Going
Ballistic
A hacker tourist
explores the deep recesses of fabled Air Force
stronghold Cheyenne Mountain, where the Cold War never
stops.
By Phil Patton
11-07-99
It's a lovely day at
Cheyenne Mountain. The sky is blue, the air is cool, and
the threatcon level is alpha. As threatcons go, alpha is
pretty mild stuff - it's the first level up from no
threat at all, and this alpha is on the wane. It started
several months ago, when rumors of a terrorist threat
from abroad caused a brief hubbub and a slight increase
in security. Nothing too exciting happened, though: The
Air Force didn't even shut down the tourist visits - and
today, as I drive up the twisting blacktop into the
Rockies' Front Range, everything is basically peaceful
at America's most legendary Cold War military
installation. Doomsday anxiety ain't what it used to be.
Buried deep inside the
rock, not far from Pikes Peak and just a few miles from
Colorado Springs, the Cheyenne Mountain base is home to
Norad, the nuke-tracking North American Aerospace
Defense operations center, and Spadoc, the Space Defense
Operations Center, which keeps tabs on satellites and
other objects in orbit. For more than 30 years, Cheyenne
has functioned as the Fort Apache of America's
early-warning system - the ultimate lookout station for
death from above, and one of the very few sites that
give tangible meaning to the elusive concept of nuclear
deterrence.
The US has other hubs
of detection and alert: the Pentagon's National Military
Command Center, the White House Situation Room, and the
Strategic Command - aka Stratcom - near Omaha, Nebraska,
which oversees the offensive deployment of nuclear
weapons. But Cheyenne Mountain, with its brooding,
tunneled entryway and blastproof doors, has always
loomed largest in the public imagination. It's the
conning tower of Armageddon.
"Cheyenne Mountain
is one of the truly mythic locales of the modern
era," says John Pike, a policy analyst at the
Federation of American Scientists who tracks
nuclear-defense issues. "It's a place where America
contemplates ultimate reality and the void."
The mountain's
$1.8 billion computer upgrade may be the most
nightmarish ever.
By day, the mountain
bristles with antennas; by night, it's dotted with red
lights. But this hardware doesn't belong to the mountain
- it's the rigging of privately owned TV and phone
relays. Downhill from this once isolated site, Colorado
Springs has sprawled outward and upward. On the 5-mile
drive to the visitor center's parking lot at 7,500 feet,
you pass a shopping mall with a Target store. Cheyenne
Mountain has been a roadside attraction since the early
'60s; about 20,000 tourists drop by every year. Visitors
start out at a Park Service-style welcome center,
complete with educational exhibits: core samples of the
mountain's solid granite, big metal rock bolts, and a
huge spring that looks like an Acme gizmo from a Road
Runner cartoon. It's 4 feet long and weighs 1,000
pounds.
At the visitor center,
I meet my guide, US Army captain Jeff Dean, a friendly
but all-business military type who tells me about the
springs. There are 15 buildings inside the 4½
acres of bunker space. The structures, built by the
Navy, are like clunky ships. Rectangular boxes made of
3/4-inch rolled steel, they range in size from a small
room to a small house. The boxes "float" on
these springs, 1,319 of them, designed to absorb what
the mountain's official literature calmly calls
"the seismic event associated with an atomic
blast."
The US Air Force, which
runs Cheyenne Mountain, invited me here because it wants
to show off its new computer system, the result of a
$1.8 billion overhaul that may be the most expensive and
nightmarish upgrade ever attempted. One general compared
the process to changing the engines of a jet in flight.
Another likened it to turning a black-and-white TV into
a color one without switching the set off.
The upgrade was
outrageously tough because Cheyenne Mountain was
burdened with a formidable legacy problem. Its Systems
Center, in charge of the complex's hardware, networks,
and software, maintains more than 12 million lines of
code on 34 separate systems written in 27 languages. The
site's array of machines, many of which survived this
upgrade, encapsulates a history not just of the Cold War
but of modern computing. Bearing old nameplates from
companies like Honeywell and Data General, hardware that
uses the hoary technologies of core memory and magnetic
tape is still whirring away in there.
"We've even got
one of those washing-machine computers somewhere,"
says Dean.
Washing-machine
computers?
"The ones with the
big tape reels that look like washing machines."
