IT MAY SEEM STRANGE, but in the middle of a long war and only days after North Korea tested its first atomic bomb, the United States is shutting down its iconic military command center.
The Cheyenne Mountain complex near Colorado Springs, Colo., is being put on standby. Staff will be reduced and operations will be shifted from the complex of deep caves protected by thousands of feet of solid rock to an above-ground Air Force base a few miles away.
When it was built in the 1960s, Cheyenne Mountain was intended to protect the military’s command capacity in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. Safe under its mountain, the center’s staff would be able to order retaliatory missile strikes for as long as the nation’s bombers, missile fields and submarines survived.
Since the end of the Cold War, Cheyenne Mountain has continued monitoring space above the United States and the airspace around it, but the base’s primary job had been rendered obsolete. There are still long-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads elsewhere in the world, but they are all in the hands of countries that are, at least nominally, friendly to the United States.
Bit by bit, the secrecy surrounding Cheyenne Mountain has been stripped away, as the once-secret installation has been opened for visitors as diverse as Russian military leaders and the Denver Broncos cheerleaders. The Air Force, which contains Cheyenne Mountain’s North American Air Defense Command, even posts photos of the inside of the complex on its Web sites. It looks much the way Hollywood imagined it in the thriller “WarGames,” back in 1983.
It would seem that the only secrets left are those in the complex’s computers and vaults.
The military is probably right in thinking that sticking its commanders in a hole in Colorado is no longer essential to ensuring that the nation can be defended in an attack. Advances in satellites, computers and computer networks have made the location of decision-makers almost irrelevant. The world seems no less dangerous than it was 40 years ago, but the nature of the threats has changed.
Still, the way things are going in North Korea and Iran, the Air Force may want to leave a light burning in the window at Cheyenne Mountain.