Author: Eagle Owl
crown recent new outbreaks in the United States continued to deteriorate, even to the point has been a threat to national security. It is reported that the US military insiders pointed out in the "War Zone" column on TheDrive website that in order to prevent the United States and the entire North American air defense command system from being paralyzed by the new crown virus, the North American Air Defense Command has transferred part of the command system to Colorado in early April. Inside an "underground nuclear war fortress" in the state.
This news has been confirmed by General Terrence O'Shaughness, commander of the North American Air Defense Command. This fortress, called "the last bottom line of the North American Air Defense Command" by the media, is the Cheyenne Mountains nuclear war fortress in Colorado.
North American Air Defense Command staff take a group photo in front of Cheyenne Mountain Fortress
North American Air Defense Command Headquarters
If you want to talk about Cheyenne Mountain Fortress, just I have to mention the North American Air Defense Command. This organization was jointly established by the United States and Canada on May 12, 1958. Its main task is also very simple. It is to monitor the Soviet strategic bomber cluster that was eyeing the North American continent at that time, and to intercept them at all costs. In that era, both the United States and Canada were a bit nervous. In order to intercept Soviet nuclear bombers, they almost did everything they could. They even produced the frenzied AIR-2 "monster" nuclear rocket.
AIR-2 nuclear rocket
But as the saying goes, the more frenzied people tend to be more afraid of death, in order to prevent the command of the North American Air Defense Command from being given a pot by the Soviet nuclear weapons, The United States and Canada unanimously decided to dig an "absolutely safe" fortress as a new headquarters in an "absolutely safe" place. And this "absolutely safe" fortress is today's Cheyenne Mountain fortress.
Top secret fortress built by private enterprises
Interestingly, in order to avoid people’s eyes and ears as much as possible, the United States did not use the army to build the fort, but secretly stuffed the Utah Construction and Mining Company with money. Let them build fortresses under the banner of "civil project." Of course, all of this was implemented under the command and supervision of the officers of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Construction of the Cheyenne Mountain Fortress started on May 18, 1961 and was not completed until February 8, 1966. However, due to confidentiality reasons, almost no one knows the cost of the entire Cheyenne Mountain Fortress.
The Cheyenne Mountain Fortress is not conspicuous.
However, the decrypted documents show that the combat center in the Cheyenne Mountain Fortress alone spent a huge amount of US$142.4 million. At that time, the cost of a Kitty Hawk-class aircraft carrier was only 260 million US dollars. Of course, the money was not in vain: the combat center was installed with the most advanced command and control system at the time, and there were also aviation data monitoring, electronic, and integrated communication systems with a refresh time of up to one millionth of a second. It was the top level of the electronics industry in the world at that time.
Abnormal defense
As a nuclear war bunker that regards Soviet nuclear weapons as its deadly opponent, the defense of Cheyenne Mountain Fortress has almost reached the level of abnormality. The main body of Cheyenne Mountain is solid granite, which is extremely difficult to excavate. However, the U.S. Army has taken a fancy to this point. It took several years to explode a huge mountain with 1.5 million tons of explosives. underground space.
The Cheyenne Mountain Fortress Command Center at the time
According to estimates, the Cheyenne Mountain Fortress needed to dig a total of 693,000 tons of granite. In this way, the entire Cheyenne Mountain has become a natural protective cover, and ordinary strategic nuclear weapons and ground-penetrating bombs can't use it at all, because it is located under the 2500-foot-deep granite layer.
In addition, the gate of Cheyenne Mountain Fortress is also extremely abnormal-the weight of a blast door alone is as high as 25 tons, and according to some military experts who have the honor to visit Cheyenne Mountain Fortress, such a huge blast door There are several more inside the fortress.
The fortress’s giant explosion-proof door
According to calculations, Cheyenne Mountain Fortress can theoretically withstand a 30-megaton nuclear explosion within 2 kilometers, and the largest nuclear weapon manufactured by the United States-the B-41 nuclear bomb Its explosive equivalent is only 25 megatons. The United States believed that no nuclear weapons could threaten Cheyenne Mountain Fortress, of course, except for something crazier than metamorphosis...
In 1961, the year the Cheyenne Mountain Fortress was opened, the Soviet Union was in Xindi. The island nuclear test site exploded a unique nuclear weapon, and it was the RDS-220 hydrogen bomb. Of course, its other name may be more famous-"Tsar Bomb." Its explosive power exceeds 50 megatons, and this is the result of deliberately weakening its power.
