'Nuclear Highway' Puts Today's Pioneers on Beaten Path

By TAD BARTIMUS and SCOTT McCARTNEY

July 3, 1988 12 AM PT

Associated Press

CHALLENGER POINT, Colo. —

This snow-capped peak, named to honor seven space shuttle crew members who perished exploring the last frontier, fittingly lies halfway along a 1,000-mile superhighway built atop conquistador tracks, Indian war paths and the wagon ruts of pioneers.

The land has captivated dreamers and held the milestones of mankinds past. Today, the strategic corridor where the Great Plains erupt into the Rocky Mountains is again the route of trailblazers.

Along Interstate 25, scientists, entrepreneurs and generals by the dozen have gathered to probe and create the particles of life--and death. Here beats the heart of work that could save the world--or destroy it.

I-25 is America’s Nuclear Highway.

Looking to Next Century

The four-lane concrete ribbon that begins at Las Cruces, N.M., and ends at Buffalo, Wyo., is a lifeline for high-tech companies, military installations and research looking toward the 21st Century.

The southern terminus is anchored by White Sands Missile Range, where technology for “Star Wars,” officially named the Strategic Defense Initiative, is tested in the desert known as Jornado del Muerto, the Journey of Death.

This is the place where J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the nuclear era, watched the world’s first atomic bomb explode and, in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, quoted from the Bhagavad-Gita, part of an ancient Sanskrit epic: “I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds.”

Near the highway’s northern end, poised under vast cattle ranches, 200 of the deadliest weapons on Earth are aimed at the Soviet Union. By year’s end, 50 of them will be MX missiles, which President Reagan calls Peacekeepers. Each carries 10 nuclear warheads and a payload more than 200 times as destructive as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Dozens of Laboratories

In between are dozens of experimental and research labs, some owned by the government, others parts of universities or private businesses. In them, men and women are inventing “Star Wars” wizardry--already staffing the center that will be the system’s control point, already firing lasers with the potential to blast missiles from space, already talking of hitting a piece of paper 50 miles away.

Workers are building a laboratory that simulates landings on Mars, a machine capable of small nuclear explosions, a spacecraft destined to map Venus, pieces of the long-awaited space station, the next generation of super-computers and a thousand more wonders to change people’s lives forever.

The I-25 corridor has been the crucible for every nuclear warhead of the ‘80s. Instruments to verify the pacts that will eliminate some atomic weapons are born here. Old weapons are brought here for modification. Now that the intermediate-range missile treaty has been ratified, Pershing missiles in Europe likely will be sent here for destruction.

Bring me men to match my mountains,

Bring me men to match my plains,

Men with empires in their purpose

And new eras in their brains.

The poem, “The Coming American” by Sam Walter Foss, is emblazoned on a wall at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Throughout this century, such men--and women--have been coming, creating links in what is today a strong chain of military and technological might.

Some of the links were forged at the birth of the Atomic Age, when the reclusive Oppenheimer brought his scientists for the solitude and secrecy. Others are the offspring of upstart entrepreneurs fleeing the congestion of the East and West coasts.

Civic, military and political leaders see the I-25 corridor as the future capital of Space Age America.

Executive Praises Attitude

“The vision for the future of this country is exemplified by what is happening here,” said Richard MacLeod, executive of the nonprofit U.S. Space Foundation in Colorado Springs. “The ‘can-do’ attitude is about the best I’ve ever found anywhere.”

Here is a quick tour of the highway:

- The North American Aerospace Defense Command, the U.S. Space Command, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration installation, four Air Force bases, two Air Force stations (which have no landing fields) and an Army base are scattered beside I-25 from Cheyenne, Wyo., to Albuquerque.

- Other long-established installations include the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant outside Denver, which assembles bomb triggers, and the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, where scientists work on such projects as testing atomic waste containers and blasting weapon parts with X-rays and gamma-rays to see how they will withstand nuclear warfare.

- Aerospace and computer giants such as Boeing, Texas Instruments, TRW, Ball Aerospace, Rockwell and Lockheed have, or plan to open, major plants along I-25 in Colorado and New Mexico.

- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Solar Energy Research Institute and the National Center for Atmospheric Research are all headquartered in Colorado. NCAR, run by a consortium of 57 universities under auspices of the National Science Foundation, investigates the dangers of a “nuclear winter” and probes the Earth’s depleted ozone layer for clues about the “greenhouse effect.”

- In the mountains above the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, explosives experts study ways to penetrate new tank armor and create super-hard materials by welding with explosions.

- In Pueblo, Colo., the nation’s largest defense contractor, McDonnell Douglas, completes assembly of its Delta series rockets.

- Just 100 miles north on I-25, Martin Marietta builds Titan rockets for military and commercial satellite payloads at its Denver factory.

- At Colorado Springs, a $100-million center under construction will link SDI research projects around the country. Martin Marietta, armed with the center’s initial $508-million contract, will test computer software for SDI and prepare officers to fight a space war by simulating combat conditions thousands of miles up.

