Guests: Lance Blyth, Brian Laslie, James Ferguson, Joseph Jockel, Matt Mayberry, Peter Rayls, Eric Schlosser, Bruce Schneier

Links:

• Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, The Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser.
• Launch of NORAD: In Perpetuity and Beyond (MQUP) by Andrea Charron & James Fergusson
• North American Aerospace Defense Command
• Beyond Fear, Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World by Bruce Schneier
• Behind the Wings: North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) by PBS

 

The Ship Inside the Mountain: A Hidden History of NORAD and North America's Nuclear Defense (Script)

Lost Highways from History Colorado is made possible by the Sturm Family Foundation, proud supporters of the humanities and the power of story-telling for more than twenty years. And by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: exploring the human endeavor. 

[Siren sounds and panic from The Day After]

Noel: When I was a kid growing up in Colorado Springs in the 1980s, everyone knew that if there was ever a nuclear war, we were toast.  

This audio is from The Day After, a made for TV movie that I, along with more than a hundred million other Americans, made the mistake of watching on November 20, 1983 when I was just 11 years old. 

The drama follows the lives of a handful of seemingly ordinary American families and individuals in and around Lawrence, Kansas as news of a quickly escalating conflict with the Soviet Union in East Berlin unfolds on radios and television reports. 

And then: the sky is filled with missiles.

[John Lithgow says: “Those are minuteman missiles and ending with “So do theirs, right?.”]

And then… 
[explosion sounds]

The images of flesh vaporizing around skeletons like molten x-rays on our little 12-inch Zenith TV screen are still seared in the back of my eyes. 

After the bomb explodes over Lawrence, the family of wholesome farmers who’ve taken shelter in their well-stocked basement outside the city face the horrifying prospect of survival. 

[Clip of dog barking and farm girl asking why it was left outside. Dad replies that “life is going to be different now. We’re alive, and we’re together.”] 

But for those of us living in Colorado Springs, we knew there was no chance. We were surrounded by military installations: Fort Carson Army Base to the south, the Air Force Academy to the North, and Schriever and Peterson Air Force Bases out east. Even if we had a bomb shelter, they’d send enough thermonuclear firepower to turn Pikes Peak into a crater. 

I was in 6th Grade that year, and spent endless hours at my desk fantasizing about what I’d do with that last half hour of my life. Would I be able to find my mom? Would I get to kiss a girl for the first time, and then go find my mom? Would we go down in the basement? Or would we go out into the middle of Nevada Avenue and fix our eyes in the clear blue above the mountain skyline and wait for the horsemen from Russia to arrive with our apocalypse. 

Maybe we would make it If only we could somehow get to NORAD, a city on literal shock absorbing springs built inside Cheyenne Mountain. It had a 25 ton, 3-foot thick blast door, a lake full of fresh water, a diesel generator, and food for months, and maybe we could even bring our dog.  

[Theme Post]

Noel: From History Colorado Studios, this is Lost Highways: Dispatches from the Shadows of the Rocky Mountains. I’m Noel Black. 

On this episode, we’ll take you inside the history of NORAD, or North American Aerospace Defense Command. And we’ll take you inside The Cheyenne Mountain Complex, the base that has stoked the pop cultural imagination of generations with movies and shows from Dr. Strangelove to Stargate to Interstellar. 

As the war in Ukraine and Chinese spy balloons entering American airspace have brought long dormant fears of a nuclear attack back to public consciousness, we’ll look at the way the Cold War reshaped and modernized the already militarized American West as it became the stage for a global high noon with the Soviet Union. 

We’ll also look at the way NORAD’s vigilant watch for threats beyond our borders may have made us feel safe, but also left us vulnerable to threats from within and the instability of our own nuclear arsenal. 

[music]

Noel: Despite the fact that I grew up just 10 miles north of NORAD, the first time I knew anything about it was from another, far less depressing movie I saw in the Summer of 1983, just a few months before The Day After aired on TV. 

[clip from War Games] 

Brian Laslie: I think a lot of people will remember NORAD from the Matthew Broderick movie War Games, and then they'll also maybe think about it once a year as the organization that tracks Santa. 

Noel: This is Brian Laslie, the Command Historian at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. 

