Cold War Thaw Hasn’t Defrosted This Mountain With a Mission

A third of a mile down, under a million tons of dense granite, lies a monument to a war never fought.

There are no taps, wreaths or 21-gun salutes here. There are no honored dead. Here, inside a hollowed-out mountain a short drive from downtown Colorado Springs, soldiers sit behind 10-ton, blast-proof doors and stare at computer screens of the world. For 30 years they have been watching and waiting for a telltale blip announcing World War III.

But now, some experts say, it is time for these American and Canadian soldiers at North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) to leave the mountain. The Cold War is officially over. Russia and the United States have reduced the number of nuclear weapons aimed at each other.

“It’s there perpetuating itself for a mission that is no longer necessary,” said retired Rear Adm. Eugene J. Carroll Jr. of the Center for Defense Information, a Pentagon watchdog.

Cheyenne Mountain was built in the 1960s to direct a jet-fighter defense against Russian bombers flying over the North Pole with nuclear payloads. Back then, the mountain could withstand a nuclear-bomb attack and continue to direct the defense of the continent with aircraft fighters.

But the advent of more powerful long-range nuclear missiles changed all that. Bomber aircraft aren’t the main threat anymore. It is the huge deployment of powerful Russian rockets scattered across Siberia that could hit North America in less than half an hour.

A bull’s-eye hit on Cheyenne Mountain would obliterate the facility. So its main job now is to spot those missiles as they come shooting out of their silos, decide where they’re heading and tell the president. End of mission. If the president decides to launch a nuclear counterattack, he would go through Strategic Command in Omaha.

Even supporters acknowledge the mission could be done from less complicated places than inside a fortress mountain.

“If we were going to do this today, we probably wouldn’t dig a hole in a granite mountain to do it,” acknowledged Col. Gary W. Dahlen of U.S. Space Command.

So why keep this giant, Dr. Strangelove-like bulwark in a hollowed-out rock, with its dark rooms, water reservoir and rabbit warren of tunnels?

“There is no compelling reason to spend millions of dollars just to move it,” said Vice Adm. David E. Frost, the No. 2 man in military space command.

Besides, in “the mountain,” as it is affectionately known in these parts, the Cold War hasn’t defrosted all that much. Six million gallons of water are stored here along with enough diesel fuel to keep the place running for a month. Beds and cots are stashed wherever there’s room, and there are enough rations to feed 700 soldiers for 30 days.

All roads lead to the Command Center, a two-story, wood-paneled chamber far different from the dark, forbidding amphitheaters portrayed in movies such as “War Games.”

Eight dozen soldiers sit on two sides of a bank of computers, with phones held to their ears. On one wall is a bank of clocks with times stretching from Greenwich Mean Time to Pacific time to Moscow time. Above the clocks are a couple of video screens the size of picture windows. One is usually a map of North America, while the other could be any trouble spot that deserves a microscopic look.

In the center chair, directing traffic, sits Command Director Paul R. Hussey, 44, a Canadian Air Force officer. For eight hours each day, 270 million North Americans depend on Hussey to know a missile when he sees one. The soft-spoken Newfoundland native has four minutes to decide whether the information being spit out from satellites circling Earth means that an attack has begun.

Behind him is a glass-walled conference room where Frost and others in the top command are supposed to sit in time of nuclear warfare, cradling the red--they really are red--telephones that connect them to the president and secretary of defense.

“I’ve always thrived on this,” said Hussey, who reads Tom Clancy techno-thrillers in his spare time. “It makes life interesting.”

Watching for nuclear attack is the mountain’s top mission, but it also has less hair-trigger tasks, such as making a yearly announcement that Santa Claus is coming down from the North Pole, watching weather systems develop, providing worldwide military communications, helping soldiers navigate across the globe and keeping a close watch on everything launched into space.

In an era of smaller wars, the Cheyenne outpost has also taken on the job of spotting launches of small, theater missiles like the Iraqi scuds that bedeviled coalition forces during the Persian Gulf War. The key to spotting these small rocket flames is to have two satellites tune into the launch, like stereo in space.

“This country no longer goes to war without space assets,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Tim Roberts, commander of Cheyenne’s Space Control Center, a windowless room set behind a combination-lock door, like everything else in this 4.5-acre underground city.

In one corner of the room, Senior Airman Beau Marcum watched the Russian Mir space station crawl across the screen of his Silicon Graphics computer.

Marcum spends his days helping to track the 7,935 man-made objects currently circling the Earth, some of them merely space garbage--such as dead satellites--and others more sinister.

The space control center uses telescopes, satellites and radar to tell it what time the next Russian satellite is going to take a picture of the White House or whether there is anything in the path of the space shuttle. Every object is cataloged, from the Mir identification number--16609--right down to a 3-inch piece of metal that could rip through the Columbia shuttle.

“We make a mistake, we cause World War III,” said Canadian Air Force Capt. Robert G.T. Murphy.

With little likelihood of an imminent attack, the men inside Cheyenne Mountain keep their vigilance and skills honed with the military equivalent of video games. The combative president of Iraq, for instance, is poised to blow up the capital of Saudi Arabia, at least according to the war game Hussey and his men in the command center played one day recently to stay sharp.

Being careful to preface every communication with, “This is an exercise,” a loudspeaker blared: “We have one missile with Riyadh at risk.” A box shoots up on the screen showing all the possible landing areas for the scud warhead. Nothing near North America.

No reason to wake the president.