What did the US government bury beneath our feet during the Cold War and then forget about? For decades, vast networks of tunnels were stocked with supplies intended to keep America running if nuclear war broke out. When the threat subsided, these hidden caches were sealed and left behind.
Join us as we descend into these eerie, abandoned underground spaces to uncover the forgotten relics of a bygone era. We'll explore the survival crackers designed to last for weeks, discover the dual-purpose water drums that also served as toilets, and examine the Geiger counters that were meant to detect the invisible threat of radiation.
We'll also delve into the medical kits packed with life-saving drugs and syringes, left to deteriorate in the darkness. And finally, we'll reveal the astonishing $4 billion in cash, stacked in a secret vault, intended to rebuild the nation after a catastrophe that thankfully never occurred.
These fascinating artifacts offer a chilling glimpse into the paranoia and preparedness of the 1960s. What was it like to live with the constant threat of annihilation, and what do these preserved remnants tell us about a world on the brink?
#ColdWarHistory #AbandonedTunnels #SurvivalGear #GovernmentSecrets
Join us as we descend into these eerie, abandoned underground spaces to uncover the forgotten relics of a bygone era. We'll explore the survival crackers designed to last for weeks, discover the dual-purpose water drums that also served as toilets, and examine the Geiger counters that were meant to detect the invisible threat of radiation.
We'll also delve into the medical kits packed with life-saving drugs and syringes, left to deteriorate in the darkness. And finally, we'll reveal the astonishing $4 billion in cash, stacked in a secret vault, intended to rebuild the nation after a catastrophe that thankfully never occurred.
These fascinating artifacts offer a chilling glimpse into the paranoia and preparedness of the 1960s. What was it like to live with the constant threat of annihilation, and what do these preserved remnants tell us about a world on the brink?
#ColdWarHistory #AbandonedTunnels #SurvivalGear #GovernmentSecrets
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CreativityTranscript
00:00What did the United States government bury beneath our feet in the 1960s and then walk
00:04away from?
00:05For 30 years, the government filled tunnels under cities, mountains and bridges with the
00:09things meant to keep the country running if war broke out.
00:11When that era ended, the doors closed and most of it stayed in place.
00:15So let's go down there together and see what was waiting in those abandoned tunnels, starting
00:19with the food that was supposed to keep you alive for two whole weeks.
00:23The survival crackers.
00:25You can still find them today.
00:26They come sealed in big metal tins the colour of old butter.
00:30And when you crack one open, the smell hits you first.
00:33It is dry, dusty, a little bit like old hay.
00:35Inside are stacks of pale square biscuits about the size of a saltine, wrapped in waxed paper.
00:40The government called them all-purpose survival crackers, baked by Nabisco, Keebler, Sunshine
00:45and other big cereal companies under contract with the Pentagon.
00:48By the time the programme ended in 1964, more than 20 billion of them had been pressed and
00:53packed.
00:54The plan was simple.
00:55Each sheltery, as the manuals called you, would get 700 calories a day for 14 days.
01:00In 2006, workers fixing the Brooklyn Bridge stumbled into a sealed room and found about
01:05350,000 of these crackers still stacked inside.
01:08Some boxes stamped October 1962, the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
01:13Today, most of those tins have been thrown out, fed to pigs, or sold on eBay to collectors
01:18who paid more than the crackers ever cost to bake.
01:20Have you ever held something in your hands that was older than your parents and tried
01:23to figure out what it once meant to someone?
01:25The water drums that doubled as toilets next to the crackers, you would have seen them stacked
01:29like a small army.
01:30These were heavy metal barrels, about waist high, painted a dull olive or sometimes a pale grey.
01:35They held 17 and a half gallons of drinking water each, and the label on the side told you something
01:41strange.
01:41When the water was gone, the barrel became a toilet.
01:44The Office of Civil Defence planned for 10 of these drums for every 50 people.
01:48You drank from them for the first few days.
01:50Then, when the water ran low, you flipped the lid, dropped in a chemical packet, and squatted down right there
01:55in front of everybody else.
