- Apr 14, 2001
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Searched for "NORAD" and found nothing.
After 4 Decades, a Cold War Symbol Stands Down
By KIRK JOHNSON, The New York Times
DENVER (July 28) ? Few symbols of the cold war carry the clanging, into-the-bunker resonance of Cheyenne Mountain, home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as Norad.
The mountain, about 80 miles south of here on the Front Range, was carved out in the 1960?s to house the early warning system for nuclear war, and its accouterments and image became the stuff of a whole generation?s anxieties.
But those anxieties shifted after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990?s and even more after Sept. 11, and on Friday military officials in Colorado announced that Norad?s day-to-day operations would be consolidated, for purposes of efficiency, in an ordinary building at Peterson Air Force Base in nearby Colorado Springs.
The mountain will be kept only as a backup, though fully operational and staffed with support personnel ? a place of secure retreat should the need again arise, a military spokesman said.
"The threat has changed," said Michael Kucharek, chief of media relations for Norad and the United States Northern Command. The decision, Mr. Kucharek said, was intended to make civil defense more ?nimble, adaptive and effective.?
Nimble was probably never a word associated with Cheyenne Mountain.
Twenty-five-ton steel doors guard a windowless and secret world that would be, its designers said, impregnable to the worst thing imaginable. And the mountain in turn created a place and a setting ? if only in the public imagination ? where the worst might well play out.
A teenager played by Matthew Broderick hacked into the mountain?s computers and brought the world to the brink of destruction in the movie "WarGames." Science-fiction writers imagined post-apocalyptic societies inherited by Cheyenne-Mountain-like warrior-survivors. Dr. Strangelove haunted a similar war room at the fevered brink of disaster.
The cold war threat, and the philosophy that arose around it, were premised on the idea of a centralized, command-down enemy ? the Soviet Union ? and a centralized, command-down national defense to counter that enemy, historians and military experts said.
The technology of the time dovetailed with the goals of ?hardening,? as it was called, and burrowing down ? in Cheyenne Mountain?s case under 2,000 feet of granite. The centralized mainframe computer was the model then, too. And just as the old Soviet threat has been supplanted by the shadow world of global terrorism, so too has the mainframe been thrust aside by the modern notion of decentralized networks that can be better defended by being dispersed.
"Cheyenne represented the idea that there would be this one single nerve center where man and machines are meshed together to fight the apocalypse," said W. Patrick McCray, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who teaches a course on the history of the atomic age.
"It indicates how much fear, but also nuclear weapons in general, infiltrated all aspects of American society during that time," Professor McCray said. "Here?s this very physical representation of the determination to fight and win a nuclear war."
The Northern Command, which was created in 2002 to monitor newer kinds of terrorist-era threats to the nation ? from land and sea to cyberspace ? is already based at Peterson, Mr. Kucharek said, and its role has grown rapidly. The consolidation adds Norad?s focus on missile defense to Peterson?s broader portfolio.
About 230 people involved in day-to-day Norad operations will transfer to Peterson, Mr. Kucharek said, with no net loss of jobs, but with an undetermined cost-saving over time. Two other military units connected to Norad, employing about 200 people, are also considering moves out of the mountain, consolidating their functions at other bases around the country, he said.
Cheyenne Mountain was never designed as a place to wage war, but rather as one for warning and defense ? to coordinate the net of sensors, satellites and spies that would send the alarm, said Gen. William E. Odom, who was director of the National Security Agency from 1981 to 1985 and is now a professor of political science at Yale University.
Decisions to launch or counterstrike missiles were concentrated at Strategic Air Command near Omaha, General Odom said.
"Their job was to assemble the data that would wake up the president at 3 a.m. and say the country is under nuclear attack," he said of Cheyenne Mountain.
General Odom said he had visited the mountain many times in his career and that it was a fairly unglamorous place of charts and maps. According to the Norad Web site, four-and-a-half acres of connected chambers and tunnels were dug out for the complex. Fifteen free-standing buildings, each two or three stories tall, were built underground as offices. Metal walls and tunnels were designed to withstand an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear ignition, or an earthquake.
The pop culture imagery that came to be associated with Cheyenne Mountain, General Odom said, became for many people much more powerful and real than the workaday national defense activities that actually happened there.
Of the changes announced Friday, he said, "People producing movies will have to come up with a new image ? I think that?s really the significance."
As for defense and warning against surprise attack, the need is just as crucial today, General Odom said, but different.
