A Rare Journey Into the

Cheyenne Mountain Complex, a

Super-Bunker That Can Survive
Anything

NORAD

In the background of Colorado Springs, Pikes Peak dominates the sky. But
just to that mountain’s southeast looms another geological ripple.
Cheyenne Mountain—a rounded, rocky thing that rises 9,565 feet above
sea level—looks wild and quiet. But deep inside the mountain, a crew of
humans toils in one of the nation’s most secure military installations.
Shielded by 2,500 feet of granite, these people gather and analyze data
from a global surveillance system, in an attempt to (among other,
undisclosed things) warn the government’s highest officials of launches
and missile threats to North America.
Their military mole-city, completed in the mid-1960s amid Cold War
worries, is—when fully buttoned-up—highly resistant to nuclear bombs,
electromagnetic bombs, electromagnetically destructive behavior from the
sun, and biological weapons. It’s designed to do its job, and let those inside
do theirs, in the worst of worst-case scenarios. And with escalating fears
about North Korean aggression and nuclear capabilities, Cheyenne
Mountain’s ability to predict and survive a nuclear attack resonates more
than it did just a few months ago.

As I drive up the hairpinned road toward the entrance to the mountain,

made famous in fictional form by War Games and Stargate, signs warn me
off with increasing aggression. But I'm allowed: I'm here for a rare tour of
the mountain’s innards.

When I arrive at the visitor check-in, Fox News plays on the overhead TV.
A sign beneath says not to change the channel, and a uniformed officer
reads me a document that says I can't have explosives and that the
employees can use deadly force to protect the site. Fair enough.

Soon, badge on blazer, fully briefed, I walk with four escorts—two men who
are civilians and two women who are military officers—toward this
constructed cave. It is, perhaps, the place on this planet most able to cut
itself off from the rest of Earth. And the hardest part for those who work
there is not spending all their time subterranean but knowing that in those
worst cases—of which "North Korean nukes" is the example most used
during my visit—everyone they care about will be outside the thing that’s
keeping them safe.
Mark Leffingwell/Getty Images

A Skyless Safety Net

Much of that safety comes from the complex’s very underground-ness. And
given that miners had to excavate 693,000 tons of granite to make the
Cheyenne Mountain Complex, you might expect its entryway to wow. But
the mountain itself is so tall, so sheer, that the 22-foot, two-lane arch
leading to the north tunnel looks especially puny by comparison.

Rusty Mullins—deputy director of the Air Force’s 721st Communications

Squadron—is leading this tour. He walks down the edge of the tunnel’s
asphalt road as he talks about the site, concrete barriers forcing him at
intervals to step back onto the sidewalk. The granite makes a half-cylinder
around us, bolts knocked into the rock like some kind of sadistic climbing
gym.

People get used to these depths, the disconnection. “You learn to live
without any sky,” he says, “without any outside but what’s on TV.” There's
a lot of TV, though—sets in the work rooms that show the world beyond
that arch.
The tunnel curves ahead of us, a skew that will route nuclear (or whatever)
material and send it out through the south entrance. The blast doors that
lead to the complex's buildings branch off from the tunnel at around 90
degrees, so any material will glance off rather than slam into them.

We pass through one open 25-ton door—it'll get closed in the event of a
potential or impending threat to the area—and enter a rock-walled room
with a second such door at its far end. A slight breeze blows by. It's coming
from deeper in the mountain, the result of a purposeful over-
pressurization so radioactive or bio-particles won’t seep inside the
complex. They’d have to make that perpendicular turn and then swim
upstream. And they won’t. That’s physics.

Back when humans were cold warring, one of these doors stayed closed.
When both get shut, their uber-deadbolts and substantial concreteness
keep everything out. Today, these main blast doors remain open unless
something truly terrible and threatening happens (like 9/11, the last time
the gates shut for serious) or the employees do a drill: what they call a
button-up scenario, a practice as much human as mechanical.

Because it’s not enough for the mountain’s welded-metal buildings to sit
on springs that can take a nuclear or earthquake hit, which they do, or for
its pipes to be bendy, which they are. It’s not enough for the managers to
know they have 6 million gallons of water stored in pools carved right out
of the rock, or 510,000 gallons of diesel. They have to know the humans
can do their jobs—best of times, worst of times, regardless of how sad or
scared they are. And the electronics that let them do those jobs have to
continue functioning, even as they're cut off from an outside that, in a real
emergency, might not have working electronics.

David Zalubowski/AP

Sleepover

Mullins points inside the second door. Everyone’s “button-up bags”

(essentially sleepover kits) are already inside. Locked in, people share
bunked cots. They eat MREs—meals ready to eat, whose calorie-dense
contents are almost as indestructible as the complex itself. They breathe
filtered air that comes in through blast valves. Their lives run on six
generators, an internal 10.5-megawatt power plant (nearby, there’s a giant
door that says, “Without power, it’s just a cave.”). Any supplies they need
come from cabinets and cages that they call “Wal-Marts,” where they’ve
stashed extra fan belts and connectors and whatever else.

Mullins leads us through that second blast door, where an awning like
those fronting old apartments juts from the first of 15 buildings.
“WELCOME TO CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN COMPLEX,” it says. When the
employees enter this building during a button-up—real or contrived—they
can’t go back out. And no one can come in.

