Leaving Cheyenne Mountain: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Loathe the Bomb

Dedicated sardonically "to Dwight and Nikita" – President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, for those too young to remember – Mordecai Roshwald's futuristic novel Level 7 was published in 1959. It was the "diary" of a "button pusher" responsible for launching a nuclear war while living 4,000 feet underground in the deepest part of a seven-level bomb shelter. In the course of the book, each level of the shelter is successively snuffed out and falls silent. It represented, as Paul Brians wrote in his Nuclear Holocausts, Atomic War in Fiction, 1895-1984, "a seven-stage holocaust that deconstructs, as it were, the results of the seven days of creation in Genesis."

As in the 1957 nuclear novel (and 1959 movie) On the Beach, Roshwald's embunkered world ended not with a bang but with a whimper. His was but one of a riot of novels, movies, and even TV shows that populated the 1950s and early 1960s with radioactive creatures, alien "rays," hordes of mutants, and post-apocalyptic landscapes galore – like the desert from which, 600 years after a nuclear holocaust, the monks of A Canticle for Liebowitz struggle to get their prospective saint canonized. Who could, for instance, forget the screeching sound made by the gigantic mutant ants in Them! or the Twilight Zone episode in which friends and neighbors fall to fighting over who will occupy a private fallout shelter during a nuclear alarm, or the one in which possibly the last man on Earth after the apocalypse hits, being nearly blind, drops and breaks his only pair of glasses.

While film-makers set loose their giant ants, spiders, dinosaurs, and even rabbits (in the deeply avoidable 1972 film Night of the Lepus), members of the National Security Council, in the privacy of highly classified documents, screened nightmares of their own. From perhaps 1950 on, in their new battle scenarios, which were but other kinds of "fiction," these advisors to the president, began to plan for the possibility that 100 atomic bombs landing on targets in the U.S. would kill or injure 22 million Americans, or that an American "blow" might result in the "complete destruction" of the Soviet Union.

About the time Roshwald published his novel, American military planners were developing the country's first SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) meant to organize the delivery of more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities which would, if all went well, cease to exist. Official estimates of casualties ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and this undoubtedly underestimated radiation effects). Everyone, it seemed, had a version of the "unthinkable" to offer, of future wars of annihilation in which humanity would descend en masse into the charnel house of history.

And then, as if in imitation of Dr. Strangelove, the Pentagon created its own version of Level 7 by gouging out the insides of a mountain in Colorado. And among those who ended up working inside Cheyenne Mountain was none other than Tomdispatch regular William Astore, who now takes us into the real Level 7, while reminding us that the unthinkable is still being thought about – and not only in outlaw "rogue states" either.

This piece is a shared venture of Tomdispatch on-line and the Nation magazine in print. Tom

Leaving Cheyenne Mountain

How I Learned to Start Worrying and Loathe the Bomb
By William Astore

It took more than four years just to excavate and construct that mountain redoubt outside of Colorado Springs, that Cold War citadel whose two huge blast doors weighed 25 tons each. Within its confines, under 2,000 feet of Rocky Mountain granite, fifteen buildings were constructed, each mounted on steel springs, each spring weighing nearly half a ton, so that, when the Soviet nukes exploded, each building would sway but not collapse.

When it became operational in 1966, the Cheyenne Mountain Complex was the ultimate bomb shelter. Its 200 or so crewmembers were believed to have a 70% likelihood of surviving a five-megaton blast with a three-mile circular error of probability, even if the surrounding countryside became an irradiated wasteland. Today, over four decades later, the Complex remains an important command center, though last year the military announced that it would now serve primarily as a back-up facility (on "warm stand-by," in military jargon).

From 1985 to 1988, in the waning years of the Cold War, as a young Air Force lieutenant, my job took me inside that mountain citadel. The approach to it wasn't in any way awesome, since the mountain, at the south end of the Front Range of Colorado Springs, is overshadowed by Pike's Peak. Except for all the communication antennae blinking red at night, you'd hardly know that it was the site of a major command center for a future nuclear war. Yet each time I drove up its access road, its solid, granite bulk made an impression; so, too, did the security fence topped by cameras and razor wire, the security police toting M-16s, and the massive access tunnel, bored out of solid rock and paved for vehicular traffic that still leads inside the mountain to the actual command centers.

Like cereal box atomic decoder rings and "duck and cover" exercises, the Complex is a relic of the Cold War era. I entered on a bus which, though painted Air Force blue, was similar to the ones I had taken in grade school. On a few nights, I left work after the last bus took off and so had to hike the third of a mile out of the tunnel, a claustrophobic and often bone-chilling experience in the windy and wintry Rockies – until, that is, you emerged into a starry night above with the lights of the city twinkling below.

