Only six miles away from the Amherst College campus, a Cold War bunker is “hidden in plain sight” under a grassy mound on Bare Mountain. It has several names: the Notch, the Combat Operations Center, or the Underground Command Post of the Eighth Air Force. Built in 1957, the Bunker served as the Strategic Air Command Center for nearby Westover Air Force Base.
Strict security, noisy machinery, formal military greetings, orange light shining on the walls, and loud klaxon alarms at drills: these are hallmarks of Cold War bunkers. At over 40,000 square feet, the Bunker held a hundred-ton centrifugal AC unit, five generators, five artesian wells and an 800,000-gallon water storage tank, and plenty of stocks of food. These were to sustain 300 military officials for 40 days in the event of an “emergency.” If the emergency were to occur, sensors on top of the Bunker would detect an abnormal rise of nuclear radiation, which would instantly trigger the klaxons in the Bunker. Within seconds, a button would be pressed sending the B-52 bombers at Westover to launch a retaliation. And children who ducked under their desks at schools would be gone in the blink of an eye.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Air Force removed everything it could from the Bunker—from top-secret documents to graffiti in bathrooms. It became an empty concrete box.
Soon thereafter, the Federal Reserve took it over to store backup computer files, outdated records, and miscellaneous materials. In 1992, Amherst College acquired the Bunker for $500,000 and spent another million to renovate it into a book depository. It now houses over 500,000 lesser-used materials from the Five College Libraries.
From Cold War bunker to library, this place offers, as some say, “nothing interesting” to investigate. Our documentary unfolds the stories associated with the Bunker from the perspective of the renovation project manager, Aaron Hayden, and others familiar with bunkers in Massachusetts. Our project invites listening viewers on a sonic journey by re-imagining the past and documenting the present of the Bunker––a transformation from housing the sounds of near apocalypse to housing rarely requested books for the Five College Libraries.