Inside the Mountain

In 1956, the men running NORAD had a problem that no amount of radar stations could solve. The Soviet Union was building intercontinental ballistic missiles, and every above-ground command center in North America had just become a target. The interim headquarters at Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs was a glorified office building. A single warhead would erase it — and with it, the entire nerve center of continental air defense.

The solution was as audacious as it was straightforward: dig a hole in a mountain and put the command center inside it. On May 18, 1961, construction crews began blasting into Cheyenne Mountain, a granite massif on the Front Range of the Rockies. Over the next five years, they would remove 693,000 tons of rock — enough to fill a freight train stretching from Colorado Springs to Denver — and spend $142.4 million (roughly $1.3 billion in today's dollars) building what remains the most heavily fortified military installation on Earth.

The facility went operational on April 20, 1966. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and prime contractor Utah Mining and Construction had created something unprecedented: a small city inside a mountain, designed to absorb a direct nuclear strike and keep functioning. It wasn't a bunker. It was a statement — that even in the worst case, someone would still be watching.

Here is the thing that separates Cheyenne Mountain from every other hardened facility ever built: the buildings don't touch the mountain. Fifteen three-story structures sit on 1,319 steel coil springs, each weighing approximately 1,000 pounds. The springs allow the buildings to sway up to one inch in any direction, independent of the surrounding granite. When a nuclear shockwave hits the mountain, the rock shakes. The buildings ride it out.

Think about that engineering for a moment. In 1961, someone had to calculate the resonant frequency of a granite mountain, design a spring system to decouple fifteen buildings from it, and then build the whole thing a third of a mile inside solid rock. They did it with slide rules.

The blast doors deserve their own paragraph. Weighing 25 tons each and standing 3.5 feet thick, they're the most iconic feature of the complex. They can be closed hydraulically in 45 seconds, or manually by two people in an emergency. They're designed to channel the shockwave of a multi-megaton blast through the tunnel system and out the other side, like wind through a canyon. The facility behind them was rated to survive a 30-megaton detonation at a distance of 1.5 nautical miles.

For forty years, the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center was the most consequential room on the planet. Every radar return from the Distant Early Warning Line, every satellite track, every sensor reading funneled into this granite cave. The people watching those screens had one job: determine whether the Soviet Union had just launched a nuclear strike. They had minutes to get it right.

They almost got it wrong — twice.

At its peak, nearly 2,000 people worked inside the mountain around the clock. The complex ran 24/7/365 with no interruption for over four decades. Personnel described a peculiar psychological effect: after days of 12-hour shifts inside granite walls with no natural light, the mountain became its own world. Some compared it to submarine duty. Others said it was worse — at least submariners could look at the ocean.

Between crises, the daily reality was methodical vigilance. Operators tracked Soviet submarine movements, monitored satellite launches, and maintained the Space Surveillance Network. The original mission of tracking incoming bombers evolved into tracking missiles, then satellites, then space debris. The threat changed, but the mountain kept watching.

In 1983, WarGames turned Cheyenne Mountain into the most famous military facility on Earth. Matthew Broderick's teenage hacker accidentally triggered a nuclear war simulation on NORAD's computer — called "WOPR" in the film, housed inside a cavernous set that bore little resemblance to the real, much more cramped operations center. The movie's tagline became a Cold War proverb: "The only winning move is not to play."

The real irony? The film's premise — a computer system that couldn't distinguish simulation from reality — had actually happened four years earlier, in the 1979 training tape incident. Truth preceded fiction.

Then came Stargate SG-1, which ran for ten seasons (1997–2007) with the Cheyenne Mountain Complex as its primary setting. The show's "Stargate Command" (SGC) placed an alien portal device in the mountain's deepest level. The Air Force cooperated with the production, and the show became the longest-running North American sci-fi series of its era. To this day, visitors to the real facility reportedly ask where the Stargate is.

But the mountain's most charming cultural contribution predates Hollywood entirely. In 1955, a Sears department store ad accidentally printed NORAD's predecessor's phone number as Santa's hotline. Rather than correcting the mistake, the duty officer played along and told children where Santa was. NORAD Tracks Santa has run every Christmas Eve since, with personnel inside the mountain tracking "Santa's sleigh" on the same screens used to monitor ICBMs. It is perhaps the most unexpectedly wholesome tradition in the history of nuclear defense.

In 2006, someone decided the most hardened military facility in the Western hemisphere was too expensive to run. NORAD and USNORTHCOM moved their primary command centers to the basement of a building at nearby Peterson Air Force Base. The logic was threefold: the Cold War was over, the immediate ICBM threat had receded, and it was genuinely difficult to modernize IT infrastructure inside a 1960s granite cavern. The mountain was placed on "warm standby" — skeleton crew, lights on, ready to reactivate within hours.

For nine years, this was the arrangement. The most survivable command center on Earth served primarily as a backup and training facility. Critics called it the most expensive closet in the Department of Defense.

Then the strategic calculus shifted. Around 2015, Pentagon planners confronted a new threat that made the mountain's unique properties relevant again: electromagnetic pulse. A high-altitude nuclear detonation — or a sufficiently powerful solar storm — could fry unshielded electronics across an entire continent. Every above-ground command center was vulnerable. Cheyenne Mountain, buried under 2,000 feet of granite that functions as a natural Faraday cage, was not.

In 2015, Raytheon was awarded a contract valued at up to $700 million to modernize the complex's systems with a specific focus on EMP resilience. Admiral William Gortney, then-commander of NORAD/NORTHCOM, put it bluntly: "Because of the very nature of the way that Cheyenne Mountain's built, it's EMP-hardened. And so, there's a lot of movement to put capability into Cheyenne Mountain and to be able to communicate in there."

The lesson was expensive but clear: you don't abandon the only facility guaranteed to survive the thing you're most afraid of.

The facility's current designation tells you everything: Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station, under Space Base Delta 1. A bunker built to track Soviet bombers is now the backbone of American space domain awareness. The irony is almost poetic — the same granite that shields against nuclear blast also shields the satellite tracking systems that watch for anti-satellite weapons.

In July 2024, the 210th Engineering Installation Squadron completed a major infrastructure upgrade, threading over 3,000 feet of secondary fiber optic cable through the complex. This isn't a cosmetic refresh. Redundant high-speed data connectivity is the circulatory system of modern missile warning — and the mountain's original copper wiring wasn't going to cut it for the data volumes involved in tracking 48,000+ orbital objects.

Today, Cheyenne Mountain serves three concurrent roles. It's the alternate command center, ready to assume full operations if Peterson is compromised. It's the EMP sanctuary, housing the most sensitive servers and communications gear in an environment guaranteed to survive electromagnetic catastrophe. And it's a training hub for exercises like Global Lightning and Vigilant Shield, where crews rehearse the scenarios no one wants to face for real.

The Department of the Air Force's FY 2026 budget request emphasizes "nuclear enterprise modernization" and "resilient command and control" — bureaucratic language that translates directly into money flowing back into the mountain. In 2025, the facility began opening its doors for rare public tours and media visits, including a NewsNation feature and appearances by content creators — a public relations strategy aimed at showcasing American readiness to a generation that knows the mountain primarily from video games and Stargate reruns.

Sixty years after construction began, Cheyenne Mountain is arguably more strategically relevant than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hypersonic glide vehicles, anti-satellite weapons, cyber warfare, and electromagnetic pulse have created a threat environment where the unique properties of a Cold War granite bunker — physical isolation, EMP hardening, air-gapped systems — aren't relics. They're requirements. The mountain endures because the threats it was built to survive never actually went away. They just got new names.