Building JFK’s doomsday bunker
In the early 1960s, Nantucket’s Tom Nevers Naval Facility was a top-secret submarine listening post. At the time, the island had around 3,500 year-round residents, and the space around the military base was not yet developed. “No one lived out in [the] Tom Nevers area, so it was way out there for the locals,” says Robert Young, a third-generation resident.
Young recalls delivering milk to the facility when he was a teenager. “There was a guard station I had to approach each day,” he says. “You’d have thought they would eventually wave me through since I was delivering necessary supplies daily, but not a chance. I had to stop every single time and get cleared to pass.”
Because of its location east of the continental U.S., Nantucket was uniquely positioned to monitor ships and submarines passing through the Atlantic. As Bruce Percelay, a real estate developer and the publisher of N magazine, explains, “There’s a web of copper wires right next to the site of the bunker that stretches way out into the ocean to detect submarine propellers.” With this infrastructure already in place, a bunker could be built quickly and quietly, without drawing the attention of year-round residents.
The plan was this: In the event of a nuclear attack, Kennedy, his family and 20 members of his cabinet would be whisked away by submarine or helicopter to the bunker, where they would ride out the first 30 days post-attack, hopefully escaping any nuclear fallout. According to Bradley Garrett, author of Bunker: Building for the End Times, escapees would have at most 30 minutes to flee after receiving warning of an impending blast.
Naval builders initially hoped to construct the Kennedy bunker underground. But Nantucket is a relatively small island, so they couldn’t dig down without hitting water. Instead, the team crafted the bunker out of various bits of Quonset huts—prefabricated wartime structures that were developed in 1941 to meet a growing need for quickly assembled shelters. Workers then encouraged Nantucket’s scrubby brush to grow over the galvanized steel.
“A shelter only needs three feet of dirt on top, and you can stay there safely until the radiation levels have come down,” says Garrett.
Per the Providence Journal, construction of the shelter took less than two weeks. Spanning 1,900 square feet, the partially underground bunker has a relatively simple layout, consisting of a long metal corridor that ends in a three-way juncture. The right side opens into a mechanical room, while the left leads to the central gathering space.