The upgrade started
more than two decades ago, mainly to address Cheyenne
Mountain's inability to process the increasing amounts
of information fed into it. Despite this system
weakness, the mountain has kept us safe since its
inception - and the official word is that this latest
upgrade makes us that much safer. But today, safety
seems slightly beside the point. The Cold War is over.
Despite its brass and bustle, Cheyenne Mountain has
become an anachronism.
As far back as 1980,
the Pentagon's assumption was that all the bunkering-in
here was for naught - that Norad couldn't last more than
half an hour or so in a targeted nuclear exchange.
Although the mountain is the ultimate monument to
"command and control" as an idea, in a real
nuclear war the action would quickly switch over to
mobile hubs. The president has a 747 called the National
Airborne Operations Center, as well as the
Commander-in-Chief Mobile Alternate Headquarters, a
fleet of mysterious truck-based units that roam the
nation's interstates. The Air Force maintains the Post
Attack Battle Management Aircraft - better known as
"Looking Glass," a flying duplicate of the
mountain's systems - fueled and ready to go at all
times.
Systems with mobile or
multiple centers are the hardest to disable because
they're less vulnerable to "decapitation."
This principle is true for all wars, big or small,
nuclear or not. Even a besieged dictator like Saddam
Hussein can call the shots from a motor home and a dozen
anonymous shelters while on the run.
After Desert Storm, the
US military accelerated its move from the mainframe
architecture of the Cold War to the PC model of warfare
- quick, mobile, and locally directed. All of this
contributes to an irony that defines Cheyenne Mountain
now: The massive upgrade is completed, but the nodes
have become more important than the supercomputing
center.
While Cheyenne still
watches over North American airspace, the heat has moved
to the "theater" conflicts on foreign soil.
(Indeed, the day after I visited, the US carried out a
military air strike that barely caused a ripple at the
mountain.) During the high-speed information flows of
wars to come, Cheyenne Mountain will surely end up
functioning as just one node among many - even as it
symbolizes the seat of command in America's global I-war
network.
Truth be told, I'm
still excited to be here, partly out of nostalgia. I
grew up in the '60s, when Cheyenne Mountain shadowed our
lives with a mixture of anxiety and reassurance. Those
of us raised on visions of SAC and the Big Board went to
bed vaguely aware that Norad was keeping us safe. One
night a year, Cheyenne Mountain spoke to us directly.
Every Christmas Eve a bulletin came crackling over my
transistor radio: Norad was reporting a radar blip
heading our way from the North Pole. Death and
destruction could come roaring over the Arctic Circle,
but toys arrived by the same route. Santa was akin to
Ike.
Captain Dean and I
hitch a ride from the tourist area into the mountain
with a busload of tight-lipped workers. The stone and
concrete arches of the tunnel entrance are wreathed with
razor wire. Before going on, all vehicles must pause in
a special cage to be checked, whether they're delivering
computers, frozen food, or journalists.
Dean escorts me to
what he calls the village - there's a dentist's
office, a barbershop, a chapel, and six battle
stations.
From this point on, I
exist in the land of the military brief, a no-frills
unit of discourse made up of canned facts and figures
that don't tell you much. Gallons of stored water: 4.5
million. Miles of tunnel: 2.8. Cubic feet of
hollowed-out space: 7 million. Number of rock bolts
preventing implosion: 115,000. Number of full-time bolt-tighteners
on the job: 2. The stats are spiced with whimsical
factoids. I'm told that "the world's smallest
fleet," a single rowboat, patrols the little
underground lake that holds the mountain's water supply.
Once we're in the cave,
Dean and I pass few others. The quietly ubiquitous
fluorescent lights give the place a ghostly pall. I'm
used to the New York subway - hot in the summer, cold in
the winter - and I ask the captain about the climate
down here. Conditions, I learn, are never quite hot or
cold: The heat from the computers keeps the work area's
temperature at 72 degrees.
Dean escorts me to what
he calls a village - a cluster of buildings that looks
like a cross between a trailer park and a fleet at
anchor. On the 3-D map of Cheyenne Mountain's interior,
the village is represented by a crisscrossed grid of
tubes. There's a dentist's office, a barbershop, a
chapel, and six battle stations. Five crews of 40 men
and women rotate in eight-hour shifts. Some 1,200 people
work here regularly. In wartime, 800 could live
underground for a month with food, water, air, and
power.
