After 4 Decades, a Cold War Symbol Stands Down
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.
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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.
“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.”