<story><title>Inside NORAD&apos;s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center</title><url>http://thememoryhole2.org/blog/inside-norad</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sgnelson</author><text>The author states that NORAD &amp;quot;... dropped the ball on 9&amp;#x2F;11..&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s be clear, NORAD did not drop the ball on 9&amp;#x2F;11.  You can certainly make the argument that the FBI, CIA, and NSA (and other US intelligence services) dropped the ball on 9&amp;#x2F;11, but NORAD did not.  NORAD&amp;#x27;s primary goal has never been to stop terrorism&amp;#x2F;hijacking from occurring on passenger planes within the United States, but rather to warn of enemy planes and missiles from _entering_ the US. (this did change somewhat after 9&amp;#x2F;11, but that&amp;#x27;s after the fact...)&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I stopped reading the article after this line, because clearly the author doesn&amp;#x27;t know what they&amp;#x27;re talking about.&lt;p&gt;But if you&amp;#x27;re interested in this sort of thing, I&amp;#x27;d recommend starting here:  Strategic Air Command: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Strategic_Air_Command&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Strategic_Air_Command&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I just finished reading Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, it&amp;#x27;s a pretty decent primer on early US nuclear deterrence and such things as SAC and NORAD.  (though there are better books specifically about SAC&amp;#x2F;NORAD, this is an overarching general&amp;#x2F;popular history.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Inside NORAD&apos;s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center</title><url>http://thememoryhole2.org/blog/inside-norad</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sverige</author><text>When I lived in Colorado Springs, my wife was friends with the wife of one of the military security guards at Cheyenne Mountain. We went on one of the last public tours of the facility in April of 1996 (IIRC).&lt;p&gt;None of the doors in the buildings had any indication of what went on behind them, just numbers, or maybe number-letter combinations. We followed our guide through a maze of these featureless corridors with the anonymous doors all closed, then were ushered into the command center.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s pretty small, maybe holds 20 people around a conference table in close quarters. The folks who monitor everything in the world were right next door. One wall is a glass partition between the two rooms, but they pulled a curtain over that because there was some incident going on right then that we were not authorized to see.&lt;p&gt;Then we got a walking tour of much of the rest of the underground complex. The tunnels are wide and high, and there are big reservoirs of water and diesel fuel along the sides.&lt;p&gt;It was really fascinating. Of course no photos were allowed, but I still have a fairly good mental picture of parts of it 20 years later. The photo of the gigantic blast door took me right back - we walked through that very spot.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Thinking about it more, the most surprising thing was the scale of the place. It&amp;#x27;s a quarter mile from the tunnel entrance around the bend (meant as a way to diffuse the energy from a nuclear blast) to the big steel door. We all rode a bus back to that point. We walked about a half mile or maybe more to near the bottom of the other end of the main tunnel. If you look at the diagram in the story, it doesn&amp;#x27;t do justice to the sense of how much work went into carving out the middle of that mountain.&lt;p&gt;The conference room where command decisions were made might have only held 12, not 20. It was very small and spartan. I remember thinking, Shit, the fate of the world might be decided in a room smaller than our conference room at work.&lt;p&gt;Also, it might have been April 1998, not &amp;#x27;96.</text></comment>