Cheyenne Mountain: The Fortress Inside the Mountain

On October fourth, nineteen fifty-seven, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. If Moscow could put a steel sphere into space and bring it back over the continental United States every ninety-six minutes, they could put a nuclear warhead on a missile and aim it wherever they chose. The United States military understood this immediately.

The question was where to put the brain that would manage the response. The answer was inside a mountain. Construction of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex began on May eighteenth, nineteen sixty-one, when crews started blasting into the granite of Cheyenne Mountain, the dominant peak at the southern edge of Colorado Springs.

The project would take nearly five years and remove hundreds of thousands of tons of rock. A geologist from the Colorado School of Mines consulted on smooth-wall blasting, a technique that shears rock cleanly without fracturing the surrounding granite, preserving the structural integrity of the caverns being carved. Inside the mountain, engineers built fifteen freestanding steel buildings mounted on one thousand three hundred eleven coil springs, each spring able to compress several inches to absorb the shock of a nearby nuclear detonation.

The blast doors at the main entrance weigh twenty-five tons each. The complex was designed to be fully sealed, to generate its own power, and to manage the aerospace defense of North America after a nuclear strike had destroyed everything above ground. The facility became operational in February of nineteen sixty-seven, housing the Combat Operations Center of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a binational partnership between the United States and Canada formalized in nineteen fifty-eight.

For nearly four decades the mountain watched every aircraft and missile in the northern hemisphere continuously. Beginning in two thousand six and completing by two thousand eight, NORAD's primary command center relocated to Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs. The mountain was placed on warm standby status: fully equipped, continuously staffed, and capable of resuming primary operations within hours.

It remains that way, a Cold War fortress that has never been used for the purpose it was built for, and that the people of Colorado Springs hope never will be.