After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, then-President Franklin D Roosevelt built a secret bunker under the East Wing of the White House. It later evolved into a submarine-style bunker complex, connected to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) - a command center for the president in times of crisis.
According to a CNN source, the facility was self-sufficient with electricity, water, air filtration, communications and evacuation, but with infrastructure and technology that largely remained from the 1940s.
The bunker has been used over the years. Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, was evacuated there during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Facing new threats
Donald Trump's construction of a large, gold-decorated ballroom is underway. According to CNN sources, the aging underground facilities have been dismantled at the same time. The space will likely be replaced with technology to meet new threats.
The demolition of the East Wing has been criticized. A lawsuit has been filed to stop the project, but the White House says stopping it would jeopardize national security, citing a classified declaration attached to the case.
"Top secret nature"
White House Chief of Staff Joshua Fisher was recently pressed during a meeting with the NCPC - the government’s central planning agency for Washington - about the ballroom, suggesting that the underground work was the reason the construction project began without the usual approvals.
"There are certain parts of the project that are of a top-secret nature that we are working on right now. That doesn't prevent us from modifying the above-ground structure, but that work needed to be considered, which was not part of the NCPC process," Fisher said.
Unknown cost
Trump has said the military is “very involved” in the ballroom’s construction. According to Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent, the bunker must be able to anticipate and deal with nuclear explosions, plane crashes, chemical or biological weapons, and electromagnetic pulses.
"When you're trying to address the threats of today and tomorrow, we're talking about new technology and new infrastructure - things that may not even be commercially available. We'll never have full visibility into what that costs," Wackrow told CNN.