01:57There was no privacy, no flushing, just a sour smell that would grow worse every hour.
02:01These days, the few drums still left in those tunnels are rusted through, leaking nothing but air, and the chemicals
02:07inside have turned to dust.
02:08But for almost three decades, this was the government's answer to one of the oldest human questions.
02:13Have you ever stopped to think about how much of civilisation is really just plumbing?
02:17The Lionel Geiger counters
02:20Open a kit marked CDV777, and you will find one of the most photographed objects of the Cold War.
02:25It is a small yellow box about the size of a lunch pail, with a black handle on top, and
02:30a coiled wire running out to a metal wand.
02:32This is the CDV700 Geiger counter, and tens of thousands of them were sent into bunkers, basements, and government tunnels
02:38in the 1960s.
02:39You would have used it like this.
02:40After the bomb dropped before you opened the door, you would point that wand at a sample of water, or
02:45a hunk of food, or even your own clothes.
02:47The dial would tick, the headphone would crackle.
02:50If the needle climbed too high, the food went in the trash, and the clothes came off.
02:53Some of these counters were even built by Lionel, the same company that made toy trains for kids on Christmas
02:58morning.
02:59Most of the ones still left in old tunnels today work just fine, even after 60 years, and the needle
03:04still climbs when you wave the wand near an old watch dial.
03:08Have you ever held something in your hands that was built for the worst day of your life that never
03:12came?
03:12The dextran vials and the field medical kits in the Brooklyn Bridge cache, right alongside the crackers and the drums,
03:19the workers found dozens of small glass bottles.
03:22The label read dextran, an intravenous drug used to treat shock.
03:27Next to them were syringes, paper bandages, sealed sutures, and bottles of pills that had long lost their names.
03:33The plan was that after the blast, your blood pressure would crash, your skin would go grey, and somebody in
03:40the tunnel would push a needle into your arm to keep your heart going.
03:42The government packed these medical kits to serve 50 to 65 people each.
03:47Most of the pills inside were morphine, aspirin, and a stack of paper tags so the medic could write your
03:53name on you before you died.
03:55Walk into one of those tunnels today and the bandages are yellow.
03:58The pills have crumbled into powder.
04:00The dextran has separated like old salad dressing forgotten in the back of a fridge.
04:04Have you ever wondered who exactly was supposed to give the shot, and who was supposed to be brave enough
04:10to take it?
04:11The $4 billion at Mount Pony.
04:14Under a hill in Culpipa, Virginia, the Federal Reserve carved out a tunnel they called Mount Pony in 1969.
04:21Inside the 400-foot concrete vault, they stacked $4 billion on pallets 9 meters high, all of it shrink-wrapped
04:29in clear plastic, mostly in $2 bills.
04:32The plan was that if New York and Washington burned, this money would be loaded onto trucks and driven out
04:38to rebuild the economy east of the Mississippi River.
04:41Senator William Proxmire called it a huge, subterranean mattress, stuffed with about $4 billion in newly printed bills,
04:48and said the only people left to spend it would be a few lonely radioactive officials.
04:53The cash was finally removed in 1988, as the Soviet Union began to crack.
04:59Today, the same vault holds the Library of Congress film collection.
05:02The pallets are gone, the plastic is gone, but the air down there still tastes a little bit like fresh
05:08ink.
05:09Have you ever stood in a room and felt how much money used to be sitting where you're standing?
05:14The pathological waste incinerator.
05:16Under the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, the government built a bunker in 1962 to hide everyone of the 535
05:23members of Congress in case of a nuclear strike.
05:26Among the dormitories and the cafeterias and the two fake meeting halls, they installed one machine almost nobody likes to
05:33talk about.
05:33It was called the Pathological Waste Incinerator.
05:37On paper, it was meant to burn medical waste, used bandages, soiled bedding.
05:41In practice, it was a crematorium.
05:43If a senator died inside the sealed bunker, his body would be wheeled to this room and turned to ash
05:49because the soil outside was too hot with fallout to bury him.