Inside, we cross little walkways that can move independently of the

buildings. These structures don't sit together in some giant cavern: They're
encased in a series of tunnels. The trim color changes from building to
building, so you know where(ish) you are. As we walk, we pass a regular
medical clinic, a dentist, a self-checkout store, and also the world’s most
secure Subway. (One assumes that in the event of a long-term lockdown,
the inhabitants would not be eating so fresh.) Down one hallway is Norad’s
alternate command center, where they’ll go if shit slams into fans. We do
not go inside.

Mullins leads us through staircases and hallways into a gym set up for spin
class. On a normal day, an instructor might be yelling about cadence over
some jacked-up pop song. But if there’s a bombing or an earthquake, this
exercise room morphs into a hospital. The curtains at the front, which I
hadn't noticed at first, would close over medical bays. The area would fill
with bleeding people clutching broken arms and medical responders to
treat them—as fast as possible, so they could get back to work. “Because
you have a job on the mountain,” says Mullins.

“I’m gonna depress you,” Mullins had said before we even went inside the
mountain. He described his family—wife, kids. And how for his whole
career here, he’s had to tell them that if there’s some kind of Event, they’re
on their own. “I’m going to be in the mountain doing my job,” he says to
the people he loves most, “and I can’t help you.”

That’s a big reason Cheyenne needs run-downs. People have to practice

leaving their families, friends, and favorite Starbucks locations, imagining
that everyone could burn up in a nuclear blast, be left in an apocalyptic
electromagnetic pulse scenario, or become bio-weapon infected.

They usually hold it together. On 9/11, just a few of the hundreds locked
inside wanted to go home. One was distraught enough that officials took
him to the chapel so he could sit, think, calm down. The chapel—which
comes with a chaplain, whose support is bolstered by mental health
services—is bland, non-denominational. It’s the kind of quiet that makes
your ears ring. After 10 or 15 minutes, the guy came out. He went back to
work.

They all do. “No matter how bad it is outside, I’m going to do my job here,"
Mullins says. He says it like a mantra.

Sarah Scoles/WIRED

Closing off the Cave

That work all these people need to get back to—it involves computers. And
their physiological aliveness wouldn't do much good if the computers were
dead or cyber-compromised, would it? That's why the complex's shielding,
both physical and digital, matters so much.

If an electromagnetic pulse hit near the mountain, it could knock out

everything around Colorado Springs. But inside the complex, computers
and the lines feeding into them stay safe. The rock sheath attenuates the
electromagnetic waves, as do the metal buildings: They're giant Faraday
cages.

Mullins leads us to a room where that protection matters a lot: the Global
Strategic Warning/Space Surveillance Systems Center. Inside, the
occupants have kindly put up simulated surveillance screens so I can't see
what's actually going on with the world. A gray-haired civilian is in charge
of smiley young staff sergeants. They're all standing in front of a herd of
monitors, bluelit by a wall of screens showing (fake) maps, (fake) aircraft,
(fake) bar graphs. It's exactly what you'd imagine would be inside a place
like Cheyenne Mountain if you were going to make a movie about it, which
people have.

Down here, they spend their time watching the skies they can’t actually see
for evidence of missiles, suspicious space behavior, launches, tests—is that
heat signature from North Korea a threat, or nah? They ingest information
and determine what’s going on that’s good, bad, neutral, what should go up
the chain to the decisionmakers. And it's here that they decide when it's
time to shut Cheyenne's doors.

As we make our way back toward those (still open) doors, after three or so
hours playing cavepeople, I ask how they isolate themselves digitally. If
their whole operation relies on data from beyond the mountain’s mouth,
how can they be so sure nothing else can get in?

We're outside the buildings now, in one of the rooms that just has granite
for walls. Well, Mullins says, some of their systems don’t connect to
outside networks, ever. That’s failsafe. For the rest, he turns to one of the
uniformed personnel with us—Major Mica Myers, who’s been pretty quiet,
cutting in to add details here and there to Mullins's narration. But I've felt
the whole time like she was watching over this excursion. Turns out, I
might not be wrong.

“I’m gonna use the 'DCO' word,” Mullins says. “OK, you think?”

She agrees.

“Defensive cyber operations,” he says. He points to Myers and says she,

director of operations for the 721st Communications Squadron, leads
them.

While they won’t say what, exactly, “defensive cyber operations” means for
Cheyenne Mountain, the Joint Force Commander’s Guide to Cyberspace
Operations gives a general definition: They “provide the ability to discover,
detect, analyze, and mitigate threats, to include insider threats.” Basically,
they identify and freeze attempts to infiltrate their cyber systems. Mullins
and Myers say they have plans for various scenarios, and proof that the
plans work. Proof, they repeat. And although they don't say what this
means, it seems safe to assume they have repelled infiltrators either real or
simulated.

Mullins looks around at the rocky walls that surround us as we turn back
toward the tunnel, toward the outside world.

“We’re having a defensive cyber conversation in the middle of a cave,” he

says. He laughs. That is, though, kind of Cheyenne Mountain’s whole
thing: Protecting high-tech stuff with the planet itself, a womb around
solid civil and anti-hack engineering.

Mullins steps back out into the tunnel. “Does it look any different going
this direction?” he asks.

I can see actual light at the end of this actual tunnel, so yes.
When we step through the arch, the world is different from the way we left
it. It has, as it always will (for better or worse or worst), gone on without
us. The air feels colder, even though it’s noon now. Charcoal clouds hover
over the eastern plains. There’s a beat of thunder. A fleet of military sirens
goes off 1,000 feet below, back in town. This is just a test, they tell me.