The Bunker
How Albany’s Cold War Control Site Would Survive Nuclear War
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The call comes at 4:47 a.m.
Douglas Couse, Supervisor of Civil Defense Radio Services, is already in the bunker. He has been here since midnight, logging routine traffic from the auxiliary sites, drinking bad coffee from a steel thermos. When the teletype begins chattering with a different urgency, short and clipped, the rhythm of a message compressed to its irreducible minimum, he sets the thermos down and does not pick it up again.
The message is from Glens Falls.
CONDITION YELLOW. SUSPECTED LAUNCH DETECTED. AWAITING CONFIRMATION.
Couse tears the tape from the machine and walks it to the watch desk. Twelve seconds. That is how long it takes. He has done this walk in drills so many times that his body knows the path without instruction: left at the patch panel, past the bank of TMC receivers, through the door that never quite closes flush because the concrete has settled two millimeters since installation. He hands the tape to the duty officer. The duty officer reads it once. Then reads it again. Then picks up the handset.
Upstairs, Albany is asleep. The streets are empty. The Capitol is dark. Somewhere above them, sixty feet of earth and concrete and rebar separate this room from everything that is about to change.
The duty officer begins making calls.