Aiding Battered Economies

Such projects are bolstering local economies hit hard by oil and agricultural slumps.

“We have in (Colorado) over 1,000 high-tech companies that together gross more than $10 billion a year and employ tens of thousands of people,” U.S. Rep. David Skaggs (D-Colo.) said.

A new plant in Colorado Springs will build the next generation of super computers, Cray Research Inc. announced recently. Production of the Cray-3, which could become the brain of “Star Wars,” will employ up to 1,000 people in the 1990s.

The Air Force Space Technology Center’s Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque now lays claim to the world’s fastest computer, Cray-2 No. 11, which is used to simulate the effects of nuclear explosions and solve SDI problems.

New Mexico has more Crays than the rest of the country combined, scattered among Los Alamos, Sandia, the Weapons Lab and “underground places nobody knows,” one Air Force computer expert said.

Modern Manhattan Project

The enthusiastic science jocks flocking to Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos National Laboratory consider “Star Wars” their generation’s version of the Manhattan Project.

Stan Schriber works on a project its creators hope will produce a space-based machine capable not only of destroying enemy missiles, but also of detecting decoys.

He points to the snow-covered Sangre de Cristo range on the horizon and says his task is to create a beam capable of picking a lift ticket off a skier 50 miles away. He also is enthusiastic about new frontiers in physics that promise to yield medical wonders.

“ ‘Star Wars,’ all this work, is going to impact a lot of other things,” Schriber said. “This is a lot like the space program was in the ‘60s. Technology is really advancing.”

The I-25 corridor has evolved through quirks of fate, a little elaborate planning and the capricious genius of a few men.

Meeting in 1867

Cheyenne and the cavalry outpost that would become F. E. Warren AFB, headquarters for the nation’s MX force, sprang from the meeting on July 4, 1867, of a Union Pacific Railroad official, a representative of President Andrew Johnson and an Army general beside Crow Creek in the Wyoming Territory.

Colorado Springs was founded in 1871 by Gen. William Jackson Palmer, the first of a long line of real estate speculators who built their fortunes off the town’s newcomers.

Always, the land has drawn the people. Fanning out from Challenger Point are reminders of civilization’s march through the ages, as well as harbingers of things to come.

East of I-25, buried under empty grasslands, are a few precious flint tools left behind by Folsom man in the last ice age.

To the west, the abandoned ruins of vanished Anasazi people erode with the seasons.

Deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, to the northeast, hundreds of disciplined warriors scan TV screens for hints of impending annihilation.

Enormous Antennas

To the southwest, alone in the silent desert, enormous antennas listen for alien voices from space.

Since migrating man discovered the easiest path alongside the mountains, the I-25 corridor has attracted adventurers searching for wealth, power, security and a better life.

“Most of this technology has come to New Mexico because of those wide open spots along the road,” said Jim Mitchell of Sandia Labs. “It’s not bunched up like Boston. It’s the same reason Goddard came to Roswell to start rocket tests. It’s the same reason Oppenheimer came--there are not a lot of people around.”

But like small voices in a wilderness, some residents wonder if the buildup will be a long-term economic panacea or a fleeting bonanza. Some people who live beside I-25, especially near any military installation euphemistically described as a “Class A Resource,” meaning an enemy’s nuclear target, adamantly oppose the military might around them.

World ‘Very Dangerous’

“I think the military buildup people and the pacifists share one same view--that the world is becoming a very dangerous place,” said Sydney Spiegel, a Cheyenne, Wyo., high school teacher and MX opponent. “Where we part company is on how we’re going to make it safer. They say more, we say less.”

These voices, however, are few compared to the thousands who work at plants and offices along I-25 in three states. Some are transplanted Californians from an overcrowded Silicon Valley and a polluted, gridlocked Los Angeles. Others are bailing out of the high-priced, overbuilt New England-to-Virginia chute.

“I was tired of terminal sophistication,” said H. Pike Oliver, executive vice president of Aries Properties, who moved to Colorado Springs from Southern California two years ago.

“Here I’m bettering my family’s quality of life and it only takes me 15 minutes to get to an office where I can create a development from a 33-square-mile blank sheet of paper,” said Oliver, whose company plans a residential-office complex on 24,485 acres just east of the city.

“This place is on the verge of taking off. I saw it happen in Tucson, Orlando, Austin and Raleigh-Durham. I’m ready for it.”

For dreamers, there is still land left beside the Nuclear Highway.

ALONG THE NUCLEAR HIGHWAY

Here are the major military installations and laboratories clustered along Interstate 25, America’s nuclear highway, from Las Cruces, N.M., to Buffalo, Wyo.

New Mexico

White Sands Missile Range, near Las Cruces.

Holloman Air Force Base, Alamogordo.

Terminal Effects Research and Analysis group, Socorro.

Center for Explosives Technology Research, Socorro.

Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque.

Air Force Space Technology Center, Albuquerque.

Air Force Weapons Laboratory, Albuquerque.

Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque.

Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos.

Colorado

Pueblo Army Depot, Pueblo.