Of that "mountain," meant to corral and contain our nuclear fears, what struck most first-time visitors were the huge steel-reinforced blast doors, ten-feet high and several feet thick. They were supposed to seal the Complex, protecting it from a nuclear strike. Then, there were the enormous springs (1,319 in all) upon which each of the 15 separate buildings inside that mountain rest. I liked to think of them as giant (if immobile) Slinkies. As visitors got their bearings and looked around, they were sometimes disconcerted by the bolts embedded in the granite walls and ceiling. These held wire mesh, meant to stabilize the rock and protect against falling shards. Lots of exposed pipes and cables gave the mountain a style that might be termed "early industrial chic" – and one that you sometimes see echoed today in high-end lofts and dance clubs.

The blast doors were usually open – except, of course, during "exercises," when the mountain "buttoned up" its self-contained world. Along with enough food and other provisions to weather any initial rounds of Earthly devastation, the mountain also had four freshwater reservoirs, each with a total holding capacity of 1.5 million gallons. The inside joke was that the Complex, technically an Air Force station, had its very own navy – the row boats used to cross the reservoirs (though, sad to say, I never used one). Today, when I think of them, the River Styx and Charon come to mind.

Images of the underworld were then, and remain, all too appropriate. By the time I was inside Cheyenne Mountain, we knew it was vulnerable to a new generation of high-yield, highly accurate Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). In case of a full-fledged nuclear war, as a popular poster of the 1970s put it, we had no doubt that any of us could "bend over and kiss your ass goodbye."

The citadel that had been built to ensure official survival during a planetary holocaust was, by then, sure to be among the initial targets struck by those ICBMs – perhaps a dozen or more warheads – to ensure a "first strike kill." Our job was simply to detect the coming nuclear attack by the Soviets and act quickly enough to coordinate a retaliatory strike – to ensure that the Soviet part of the planet went down – before we, too, were obliterated, along with Colorado Springs (a "target-rich" city that includes Fort Carson to the south, Peterson Air Force Base to the east, and the U.S. Air Force Academy to the north).

Launched over the North Pole from missile fields in the USSR, those Soviet ICBMs would explode over American cities in 30 minutes. Reacting before they hit placed a premium on decisions based on computers and early warning satellites. Due to the hair-trigger nature of such a scenario, human errors and system malfunctions were inevitable. One false alarm came on November 9, 1979, when a technician mistakenly loaded a "training tape" that simulated a full-scale Soviet missile attack. Two false alarms followed less than a year later on June 3 and June 6, 1980 and were eventually traced – according to an official Air Force release – to a defective integrated circuit, a silicon chip costing less than $100. In each case, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) alerted ICBM crews and scrambled air crews to nuclear-armed B-52s, which were warming up engines for takeoff before the alarms were rescinded.

Mountain Men

Cheyenne Mountain was something more than a bastion to seal in our nuclear fears. It was also a repository of our technological dreams and a response (however feeble) to our technological nightmares. In this high-tech, man-made cave, we could for a moment forget how hydrogen bombs had reduced the bravest of warriors to inconsequential matter. To this end, we cultivated a quiet professionalism – a studied detachment from our surroundings as well as the implications of Cold War deterrence theory.

That said, working within the mountain was decidedly unglamorous. Obviously, there were no windows, so no natural light. Air circulated artificially (and noisily). As big as that cavern sometimes seemed, space was often at a premium in a complex manned 24/7 – with at least a brigadier general always on duty in case the "nuclear balloon" went up. (I recall one quiet mid-shift where I read several chapters of Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising – the irony was not lost on me.) Crewmembers sat in the Missile Warning Center in front of consoles, processing data from satellites and other sensors. The most vital of these were the super secret DSP satellites used to detect Soviet missile launches. I worked mostly in the Space Surveillance Center, which kept track of the objects orbiting Earth (including lost wrenches and shattered satellites) – tedious, but necessary work that involved weekly software "crashes."

The men and women who served in the Complex were anything but Strangelovean. The U.S. strategy of that time, known as Mutually Assured Destruction (which boiled down to the distinctly Strangelovean acronym of MAD), may have been comical in an obscenely dark way, but the crewmembers themselves did their duty with little fanfare. Like them, I was caught up in "the mission," in making everything work, even if everything included a potentially world-ending event. We all – each in his or her own mundane way – became servants of the early warning machinery of nuclear war. We were, as technology critic Lewis Mumford might have put it then, "encapsulated men" serving the Pentagonal megamachine.

"Manly" military glory was still an ever-present ideal in those years; but, as we all were well aware, it lay somewhere beyond the mountain and missile silos in the so-called air-breathing element of the Strategic Air Command. It was the property of the air-jockeys in the long-range bombers. Today, it's not the brilliant, but intentionally deviant Dr. Strangelove that really catches the ethos of that SAC moment – a certain cocksure insouciance to what bombing actually meant when your planes were nuclear armed. For that, check out the 1963 movie A Gathering of Eagles, starring Rock Hudson and Rod Taylor. Watch for the scene in which Taylor resolutely reacts to the news of a no-notice, make-or-break "Operational Readiness Inspection" – the dreaded ORI. He rips off his tie, Clark Kent-style, exposing an impressive thatch of chest hair. It's a classic embodiment of testosterone-driven, hard-charging command, whose end point is redemption for him as well as the wing – not the extinction of life on Earth as we know it.

