Deep Underground Command Center

The Deep Underground Command Center (DUCC), sometimes also called the Deep Underground Command and Control Site (DUCCS), was a United States military installation that was proposed on January 31, 1962,

Decades later, Spurgeon M. Keeny Jr., who served as an advisor to five presidential administrations from the 1950s to the 1970s, recalled President Lyndon B. Johnson's reaction to the proposed site:

... Johnson, despite his growing preoccupation with Vietnam, rejected out of hand the use of nuclear weapons there. His view of nuclear war was brought home to me by his reaction at the final meeting in 1965 on the military budget to an item listed as DUCCS. In response to his question as to what this was, he was told it stood for Deep Underground Command and Control Site, a facility that would be located several thousand feet underground, between the White House and the Pentagon, designed to survive a ground burst of a 20-megaton bomb and sustain the president and key advisers for several months until it would be safe to exit through tunnels emerging many miles outside Washington. After a brief puzzled expression, Johnson let loose with a string of Johnsonian expletives making clear he thought this was the stupidest idea he had ever heard and that he had no intention of hiding in an expensive hole while the rest of Washington and probably the United States were burned to a crisp. That was the last I ever heard of DUCCS.^[2]

Other contemporary underground installations did see upgrades, such as the