The role of this
skyless facility is to detect airborne attacks on the US
and Canada, and to communicate those dangers to military
and civilian leaders. Norad, of course, looks out for
incoming nukes and bombers. Spadoc's main mission is
monitoring the vast supply of space junk. There are
about 8,500 orbiting objects to track, from Mir right
down to booster bolts. Even the tiniest piece of
orbiting flotsam can destroy a satellite or spacecraft.
When the space shuttle is flying, Spadoc makes sure
there's a 6-mile-square "safety box" around
it.
Both Norad and Spadoc
are manned from buildings in the village. To enter the
Missile Warning Center, a typical structure, I climb a
short set of metal steps. The door seals with a
rubber-gasket squish behind me. Once it closes, the
cavernous feeling is gone. The dropped ceilings,
industrial carpet, desks, and shelves are all generic.
Efficient young professionals sit at the terminals, just
as they would in the back office of any bank or
brokerage. It's Dullsville incarnate. Seeing the boredom
on my face, the officer in charge gamely pretends that
an attack is under way.
"We have a
familiar pattern," he says. "We recognize it
as an IRBM." An intermediate-range ballistic
missile is better news than an intercontinental (ICBM),
but still plenty bad. The phosphoric tendril of its
track grows menacingly up and across the gridded map.
I'm watching as the faux missile heads from Russia
toward the Barents Sea. Where it could land is indicated
by the "threat fan," a shape that forecasts
its ultimate trajectory.
A few doors away, in
the Battle Management Center, I watch a Royal Canadian
Air Force officer toss up a video image of the tourists
on Cheyenne Mountain's front lawn. It's in black and
white, draining away the bright sunlight I know is
there. His monitors can display maps, videos, and
charts, as well as feeds from the PAVE PAWS - radar
facilities in Massachusetts and California. The ultimate
nodes of the hardwired network, the PAVE PAWS are housed
in huge structures whose walls tilt at 20-degree angles,
looking like the futuristic temples of a cult.
The farthest-flung
element in the sensorium is a constellation of Defense
Support Program satellites. "Each satellite is
about the size of a Suburban," Dean says. "The
exact number of them is classified." I've read that
there are five: four parked in geostationary orbits, and
a fifth wobbling lamely around the planet.
Each year, some 700
airborne objects caught in this military nerve net
remain unidentified for more than two minutes. Most are
small planes without flight plans. A hundred or so might
be drug runners; others might be aircraft belonging to
Cuban liberation groups flirting with Castro's airspace.
Very rarely, a satellite falls to the earth - like
Skylab did in 1979. Beside Spadoc's gleaming new
computers are chunks of metal that have tumbled back
from space. I had always thought of satellites as light
and lean, but these fragments resemble pieces of cannon.
Cheyenne Mountain was
conceived in the wake of Sputnik, whose October 1957
launch dealt a deep psychological blow to the US
government. Suddenly the entire continent seemed
vulnerable. Russia had the means to lob a nuke at the
White House or New York City, not to mention Conad, the
Continental Air Defense command, which was Norad's
predecessor. Conad, housed in a few cinder-block
buildings at Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, had
begun research into new underground headquarters only
the year before. In May of 1961 an official
groundbreaking at Cheyenne Mountain took the form,
appropriately, of a small ceremonial explosion to mark
the start of the dig. The dynamite was lit just as the
crisis in Berlin was heating up.
A lot of pioneering
computer science work was done for Conad. The need to
track aircraft and, later, missiles and satellites
created a demand for computers that could display images
and receive information in real time. After World War
II, a radar-based detection system was created to search
for Soviet bombers bearing nuclear weapons. It used
triangulation from many small radar stations to pinpoint
them. But the math involved was well beyond the average
GI and his slide rule. To develop a computer that could
do the job, the government funded SAGE, the largest
military program since the Manhattan Project. Along the
way, the Pentagon created dozens of now-familiar desktop
technologies, including modems, light pens, and graphic
screens.
Norad was proud to be
at the cutting edge as well as on the front line. But
the laws of computer obsolescence are as unyielding as
mountain rock: Staying on that edge meant constant
change. Here, where endurance and stolidity are sum and
substance, the fevered progress of computer technology
is a bit out of place.
