Cold War Military Command Center Inside a Colorado Mountain

At the height of the Cold War, the United States needed a place where it could keep watching the skies even after a nuclear attack. The answer was to go inside a mountain. On June 16, 1961, ground was broken at Cheyenne Mountain, just outside Colorado Springs. Crews blasted and dug a network of chambers and tunnels deep into the granite, covering about five acres. By the time they finished, the command center sat under roughly 2,000 feet of solid rock. Inside those chambers, engineers built 15 steel buildings, some of them several stories tall. None of them touch the rock around them. Instead, every building rests on a system of 1,319 giant steel springs, each weighing about 1,000 pounds. If a nuclear blast shook the mountain, the buildings were designed to sway on their springs instead of cracking apart. The only way in is a tunnel about a third of a mile long, ending at a pair of steel blast doors that weigh 25 tons each. Behind them, the complex could seal itself off completely, with its own power plant, water supply, and heating and cooling system. Operations began in 1966, and the NORAD Combat Operations Center was declared fully operational on February 6, 1967. For decades, this was where the North American Aerospace Defense Command, run jointly by the United States and Canada, tracked aircraft, missiles and objects in space, 24 hours a day. In 2008, NORAD and U.S. Northern Command moved their day-to-day operations to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs. Cheyenne Mountain didn't close. It became their alternate command center and a crew training site, kept ready in case it's ever needed. Today it's run by the U.S. Space Force as Cheyenne Mountain Space Force Station. It was built for a war that never came, and it's still there inside the mountain, still on its springs, still ready.