05:53The bunker was exposed in 1992 by a Washington Post reporter named Ted Gup, and the doors were finally thrown
05:58open.
05:59You can walk through it on a tour today.
06:01The incinerator is cold and quiet now, but the steel door is still there, and so is the chute that
06:07fed it.
06:08Have you ever stood in a room that was built for a death that never had to happen?
06:12The riot guns in the records room down the same hallway in the Greenbrier bunker, behind a door marked Congressional
06:18Records Room, the government stocked the only weapons in the whole facility.
06:22It was a small collection of rifles, pistols, nightsticks and helmets, basically the kind of riot gear a small town
06:29police force might keep locked up in the back of a closet.
06:32The reason was simple, and it was not pretty.
06:35If the bombs fell and the bunker doors closed, the men who planned the place worried that congressmen would lose
06:41their minds, fight each other in the dormitories or try to claw their way out through the blast door.
06:46So they stocked rifles to stop them.
06:49There was even a special room for calming members of Congress who could not handle the stress.
06:54The rifles never had to be loaded.
06:56The cabinet was opened, dusted and closed again every few years for 30 years straight.
07:03Have you ever locked something away you hoped you would never need, and then forgotten you ever locked it?
07:10The cherry red hard candy.
07:12Inside the same big metal cracker tins, you would find smaller cans with tiny red squares of candy stacked inside,
07:19about the size of a piece of bubble gum.
07:21The label called it carbohydrate supplement.
07:24The men who ran the program called it the cherry drops.
07:27The kids who tasted them in tests called them awful.
07:30The red dye in those candies, by the way, was most likely the same dye that was later banned for
07:35causing cancer.
07:37Nobody knew that in the early 1960s.
07:39The candy was packed to give you a fast jolt of sugar, a little hit of sweetness when the world
07:44above your head had ended and you were sitting on a bunk bed waiting for the radiation to drop.
07:49Most of these tins are gone now, eaten by mice or hauled out by janitors.
07:53The few sealed cans still around will give you a faint whiff of sugar when you crack the lid.
08:00Have you ever found something sweet sitting in a place that was built to remember something terrible?
08:06The giant springs under Cheyenne Mountain.
08:09Drive south out of Colorado Springs and you reach a granite mountain with two enormous blast doors built right into
08:16the side.
08:17Behind those doors, the United States Air Force drilled a grid of six tunnels in the early 1960s and built
08:23a city inside the rock.
08:25They called it the NORAD Combat Operations Center and they hid one of the strangest pieces of engineering of the
08:31entire Cold War in there.
08:33The 15 buildings inside the mountain do not sit on the floor.
08:37They sit on more than 1300 steel coil springs, each one about three feet tall and as thick as your
08:42forearm.
08:43When the bomb landed up top, the whole mountain would shake, but the buildings inside were supposed to bounce in
08:49place and keep right on humming.
08:52Walk in there today and those springs are still doing their job, even though the nuclear watch was called off
08:57back in 1992.
08:59The buildings still sway a little when you lean against the railings.
09:03Have you ever felt a whole building rock under your feet and known it was supposed to?
09:06The cannibal and mermaid murals at Burlington, under the village of Corsham in southern England.
09:13The British government carved a whole city out of an old limestone quarry in the late 1950s.
09:19They called it Burlington Bunker and it was meant to hold the Prime Minister and 4,000 civil servants for
09:24three months while the world above them burned to the ground.
09:28But the strange thing down there is not the pneumatic tube system or the second largest phone exchange in Britain
09:34or even the underground BBC studio where the government was going to broadcast to the survivors.
09:39It is the murals on the walls back in 1943.
09:42An artist named Olga Lehman was brought in to paint the bare rock and she covered the walls with circus
09:47performers, prehistoric monsters, sailors and mermaids.
09:51One painting even shows a missionary boiling in a cooking pot while tribesmen lick their fingers around him.
09:57The bunker was declassified in 2004. Most of it sits empty now.
10:02The paint is fading, the colours are dulling and the mermaids are starting to lose their faces.
10:08Have you ever found a piece of art in a place where art was never supposed to be?