"This is just rearranging the furniture, this is not closing the house down," he said.
After 4 Decades, a Cold War Symbol Stands Down
By KIRK JOHNSON, The New York Times
DENVER (July 28) ? Few symbols of the cold war carry the clanging, into-the-bunker resonance of Cheyenne Mountain, home of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as Norad.
The mountain, about 80 miles south of here on the Front Range, was carved out in the 1960?s to house the early warning system for nuclear war, and its accouterments and image became the stuff of a whole generation?s anxieties.
But those anxieties shifted after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990?s and even more after Sept. 11, and on Friday military officials in Colorado announced that Norad?s day-to-day operations would be consolidated, for purposes of efficiency, in an ordinary building at Peterson Air Force Base in nearby Colorado Springs.
The mountain will be kept only as a backup, though fully operational and staffed with support personnel ? a place of secure retreat should the need again arise, a military spokesman said.
"The threat has changed," said Michael Kucharek, chief of media relations for Norad and the United States Northern Command. The decision, Mr. Kucharek said, was intended to make civil defense more ?nimble, adaptive and effective.?
Nimble was probably never a word associated with Cheyenne Mountain.
Twenty-five-ton steel doors guard a windowless and secret world that would be, its designers said, impregnable to the worst thing imaginable. And the mountain in turn created a place and a setting ? if only in the public imagination ? where the worst might well play out.
A teenager played by Matthew Broderick hacked into the mountain?s computers and brought the world to the brink of destruction in the movie "WarGames." Science-fiction writers imagined post-apocalyptic societies inherited by Cheyenne-Mountain-like warrior-survivors. Dr. Strangelove haunted a similar war room at the fevered brink of disaster.
The cold war threat, and the philosophy that arose around it, were premised on the idea of a centralized, command-down enemy ? the Soviet Union ? and a centralized, command-down national defense to counter that enemy, historians and military experts said.
The technology of the time dovetailed with the goals of ?hardening,? as it was called, and burrowing down ? in Cheyenne Mountain?s case under 2,000 feet of granite. The centralized mainframe computer was the model then, too. And just as the old Soviet threat has been supplanted by the shadow world of global terrorism, so too has the mainframe been thrust aside by the modern notion of decentralized networks that can be better defended by being dispersed.
"Cheyenne represented the idea that there would be this one single nerve center where man and machines are meshed together to fight the apocalypse," said W. Patrick McCray, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who teaches a course on the history of the atomic age.
"It indicates how much fear, but also nuclear weapons in general, infiltrated all aspects of American society during that time," Professor McCray said. "Here?s this very physical representation of the determination to fight and win a nuclear war."
The Northern Command, which was created in 2002 to monitor newer kinds of terrorist-era threats to the nation ? from land and sea to cyberspace ? is already based at Peterson, Mr. Kucharek said, and its role has grown rapidly. The consolidation adds Norad?s focus on missile defense to Peterson?s broader portfolio.
About 230 people involved in day-to-day Norad operations will transfer to Peterson, Mr. Kucharek said, with no net loss of jobs, but with an undetermined cost-saving over time. Two other military units connected to Norad, employing about 200 people, are also considering moves out of the mountain, consolidating their functions at other bases around the country, he said.
Cheyenne Mountain was never designed as a place to wage war, but rather as one for warning and defense ? to coordinate the net of sensors, satellites and spies that would send the alarm, said Gen. William E. Odom, who was director of the National Security Agency from 1981 to 1985 and is now a professor of political science at Yale University.
Decisions to launch or counterstrike missiles were concentrated at Strategic Air Command near Omaha, General Odom said.
"Their job was to assemble the data that would wake up the president at 3 a.m. and say the country is under nuclear attack," he said of Cheyenne Mountain.
General Odom said he had visited the mountain many times in his career and that it was a fairly unglamorous place of charts and maps. According to the Norad Web site, four-and-a-half acres of connected chambers and tunnels were dug out for the complex. Fifteen free-standing buildings, each two or three stories tall, were built underground as offices. Metal walls and tunnels were designed to withstand an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear ignition, or an earthquake.
The pop culture imagery that came to be associated with Cheyenne Mountain, General Odom said, became for many people much more powerful and real than the workaday national defense activities that actually happened there.
Of the changes announced Friday, he said, "People producing movies will have to come up with a new image ? I think that?s really the significance."
As for defense and warning against surprise attack, the need is just as crucial today, General Odom said, but different.
"This is just rearranging the furniture, this is not closing the house down," he said.
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