Brian Laslie cont’d: And they forget that, on the daily, this is an organization that has for the last 60 plus years and still does provide for the air defense of the United States of America. 

Noel: We’ll come back to the Santa Tracker, but I should point out here one more time at the beginning that NORAD is not the same thing as the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. But it often gets used interchangeably, even by those who know better. NORAD is a command. I should also point out that NORAD is an incredibly unusual joint command between the United States and Canada. 

It all began in the early days of World War II when Canada declared War on Germany in solidarity with Great Britain and the threat of a German attack on Canada seemed feasible. Here’s Lance Blyth, command historian for NORAD: 

Lance Blyth: President Roosevelt went up to give a speech at Queens College, just as the war had broken out, and the United States is not in. And he basically says, “Look, if Canada is attacked by a foreign power, we're going to help. We're going to help.”

Noel: Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King responded to Roosevelt’s overture in kind. 

Lance Blyth: Well, you know, we have a responsibility not to allow our territory to be used to attack the United States, as a good, friendly neighbor.  And so this sets up a relationship. And they agree the United States and Canada agree to set up a permanent joint board on defense, PJBD, still meets to this day.

Noel: After World War II as the Soviet Union began to develop their own nuclear arsenal, the U.S. and Canada both realized that a nuclear attack on the Western Hemisphere would likely come over the North Pole. 

Though the world saw the horror of the atomic bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Laslie says that most military strategists believed that atomic weapons could and would be used again. 

Brian Laslie: It doesn't take long for the United States government to realize that this kind of changes the game, right? Yeah, it's a really big bomb, but this kind of changes the game. And so that gives the United States Army Air Forces its real reason for existence.  

Noel: Up until 1947, the Air Force had been part of the Army. But there was a growing sense that it needed to be its own branch, especially with the advent of atomic weapons, which were delivered in B-29 bombers. The United States had a brief monopoly on atomic weapons. But then, on August 29th, 1949…

[bomb sound followed by Russian language]

Noel: Once the Russians had successfully detonated their own atomic weapons, says Lance Blyth:

Lance Blyth: The Soviet Union is a black box. There’s, Stalin is still in power. We don't really know what they're doing.  But we look at what they have and like, oh, man, some B-29s landed during the war in Russia, and they kept them, and they copied them down to literally mis-riveted positions. And so now they have bombers. They had copies of B-29s. 

Noel: The Soviet copies of the B-29 were nicknamed “Bulls,” and they had the same long-range capabilities. 

Brian Laslie: And remember that we spent more on the B-29 program than we spent on the Manhattan Project in the creation of the atomic bomb. This was the most technologically advanced aircraft ever produced anywhere. It could fly higher, it could fly faster. It had a sealed cockpit. I mean, there were a number of firsts that went along with this.

Noel: And that meant that the Soviets could now do to us what we did to Japan at the end of World War II. 

Lance Blyth: We know they have nuclear weapons. We don't know how many. We have no way of knowing. We know also that they kept, after the war, they kept a lot of parachute units, airborne troops. People began to look at this going “Well, wait a minute, we built all these airfields going to the Soviet Union during World War II.” 

Noel: The US had built or used existing airfields in Alaska, Canada, Iceland, and Greenland to supply various military efforts in Europe during World War II. And the US recognized that those bases could be vulnerable to Russian takeover.  

Lance Blyth: Those airfields are still there. If we get into a conflict, they could use their airborne troops to seize these airfields, put those bombers there, and they could be bombing the United States.  And so we just don't really know what they're doing.  And we don't have any good way to find out what they're doing.  

Noel: Now that the Air Force was its own separate branch of the military, the Air Defense Command was created in response to the Soviet threat in 1948. And it wasn’t long before it became clear that defending American airspace would necessarily have to involve Canada. Here’s Professor Peter Rayls, a Canadian-military historian who teaches at Queen's University in Ontario. 

Peter Rayls: Everybody understood that it would be better to engage Soviet bombers farther north to prevent them from attacking either Canadian or American cities. So Canada had the airspace, but the United States had the bulk of the air forces that could, that could defend North America. So there was an idea, even by the late '40s, that Canada and the United States needed to cooperate in the air defense of North America with the growth of the Cold War.  

Noel: Initially, says Rayls, that cooperation was only focused on a joint defensive response. 

