conspiracy-brained fools, like why does it have to look cool, like something out of a set-piece from National Treasure: Lincoln’s Chamber of Secrets.

    Do they even think why this doesn’t hit nearly 1/15th as hard if you just put this 500 meters away and make it purely utilitarian?

    But nooo hidden dimensions, hidden worlds, just below our feet, oOOooOOOooOo