The place feels like the set of an early James Bond movie, with men in jumpsuits driving A narrow escape tunnel, entered through a metal hatch, twists and turns its way out of the mountain through solid rock. The hallways and staircases are painted slate gray, the ceilings are low, and there are combination locks on many The buildingsĪre mounted on gigantic steel springs to ride out an earthquake or the blast wave of a thermonuclear strike. Pressurized air within the complex prevents contamination by radioactive fallout and biological weapons. The base is closed to the public, and a heavily armed quick response team guards against intruders. Officially called the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, the facility is entered through steel blast doors that are three feet thick and weigh twenty-five tons each they automatically swing shut in less than twenty seconds. The four-and-a-half-acre underground complex was designed to survive a direct hit by an atomic bomb. The mountain was hollowed out, and fifteenīuildings, most of them three stories high, were erected amid a maze of tunnels and passageways extending for miles. Cheyenne Mountain was chosen as the site for a top-secret, underground combat operations center. That America’s air defenses had become vulnerable to sabotage and attack. During the mid-1950s, high-level officials at the Pentagon worried Installations lies deep within it, housing units of the North American Aerospace Command, the Air Force Space Command, and the United States Space Command. One of the nation’s most important military And yet Cheyenne Mountain is hardly pristine. It looks like the backdrop of an old Hollywood western, just another gorgeous Rocky Mountain vista. From a distance, the mountain appears beautiful and serene, dotted with rocky outcroppings, scrub CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN SITS on the eastern slope of Colorado’s Front Range, rising steeply from the prairie and overlooking the city of Colorado Springs.

Eric schlosser books