Peter Rayls: So if the Soviets attacked, both the United States and Canada agreed that they would help reinforce each other, regardless of where that was, as well as agreements on allowing air forces from either country to cross into the other country with with most people obviously realizing that the most likely scenario would be American air forces crossing the border into Canadian airspace to help fight off Soviet bombers. 

Noel: Fears of this kind of attack coming over the arctic circle and down through Canada only magnified when the Korean War broke out in 1950. 

Peter Rayls: A lot of folks really kind of saw the Korean War as potentially the start of the Third World War, and that really woke up a lot of, especially a lot of political folks, who were still kind of on the fence about funding air defense in North America. The Korean War kind of really woke them up that that needed to become a priority.

Noel: The problem, says Rayls, was how to detect the attack early enough to either scramble our fighters and intercept it, or launch our own attack. The answer: a relatively new technology perfected in Great Britain just before World War II: Radar. 

[music]

Beginning in the late 1950s, the United States and Canada jointly built a series of three radar fences or tripwires across the width of the North American continent. The first was the Pinetree line, which roughly spanned the US-Canada border and extended out to Nova Scotia. 
 
But early radar technology was easily evaded by flying low. And the Pinetree line sat close to many of the major metropolitan areas in southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States. Even if the Pinetree Line did detect an attack, there wouldn’t be much time to respond. So as the Cold War escalated through the 1950s…

Peter Rayls: That agreement then extended as Canada agreed to create what became known as the Mid-CanadaLine, which was another set of radar lines further north. And then later in the '50s, Canada agreed to allow the United States to build what was called the Distant Early Warning Radar Line, which was kind of roughly around the Arctic Circle, and those stretched from Alaska into Canada and all the way into Greenland. 

Noel: And because so much of this new military infrastructure was based in Canada… 

Peter Rayls: There was this growing sense of a need to set up a more formalized system to command and control all these different pieces, whether they were radar pieces or interceptors, as well as in the late 1950s, there was also the rise of in the development of surface-to-air missiles within North America. How do you command and control all of that? And the agreement became, by 1957 that the best way to create that would be the creation of a bi-national Air Defense command, which became NORAD, based in Colorado Springs.  

Noel: Colorado Springs was chosen as the base of operations for NORAD for many reasons. For one, it was just about as far away from Russia, from the coasts and from the borders as any other point on the US map, which would make it difficult to attack. 

Brian Laslie: When you think of defense, it's always about pushing the other guy out, right? Making sure that he can't reach you. So whether it was, you know, the creation of the bow and arrow, the use of the bow and arrow. The ability to to reach out and touch your enemy and at the same time keeping him from being able to to do the same to you. And so, you know, not to be glib about it, but the bow and arrow leads to the gun. The gun leads to the rifle. The rifle leads to artillery. And really, it is all about pushing your reach out farther and farther and attempting to make sure the other guy can't do the same to you. 

Noel: In the immediate aftermath of the war, the only arrow capable of reaching the United States was a long-range bomber – the Russian copies of American B-29’s. But American Military leadership knew it was only a matter of time before intercontinental missiles would be capable of delivering a nuclear weapon. Nazi scientists had created the V-2 rocket program in Germany, which had already delivered bombs from Germany to England at supersonic speeds in the final years of World War II. 

Brian Laslie: Many of their scientists, principally led by Wernher von Braun decide to, in essence, defect to the United States of America. So we get the lion's share of these rocket engineers from the Germans. This is what's known as Operation Paperclip, where we bring all of these German Nazi rocket scientists to the United States to begin building our rocket program. 

Noel: But the Russians had also managed to capture some Nazi rocket scientists and much of the V-2 manufacturing infrastructure. And at the same time both countries were trying to build bigger and more powerful nuclear weapons, there was an equally cutthroat race to figure out how to build bigger and more powerful rockets to deliver them. 

Brian Laslie: The space race is about getting to the moon first, but it's also about rocketry and re-entry and orbiting and then being able to bring something back into Earth at a specific time, place, and location of our choosing. That's the birth of the ballistic missile.

[music]

Noel: To defend against these faster, longer-range arrows, you’d need to be as far away from them as possible, to buy as much time as possible, to decide whether or not to launch a counter-attack. And by the time the Cold War reached its zenith in the early 1980s – when the movies War Games and The Day After laid our fears bare on the surface of the pop culture – that time would be just half an hour. 

