Raven Rock Mountain Complex, or Site R, in the Pennsylvania hills near Camp David, was built in the ‘50s as a bolt-hole for the President and cabinet members in case of a nuclear attack. It is approximately 1 mile inside a granite mountain, well secured by huge blast doors. It’s a short helicopter ride from DC, which made evacuation feasible. It also houses one of the few communications stations, including AWACS, which ring the globe and keep the US Military in constant touch around the world.

My own brief experiences with Site R came when I was a Major and Chief of Perioperative Services (OR/Recovery and Sterile Processing) at Kimbrough Army Community Hospital, Ft. Meade, MD in ’89-’90. Almost all of the hospital military personnel were designated for mobilization assignments in case of war/emergency. In my previous assignment I had been designated to the 41st Combat Support Hospital, out of Ft. Lewis. Being a mobilization designee required spending some time in training and becoming familiarized with the unit in order to be ready if the time came. When I found out that I was designated to Site R I was both disappointed and puzzled as to what that meant. Disappointed because if the balloon went up I wanted to be assigned to a combat support unit. Puzzled, because I had never heard of Site R and it seemed that very few people in the hospital had visited it in recent years. Two of my senior OR Techs were also assigned to Site R as mobilization designees, to support surgery and sterilization needs.

A short time after I got the assignment, an opportunity came to go to Site R for a few days of training/familiarization. On the appointed day, a bus with a number of hospital personnel in it set off to visit the base. Since it was a secret base (I thought), I expected that it would be accessed through a series of gates, with heavy security behind each of them, far from civilization. When we turned off the main road onto Site R Road, I was a little disappointed. Across the road were a number of farms. I asked the person sitting next to me “Is that a periscope sticking out of the pond on Uncle Yuri’s Farm?”. Not knowing me, or my offbeat sense of humor, he just smiled and moved a few inches further away from me.

Once we got through the security gates and ID checks, which took about 45 minutes, we assembled outside the bus to enter the complex through a tunnel. I thought that the President was going to have to do without us in case of a real attack, because we would have been incinerated before getting that far. We walked about a mile down the tunnel, which was large enough for trucks. About a quarter of the way down, one of the NCOs started suffering from claustrophobia and had to head back to the surface. When we got down to the entrance, we passed through massive blast doors into the interior, which was spacious inside. We were shown to the living quarters, which included rooms for the President and cabinet members, as well as meeting rooms. Being the senior member of the team, I claimed the President’s quarters, which, except for the title and seal on the door, was pretty much the same as the others. It was very much ‘50s architecture, unchanged or updated since it was built. We found the dispensary and operating room to be the same. Instrumentation was primitive, even by late ‘80s standards, and was disorganized. It was clear that my predecessors had not spent time or effort on preparing it for use. By that time, I thought that it was highly unlikely that our heads of government were likely to be evacuated there, but it was my job to do what I could, so my techs and I spent our time going through the surgery/sterilization area and organizing it as well as we could in a few days. The communications and other areas were off-limits to us.

On my third and last trip to Site R, in 1990, we had the chance to tour the facility. Back at Ft. Meade we had set up a DEPMEDS surgical annex as a temporary surgical department while our department indoors was renovated. We did surgeries in that annex for about 6 months. One of the biggest challenges was convincing the military community that it was a safe environment for surgeries, which required a lot of PR, including open houses before we opened and then taking anyone who requested it on a tour after we were opened. I conducted most of the tours myself, but my staff filled in if I was not available. One of our patients was a Colonel who was a Watch Commander in the communications center at Site R. After I took him through our department, he told me to get word to him the next time our medical team went out there, and that he would see to it that we got a tour of the facility. I did so on our next visit, a few months later, and he was as good as his word. We were shown through the logistics/supply area (huge), powerplant area and the communications center. In the communications center, which was very primitive by today’s standards, they ran a scenario for us. In that scenario, presented on a green CRT screen with a map of the world overlayed, a Russian sub (Skunk) in the Atlantic, for whatever reason, launched a nuclear missle, shown by an arching track on the CRT, aimed toward the US. Although the scenario was presented in faster than real time, by what would have been about 15 minutes in real time the globe was covered with missle tracks due to response and counter-response from land, sea and air, and targeting not only the USA and Russia, but allied countries of both. Massive destruction was inevitable. We all just looked at each other in shock as we saw how fragile our world could be and contemplated the possibilities. Oh, by the way, when we saw the massive generators that powered the site, we learned that, because of 1950s design flaws, the demands of the the generators for oxygen would cause suffocation/carbon monoxide poisoning inside the complex if the outside vents were closed and it was completely buttoned-up. Leaving them open, on the other hand, would potentially expose those inside to radiation poisoning. It left me feeling okay about Plan C - being incinerated in the parking lot.

It has been nearly 30 years since my experiences at Site R, and I understand that it has been greatly expanded and upgraded during that time. I have read that during 9/11 the Vice President and other leaders were sent there to sit it out. It’s good to know that a vital part of our defense finally got some attention. I have no doubt that the ‘50s medical capabilities and structural/operational design flaws have also been corrected . . . but . . . I still wouldn't want to spend the end of civilization there. It put me in the same mood that "On the Beach", the Gregory Peck movie about the aftermath of nuclear war, did - thoroughly depressed. Within a few years of that, the Berlin Wall came down and the Evil Empire started to unravel, which was a big relief to me. It made what I saw on that computer screen less likely.