This last upgrade is
only the latest in a parade of past-due improvements. By
May 1966, only a month after Norad first brought its
operations to the mountain, the generals were already
telling higher-ups the computers would need a complete
overhaul. In 1971, an upgrade intended to bring the
mountain in sync with other military systems tapped
David Packard of HP for help. Packard's work ended in
1979, when the mountain's system was declared to have
"equivalent operational capability" to what
had come before. In other words, the new system finally
worked as reliably as the old one did in 1966.
In 1980, a multiplexer
chip failed in a Nova 840 computer and sent a false
missile warning to the national command center. It was
the second such incident in less than a year. In the
first one, fake data from a war-sim was mistaken for the
real thing, and the Pentagon was notified that a Soviet
missile strike was under way. It took about eight
minutes to determine that the end of the world was not,
in fact, at hand. As the military's pricelessly deadpan
postmortem concludes, "This aroused widespread
public and congressional interest."
Each year, 700
airborne objects caught in the military nerve net
remain unidentified for more than two minutes.
During the Reagan
years, the Gipper's get-tougher-with-the-Evil Empire
policy included planning for extended nuclear war.
Reaganites saw the USSR girding for combat by digging a
network of hardened facilities, including Beloretsk-15
and Beloretsk-16, underground cities near the Urals
designed to survive a nuclear confrontation. The Russian
equivalent of Cheyenne Mountain appeared to be a place
called Yamantau Mountain. Even today, these sites worry
US planners. Rumors persist of a still-intact system,
called Dead Hand, that fires missiles automatically,
like Dr. Strangelove's doomsday machine.
By the mid-'80s, in
response to both the false alerts and the Soviet
activity, six separate upgrades, under six separate
commanders, were in place at Cheyenne. All fell behind
schedule. By 1989, it was clear that the fragmented
approach wasn't going to cut it. The programs were
finally consolidated in 1993 under the name Granite
Sentry, and Martin Marietta took over, tossing out much
of what had been done.
The project presented,
on a giant scale, all the problems of upgrading any
complex network. The task was to harmoniously merge
Norad's and Spadoc's many systems and subsystems: the
Battle Management Center System, the Message Processing
Subsystem, the Video Distribution Subsystem, the
Integrated Correlation and Display System, and the
Survivable Communication System Segment Replacement - a
kind of network bypass.
The old Model 630 DEC
Vax 7000 mission processors were supplemented by Sun
hardware running the Solaris OS. Off-the-shelf software,
mostly from Digital and Sybase, was used when possible.
The real challenge was linking the commercial packages
with Cheyenne's custom code, written in Ada, a language
only the military can love.
There were bugs, of
course. A version of the software for the Integrated
Correlation and Display System developed a tic: It
multiplied blast megatonnage by 10. Of this error,
corrected in 1997, a Department of Defense investigator
wrote, "If not found and fixed, this deficiency may
have affected decisionmaking at the highest national
level." An Air Force document noted dryly that the
bug "could have resulted, at the very least, in
ambiguity in the data provided to key decisionmakers. At
worst, this error may have led to miscalculations in our
national military posture with potentially serious
consequences." The finished system, we are assured,
is Y2K compliant, but on New Year's Eve there will be
Russian military observers at Cheyenne Mountain, just in
case.
Still, the bugs in the
new system were nothing compared with the problem
inherent in the DEC Vaxes. An entire world war would
have had to run using only 512 Mbytes of RAM. Despite
movie visions of dozens of little icons swimming across
a big screen to menace the US, the Cheyenne Mountain
system could track only a limited number of targets
without refreshing - just 50 of them overwhelmed it.
Your average office server is more powerful.
The Cold War, we now
know, was as much about appearances as reality. The
bomber gap of the late '50s, for example, was clever
disinformation: The Soviets simply flew the same
squadron of bombers over the Kremlin again and again.
There was a lot of showbiz to geopolitics, a lot of
bluff. But Hollywood has done more for the Cheyenne myth
- buffing its reputation as a symbol of American
readiness - than any propaganda department could ever
do.
The war rooms in Dr.
Strangelove, Fail-Safe, and WarGames all have high
ceilings and long mezzanines with neatly exposed metal
stairways. They contain big boards with nearly magical
tracking abilities. On the screens in Fail-Safe, from
1964, airplanes blink and disappear as they fall from
the sky. Air-to-air missiles zip back and forth. Even
today, this is impossible.
So, trundling from
brief to brief and station to station, my head buzzing
with acronyms, I'm disappointed. Where is the Big Room
with the Big Board? I'm not alone in this letdown.