10:12Inside the same big metal cracker tins you would find smaller cans with tiny red squares of candy stacked inside,
10:18about the size of a piece of bubblegum.
10:21The label called it Carbohydrite Supplement.
10:23The men who ran the programme called it the Cherry Drops. The kids who tasted them in tests called them
10:29awful.
10:30The red dye in those candies, by the way, was most likely the same dye that was later banned for
10:35causing cancer.
10:36Nobody knew that in the early 1960s. The candy was packed to give you a fast jolt of sugar, a
10:42little hit of sweetness when the world above your head had ended and you were sitting on a bunk bed
10:47waiting for the radiation to drop.
10:48Most of these tins are gone now, eaten by mice or hauled out by janitors. The few sealed cans still
10:55around will give you a faint whiff of sugar when you crack the lid.
10:59Have you ever found something sweet sitting in a place that was built to remember something terrible?
11:05The giant springs under Cheyenne Mountain. Drive south out of Colorado Springs and you reach a granite mountain with two
11:14enormous blast doors built right into the side.
11:17Behind those doors, the United States Air Force drilled a grid of six tunnels in the early 1960s and built
11:23a city inside the rock.
11:25They called it the NORAD Combat Operations Center and they hid one of the strangest pieces of engineering of the
11:31entire Cold War in there.
11:33The 15 buildings inside the mountain do not sit on the floor. They sit on more than 1300 steel coil
11:39springs, each one about three feet tall and as thick as your forearm.
11:43When the bomb landed up top, the whole mountain would shake, but the buildings inside were supposed to bounce in
11:49place and keep right on humming.
11:51Walk in there today and those springs are still doing their job, even though the nuclear watch was called off
11:57back in 1992.
11:59The buildings still sway a little when you lean against the railings.
12:02Have you ever felt a whole building rock under your feet and known it was supposed to?
12:06Stand in any one of these places long enough and you start to notice the same thing.
12:11It is not the dust. It is not the rust. It is the silence.
12:16These tunnels were built for the loudest day in human history. The day the sirens would scream and the sky
12:21would burn.
12:23Instead, they got nothing. They got 60 years of quiet. They got a steady drip of water from a cracked
12:29ceiling.
12:30They got mice. They got the slow tick of a Geiger counter that nobody was holding.
12:36Think about the men who built these places. Most of them are gone now.
12:40They poured the concrete. They hung the blast doors. They stacked the cracker tins one by one.
12:45And then they went home to their wives and their kids and they tried not to think about what they
12:50had just built.
12:51Some of them never told their families what they did for a living. Some of them carried the secret to
12:56their graves.
12:57The blueprints sat in locked filing cabinets for 40 years before anybody was allowed to see them.
13:03Now think about the people standing in those tunnels today.
13:07We walk in with flashlights and cameras and tour guides.
13:10We laugh a little nervously at the toilet drums.
13:13We pose for pictures next to the riot guns.
13:15We taste the cherry candy on a dare.
13:19Every single one of us walks out a little quieter than we walked in.
13:22Because the truth is, the only reason these places are tourist stops today is because the worst day never came.
13:29The crackers never had to feed anybody.
13:31The springs in Cheyenne Mountain never had to bounce.
13:35The mermaids in Burlington never had to watch the Prime Minister eat his ration soup.
13:40Every one of these tunnels is a piece of luck that we forgot we ever had.
13:44Maybe that is the real thing buried under our feet.
13:47Not the cash.
13:49Not the candy.
13:50Not the crackers.
13:51The luck.
13:52So that is what they buried under our feet.
13:55Crackers.
13:55Cash.
13:56Candy.
13:57And a quiet little incinerator nobody likes to mention.
14:00If any one of these 10 things made you stop and think about how close we came to needing them.
14:04Do me a favor and drop a comment below telling me which one shook you the most.
14:08Hit that like button.
14:10Tap subscribe.
14:11So the next story finds you.
14:12And I will see you in the next one.
14:14Bye.
14:14Bye.
14:15Bye.
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