Fifteen Buildings on Steel Springs Inside a Mountain

Workers began drilling into Cheyenne Mountain in nineteen sixty-one. The mountain is solid granite, and they blasted and bored for five years before the complex inside it was declared operational in nineteen sixty-seven. What they built was not a cave. It was a city.

Fifteen freestanding steel buildings were constructed inside the excavated caverns. Each one sits on enormous steel springs, more than a thousand of them total, designed to absorb the shock of a near-miss nuclear detonation. The buildings do not touch the cavern walls. The entrances are blast doors three feet thick. The whole complex was designed to survive everything short of a direct hit from a Soviet warhead.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD, moved its operations center into Cheyenne Mountain when the complex became operational. From inside that granite mountain, military personnel tracked Soviet bomber and missile activity, monitored early warning satellites, and maintained the command infrastructure for American nuclear response. For the next three decades, the people inside that mountain were the ones who would have detected a Soviet first strike and given the President the information needed to respond.

Colorado Springs understood from the beginning what the mountain meant for its economy. The military presence that began with the Air Force Academy in nineteen fifty-four expanded through the Cold War decades into one of the most concentrated clusters of military installations in the United States. Fort Carson, Peterson Air Force Base, Schriever Space Force Base, and the Academy together made Colorado Springs a federal-military city in a way that shaped its politics, its economy, and its culture for generations.

The NORAD operations center relocated to Peterson Air Force Base in two thousand six, though the Cheyenne Mountain facility remains on standby. The mountain is still there. The springs still hold the buildings off the floor.