According to one story (which may be apocryphal),
shortly after being elected, President Reagan asked to
see the war room at Cheyenne Mountain. He had imagined
something soaring and Kubrickian, and he also came away
feeling cheated.
A war room is the ideal
set for ponderings on man versus machine, a Cold War
specialty. But here at the mountain, the rooms are tiny,
almost claustrophobic. Wide-angle lenses have lied.
Hollywood has invented and exaggerated. There is no
grand war room, no single center, no mad colonel trying
to start World War III. Expedia has sexier maps.
It all appears not so
very different from a corporate data-processing center.
I come to think of the mountain's different roles -
patrolling for planes, missiles, and satellites - as
resembling the pieces of a suite of applications. Except
for the martial acronyms, I could be on a guided tour of
Office 2000.
At the start of my
journey I was reading everything as cinema or symbol.
The two huge doors at the mountain's entrance had
reassured me the way the doors to the vault at a bank
do. Even more so, because each is 3 feet thick and
weighs 25 tons. On the walk back, though, the back-lot
images of omnipotence start to fade. I notice for the
first time that the walls are crumbling; they seep in
places. Nets line the ceiling. Here and there, water
drips. Cheyenne is, after all, a huge cave. I pass a
piece of machinery about the size of a person. At its
base is a small cone of white powder. I wonder: Is it
flour, to be stockpiled? Lime, to anoint the dead?
The real challenge
was linking the commercial packages with Cheyenne's
custom code, written in Ada, a language only the
military can love.
"What's that
for?" I ask, pointing.
"That," says
Captain Dean, "is the world's finest paper
shredder."
Remember when our
embassy in Iran was taken over and the Ayatollah's
followers painstakingly reassembled our secrets from
millimeter-wide tatters? The military-industrial complex
has perfected the document shredder in response, as
usual, to a long-ago war. That device is like Cheyenne
Mountain, post-upgrade. We have finally, at great cost
and obsessive effort, gotten it to do what it was
supposed to do in the '70s.
The years since the end
of the Cold War have seen a relaxation of military
pretense. One casualty has been the myth of presidential
control over nuclear weapons. Despite the public's
well-nurtured Cold War assumptions, a retaliatory
nuclear attack would probably have been ordered not by
the president, who was likely to be gone before Norad,
but by the military. "Cascading authority,"
the analysts call it. Communications would also have
quickly cascaded to the level of the phone system. The
distributed telephone network can't be knocked out the
way a command bunker can. Control of the nukes, then,
would not have depended on presidential orders, but on
AT&T. Decentralization, ironically, is the key to
maintaining control.
Today this observation
is no longer a perplexing and unwelcome paradox, but a
widely held belief. In the world of computing, it's a
truism, and even in the hierarchical world of defense,
the paradigm of decentralized power is flourishing. The
Air Force's New World Vistas report, created by an
advisory panel of futurists and experts, contains a
section, "Thinking the Unthinkable," which
suggests the future may see a virtual Pentagon. In this
vision, the old hardwired, dedicated,
command-and-control system gives way to a far-flung
network. The next world war could be controlled from any
phone jack. With such systems, who will need the
mountain?
Cheyenne will always be
the repository of Cold War memories. It's already a
working time capsule of the history of the computer. But
it is more than that. As I drive back down the winding
road from the mountaintop, it occurs to me that the
icons I had seen on those monitors were the descendants
of the prehistoric drawings scratched on the cave walls
at Lascaux. The hardware has been upgraded, but the
human software, the Big Game - whether gazelles or
geopolitics - stays constant through the centuries.
In that sense, Cheyenne
Mountain can never be obsolete, never be replaced. The
ruins of the Maginot Line, the roads of Rome, the
Führerbunker - all are pharaonic reminders of the
frailty of imperial dreams. But the mountain, packed
with sensors and silicon brains, is something else, too.
It's a reminder of uncertainty.
Phil Patton (philpatton@msn.com)
is the author of Dreamland, a cultural history of Area
51, now in paperback from Villard.
Related Links:
The
New "Area 51" Jan 99
A cloud of brown dust snakes behind me as I speed down
the desolate desert road. A dozen miles ago, I
passed the solitary steel mailbox that marks the
turnoff for Area 51.
Secret
Government - The Origin, Identity, and
Purpose of MJ-12
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