At that time, the United States did not know the existence of the Tsarist bomb, but because the Soviet military only wanted to use it as a symbol of nuclear deterrence and did not include it as an active weapon, the United States did not deliberately strengthen the defense of the Cheyenne Mountain Fortress. ability.
Czar bomb
Biochemical attacks are useless, and power failures are useless
The United States has not considered the possibility of the Soviet Union using biochemical weapons. In fact, When designing the Cheyenne Mountain Fortress, the designer took almost all possible threats into consideration at the time. The interior of the Cheyenne Mountain Fortress is sealed and pressurized, and the interior of the fortress has a completely independent air circulation filter system.
Although the specific structure of this system is not clear at present, the decrypted documents show that any chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear pollutants can be filtered out by this system.
The internal corridor of the fort
But since there is an air circulation system, it is bound to need to drive the power supply of the air circulation system. As many people think, the electricity currently used by Cheyenne Mountain Fortress is from outside electricity. In fact, the fort is currently connected to the U.S. power grid, but it is said to be very stable. Some employees proudly stated that "the lights on Cheyenne Mountain have not flickered in decades." But this does not mean that this fortress does not have the ability to power itself.
If you walk into the Cheyenne Mountain fortress, you will find a door that says "There is no power supply, there is only a huge cave", but this slogan is actually a bad taste of the US military, because there is a 10.5 MW class inside. In the power plant, there are 1,500 huge batteries. Even if the external power supply is cut off, the power plant can keep the fortress in normal operation for several months until the fuel runs out.
Nixon and Kissinger visit Cheyenne Mountain fortress
Fortress with its own reservoir
Since there is a power plant, it must be a water source to cool the power plant And the warehouse for storing fuel, Cheyenne Mountain Fortress does a very good job at this point. When building the fortress, they also built a huge underground reservoir with 6 million gallons of water, which can be used by 250 people for a whole year while cooling the equipment. Interestingly, the workers happened to dug a mouthful of spring water when they were digging the fortress, so some people joked that as long as the fuel and food are constantly lost, we can stay in the fortress without going out.
Of course, in order to maintain the operation of the facility, sufficient fuel is also necessary. The construction crew dug a huge oil depot in the granite wall of Cheyenne Mountain, capable of storing 1.93 million liters of diesel, enough to support the independent operation of the power plant for several months.
An earthquake is useless
For many underground facilities, earthquakes are undoubtedly the biggest enemy. But in the Cheyenne Mountain Fortress, the earthquake is not a huge trouble. As early as the 1960s, it innovatively adopted a spring buffer device.
This kind of device is not complicated at all, that is, the main body of the construction is installed on countless large springs, so that when an earthquake comes, the construction will not deviate and cause the wall to break. The same technology has been applied to underground forts such as the Presidential Bunker under the White House and the Raven Rock known as the "Underground Pentagon."
Spring buffer system
Of course, this device is not designed for natural earthquakes, but designed for earthquakes caused by the explosion of strategic nuclear weapons, so it can only withstand the Richter scale. Earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 and below.
was abandoned and restarted
Since it was put into use, Cheyenne Mountain Fortress is one of the safest underground forts in the United States and the world. But as time goes by, it also faces many problems, such as large-scale upgrading of electronic equipment, aging of hardware facilities, and so on. Because it was too expensive to completely renew this fortress, and with the fall of the Soviet Union, the North American Air Defense Command decisively moved its headquarters to the more advanced and better working environment of the Peterson Air Force Base.
Cheyenne Mountain Command Center
The Cheyenne Mountain Fortress, once known as the "Pride of Heaven", became the "branch" of the North American Air Defense Command on July 28, 2006, and even Reduced to a state of preservation and maintenance. You know, at the peak of the Cheyenne Mountain Fortress, there were more than 2,000 staff members in the fortress, but only 210 people were left to maintain the fortress at the worst time, and even the satellite antennas used were handed over to the commercial communications company for operation and management. ……
But as the US epidemic continues, the North American Air Defense Command has to restart the Cheyenne Mountain Fortress again to ensure that its command system can continue to operate under any circumstances.
As predicted by Sarah Scholes, a US military expert, if the US cannot control the epidemic in a short period of time, let alone the restart of Cheyenne Mountain, the US Department of Defense may have to move to the "underground Pentagon" office. Up.
