The Cheyenne Mountain Complex is a military installation and defensive bunker located in unincorporated El Paso County, next to the city of Colorado Springs, which hosts the activities of several tenant units. But it was first built in 1957, to host the NORAD Combat Operations Centre, to provide aerospace warning, air sovereignty and protection for North America and was active during the height of the Cold War as an early warning system in the event of a nuclear attack on the US from the Soviet Union. But in 1979, the facility was exposed following a horrendous blunder, it was revealed by historian Lance Geiger on his channel “The History Guy”.
He said in 2018: “To truly allow survivability, you had to have sufficient warning that an attack was coming, so in 1957, the US and Canada formed a joint military group called the North American Air Defence Command, or NORAD.
“Their primary purpose was to provide an early warning and defence for SACS retaliatory forces and NORAD needed a hardened facility designed to protect its operations from Soviet attack.
“In May of 1961, the US started to excavate under a 9,570 foot Colorado mountain to create the facility known as the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.
“The complex became operational in 1967 for a total cost of $142.4million (£110million) and monitored the airspace of Canada and the US through a worldwide early warning system for missiles, space systems and foreign aircrafts.
“The five-acre facility was built under 2,000 feet of granite and housed 15 three-storey buildings hidden behind 25-tonne blasters and mounted on giant springs to keep them from shifting in the event of a nuclear blast.”
Mr Geiger went on to reveal how the supercomputers at the headquarters suffered a blunder.
He added: “During the Seventies, NORAD’s early warning systems at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex were not fully automated, but in 1972, Cheyenne Mountain began to integrate those systems with what was called the Cheyenne Mountain Complex improvements Programme 427M.
“It was a programme for a command centre, ballistic missile and space functions developed using new software technology and designed for computers with large processing capacity.
“It was intended to give greater reliability and quicker early warning capability.
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“This was no drill, the Pentagon’s National Military Command Centre and the Alternate National Military Command Centre all showed the same thing – the Soviet’s had launched more than 200 submarine-launched ballistic missiles.”
“US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was woken at 3am by a call from his military assistant Major General William Odom, who informed him that 250 Soviet ballistic missiles were headed to the US.
“Brzezinski knew that the President’s decision time to order a retaliation was just three to seven minutes and they were still waiting for satellite confirmation.
“A moment later, Odom called again to tell him that the Soviets had now launched 2,200 missiles – an all-out nuclear attack.
“Moments later, Odom called for a third time, data from the early-warning satellites were seeing nothing, it was a false alarm.”