Certainly though, Dr. Strangelove did a better job capturing the surreal world of nuclear theory outside Cheyenne Mountain, rather than the humdrum one inside the Complex. Serving in SAC in the early 1970s, for instance, my brother routinely appended to its official motto, "peace is our profession," the unofficial, but popular, "war is our hobby." That, after all, was more consistent with the mailed fist that dominated SAC's emblem. While it clearly existed to deter nuclear wars, SAC also stood ready to fight and "win" them. As late as 1999, one B-1 bomber pilot assured me, straight-faced, "Don't tell me we can't win a nuclear war – that's what I train for." Buck Turgidson, eat your heart out.

My War Games

In 1986, the year President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev teetered on the brink of eliminating superpower nuclear weapons at their summit meeting in Reykjavik, I participated in a computerized war game inside Cheyenne Mountain. It ended in a simulated nuclear attack against the United States.

By today's standards, our computers were primitive leviathans: IBM mainframes with old-fashioned tape drives – roughly the size of jumbo, sub-zero refrigerators in today's McMansions; they had disc drives or "packs" roughly the size of dishwashers. Our computer screens were a monochromatic green. From a Hollywood special-effects perspective, they were poorly lit and relentlessly boring – not at all like the glitzy nuclear war room in the 1983 film WarGames that starred a fresh-faced Matthew Broderick.

As those monochromatic missile tracks crossed the Arctic Circle and began to terminate at various U.S. cities, the mood among the battle staff grew reflective. Yes, it was only a game, but everyone present knew that nuclear Armageddon with the Soviet Union was possible, and that it would kill tens, perhaps even hundreds of millions of people in both countries. That day, in that command center, we were virtual witnesses to our worst nightmare: a nuclear holocaust that might not only destroy our country and the Soviet Union, but perhaps civilization as we knew it.

How We Never Left Cheyenne Mountain

When the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in 1989, few people were more surprised than our intelligence agencies and our military (myself included). After putting decades of thought and planning into mutually assured destruction, after planning not just to fight but to win nuclear wars, we now faced a brighter, potentially less nuclear, or even non-nuclear future. And all this had come about – under the shadow of true global terror – without a Department of Homeland Security, or an Orwellian "PATRIOT Act," or so many of the other accoutrements of our present homeland security moment. (Without, in fact, even the emotive, vaguely un-American word "homeland" being in use.)

Indeed, when it was over, we claimed victory on the very basis that our freedoms – and our political system – were stronger than our rival's. We had, those declaring victory claimed, trusted and empowered the people, not an ossified state bureaucracy.

The optimism of 1990 was strikingly mainstream. President George H.W. Bush spoke of "a new era, freer from the threat of [nuclear] terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace." We were supposedly lining up as a society to cash-in our "peace dividend" chips – with our winnings designated for pressing domestic concerns. Like presidential candidate Warren G. Harding, who campaigned for a return to "normalcy" after World War I, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's tough-talking ambassador to the United Nations, wrote that, after so many decades of vigilance and sacrifice, we could once again become "a normal country in a normal time."

But it never happened. Instead of normalcy, we remained hunkered down in Cheyenne Mountain. We continued to look fearfully out at the world, while arming ourselves to the teeth. We became wedded to the idea of bunkers and barriers, whether fortified fences along the Mexican border, imperial military bases along the peripheries of a burgeoning empire, or, on a micro scale, security gates patrolled by small armies of private guards to keep the "have nots" out of "have" communities. (To these, the ultra-rich have now added "panic rooms" in their mansions – tiny domestic Cheyenne Mountains secured by mini-steel blast doors, monitored by cameras, and stocked with provisions.) After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was as if we had "buttoned up" and slammed shut the blast doors to Fortress America.

How did the planet's self-proclaimed "sole superpower" in its moment of triumph become such a fearful country? In our endless face-off with the Soviet Union, did we come to resemble it far more than we ever imagined? After all, instead of the USSR, it's now we who are fighting a difficult war in Afghanistan; it's now we who are inflating our currency with massive deficits for weapons of marginal utility; it's now we who put forward unilateral proposals for earth-penetrating, bunker-busting nukes; it's now we who are often seen as aggressors on the world stage.

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) this May ("Guarding What You Value Most" is the motto at its web site), isn't it high time that we closed those 25-ton blast doors one last time and, without glancing back, walked toward those starry skies and the twinkling lights of that city in the distance? Isn't it high time that we fulfilled the Reykjavik dream?

As Americans, shouldn't we again learn to start worrying and loathe the bomb – so much so that we roll up our collective sleeves and work to eliminate it from our planet? It's never too late to cash-in whatever peace-dividend chips still remain. And as we walk away with the last of our Cold War winnings – no matter how meager – let's leave behind as well the bunker and barrier mentality that went with them.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005) among other works. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.

Leaving Cheyenne Mountain: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Loathe the Bomb

by William Astore and Tom Engelhardt

Leaving Cheyenne Mountain