But Colorado Springs in the 1950s wasn’t just a convenient point on the map with a moat of land the size of a continent for the newly formed North American Air Defense Command. In the years immediately following World War II, almost overnight, Colorado Springs had already  become a kind of castle for the US Military. 

Matt Mayberry: Unlike most Western cities, we had no core economic base here. 

Noel: This is historian Matt Mayberry, Director of the Pioneers Museum in Colorado Springs.

Matt Mayberry: We were built on this idea that we are a great climate, a beautiful setting, a place that would be attractive to people. Meaning that you always had to figure out what was going to drive your economy besides tourism. 

Noel: Founded by a teetotaling, abolitionist Civil War General and railroad magnate named William Jackson Palmer, Colorado Springs was conceived as a genteel outpost and resort for posh east coasters and English tourists in the West. When he began selling off lots in 1871, Palmer had already built a branch line off the Transcontinental Railroad that ran south down Colorado’s front range. A gold boom in nearby Cripple Creek followed soon after in the 1890s, flooding the town with money. And then…

Mayberry: We also became a headquarters for tuberculosis sanatoriums, kind of an industrialized version of TB treatment that we'd been doing for years before. 

Noel: There was a brief flirtation with the film industry, and a period of time when it could have become an arts colony after the Fine Arts Center opened in 1936. But the Great Depression left city leaders scrambling for something to anchor the economy.  

Matt Mayberry: We had, you know, I think it's fair to call it doldrums in Colorado Springs. We weren't hit as badly as other places because we had a fairly stable and small economy. But … We had vacant homes. We had, you know, people couldn't take tourism vacations to Colorado Springs. So we were feeling the impact.  

Noel: And then…

Matt Mayberry:  With the war clouds looming in Europe and in Asia, that seemed like a good opportunity to find a new way to move Colorado Springs forward. 

Noel: U.S. involvement in the war seemed increasingly inevitable. And the military was looking for something that Colorado Springs had in abundance: 

Matt Mayberry: So, we have, upstairs at the museum, in one of our exhibits the ordinance that city council passed in which they in August of 1941 committed the funds to buy a large section, I believe, 35,000 acres of land south of Colorado Springs, open range land, and offer that property to the federal government for a training base for the military. That decision that the army needed a place to train is what promoted Colorado Springs, which had never really had any kind of military connection prior to that.  
 
Noel:  40,000 soldiers arrived in Colorado Springs shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942, doubling the population practically overnight. 

Matt Mayberry: That was the beginning of our enduring connection to the military. But it wasn't by any means the end of it. 

Noel: When the Air Force began looking for a location for its air defense operations, Colorado Springs once again stepped up. With the discovery of streptomycin antibiotic treatment for tuberculosis during World War II, sanatoriums in Colorado Springs had begun to shut down. The city bought and offered the National Methodist Sanatorium just east of downtown and it soon became the home of ENT Air Force base in 1951. 

Then, not three years later, the newly formed Air Force was looking for a city to host the construction of its new training academy. 

Matt Mayberry: Colorado Springs competed against… I don't remember what the number was, I believe it was 300 communities that were interested in hosting the Air Force Academy. 
And we again, actively worked in this case with the state government, to acquire land north of town and to make that available for training. But again, relied on the, you know, the Charles Tutt's and the Tutt family, the prominence and the poshness of the Broadmoor Hotel to wine and dine, you know, leaders from Washington, D.C. But the other communities were not as unified in their support of trying to recruit the military. And so, we could we could out compete, outshine them.  

Noel: In the decade after World War II, Colorado Springs completely remade itself around the military economy as America became a global superpower.  

And it was little surprise that General Earl E. Partridge chose ENT Air Force base in the once-genteel Little London as the location for what would officially become NORAD in 1958. The joint air defense command between the Royal Canadian and United States Air Forces was the first of its kind in the world.  

