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For the Eisenhower Administration, Mount Weather was a natural choice. It was 48 air miles from Washington in a rural and largely undeveloped portion of Virginia. The mine already existed at the site, and the Bureau of Mines had been using state-of-the-art drilling and bit technology there for years. The bureau's physicists had conducted extensive tests of high explosives inside the mountain, setting off as many as 64 sticks (34 lbs.) of dynamite at a time. Studies of the resultant impact and shock waves on the rock structure convinced them that the site would make an ideal superbunker. An April 1953 bureau study concluded that "the rock in the area . . . is exceptionally hard and tight." There were few faults or fissures; most of the rock was epidosite and greenstone, a local name for a Precambrian basalt that had metamorphosed into an extremely dense formation.
In 1954 the Bureau of Mines began a massive expansion of the mine into the most secure shelter and command post scientific and military minds of the time could imagine. One of the architects of the project was Paul Russell, who headed the Bureau of Mines facility and later studied the impact of nuclear explosions on underground structures. Among the few men still alive who assisted Russell and others on the project is Gilbert Fowler, now 80. For three decades, from 1938 to 1969, Fowler worked at Mount Weather, helping both to dig the original mine and to complete its transformation into the secret complex. Crews worked around the clock for three years, blasting and excavating in a damp but constant temperature of 52 degrees F. Fowler was foreman of one of the three 40-man shifts. "That was some rough, tough, dirty work," he recalls. Between 1953 and 1969, Fowler witnessed a marvel of engineering, working first for the Bureau of Mines and later for the Army Corps of Engineers. "It was amazing the way they could drive a straight line through solid rock," he says. Inside the mountain the tunnel was gradually expanded into a self-sustaining underground complex.
Several underground ponds were carved from solid rock -- some of them, according to Fowler's estimates, were 10 ft. deep and 200 ft. across. One was to be a reservoir for drinking water; others were used to cool the air pumped through the complex's massive mainframe computers to prevent them from overheating. Side tunnels were dug, and more than 20 cavernous offices were put in, some shored up with concrete. To withstand the severe exterior shock of a nuclear blast, the roof areas of the tunnels and rooms were reinforced with 21,000 iron bolts sunk 8 to 10 ft. into the rock, according to records at the National Archives.