[music]

Noel Black: The problem with ENT Air Force Base as the command center for the air defense of the entire North American continent was that it sat right in the middle of town. And it was vulnerable. Here’s Lance Blyth again:

Lance Blyth: Partridge's concern is that his current command center is on ENT Air Force base, and it's literally at the corner of Boulder and Union. And Partridge’s looking at going, well, 1) I don’t know where I’m going to put the computer here, 2) it is really vulnerable, to anyone on the street, I’ve got no security here. And so he goes and says “I need an underground command and control center.” And his idea was what they had done up at the SAC base in Offit, up in Omaha, Nebraska

Noel: SAC is Strategic Air Command, which controls the US arsenal of nuclear weapons. 

Lance Blyth: They just basically dug a three-story hole, built a three-story building, and filled it in. That's what he's thinking.

Noel: But the soil in Colorado Springs was unstable, and it was going to be difficult and expensive to build down.

Lance Blyth: But you have all these granite mountains around here. Let's go look at those. So they proceed to look at putting it inside a mountain. 

Noel: Cheyenne Mountain looked to be the perfect location. Nearly solid granite at its base, and located just a few miles west of Fort Carson, it could also be constructed and reinforced to withstand any of the existing atomic weapons. And, says Lance Blyth…

Lance Blyth: There was a decline in some of the hardrock mining in Colorado at that time. So there were a lot of miners available to do the work. And all you really had to do was blast in a series of tunnels, blast it, dig it out, blast it, dig it out. They knew how to do this. They had not maybe have done it at the scale, you know, three stories high, effectively, but they had done it. So it only took about a year to excavate the whole thing.  

Noel: In hardrock mining, once a shaft was excavated, it would be timbered, or supported by beams, to prevent collapse. But the void inside Cheyenne mountain was too big to build an effective support structure. So the engineers drilled hundreds of massive bolts deep into the walls and ceilings to squeeze and bind all the rock together by pressure in much the same way a brick dome or an arch is held together. 

But the excavation turned out to be the easy part. Once the miners had hollowed out a space big enough to build the command center and bomb shelter…

Brian Laslie: They realized that there was a fault right above where they were going to put the command center. 

Lance Blyth: And one of the reasons that Cheyenne Mountain was selected is they didn't think there were any faults inside of it. We now know that, actually, this whole area is a fault. You know, actually, we're sitting in one here just outside Manitou Springs.

Noel: The mistake added another year to the project as they had to design, engineer, and build a concrete dome beneath the fault to further protect the massive cavern. Then they had to construct the buildings inside, which were far from conventional construction. 

Brian Laslie: They're made out of steel. I mean, they are essentially, they're made out of the same steel that you would use on a Navy ship. 

Noel: A friend of mine who worked inside the complex invited me in for a tour in the late 2000s, and this was the thing that surprised me the most. Since I was in 6th grade, I’d built up an idea of what NORAD looked like inside. There were rumors that it was like a little town in there with a Main Street — like the set of a movie where the people lucky enough to get inside during Armageddon might go about some sunless small town life without us. 

But when you get inside the complex–inside the monolithic blast door, it looks and feels more like they managed to shove an aircraft carrier inside the granite cavity. The welded steel corridors and sealable steel doors make it feel like you’re in the bowels of a Navy ship. 

Brian Laslie: Yeah. Yeah. If you, if you go in there, there's no windows, there's nothing to see. You're very much inside the heart of a ship there.  

Noel: Everything was small. There was no main street – just a labyrinth of corridors painted a yellowish-beige. There was an impressive reservoir of fresh water I’d heard about that stretched off into the darkness of a long side tunnel. The surface was black and there was a little silver rowboat on it for… I can’t remember what it was for.  I didn’t get to see the command center, but I’ve seen pictures, and even that is small compared to the massive room full of screens I saw in movies like War Games. 

The only things that were big besides the blast doors and the ceiling, were the gigantic steel springs designed to absorb the shock of a nuclear blast. And those were the only things I’d heard about that looked like I’d imagined.

Brian Laslie: Every time I gave tours, I always ask people, “What are those? What are those springs called?” And no one knew. And I said, “Well, those are Colorado Springs.” 

Noel: Oh, Brian… 

Brian Laslie: Is a very dad-joke of me, I know, but I couldn't resist.

Noel: I remember seeing a Snickers Bar sitting on someone’s office desk in one of the metal rooms when we walked by. That seemed like the most ordinary, everyday American thing about the entire place. And I remember thinking about how I’d fantasized so much about it when I was a kid as the one place on Earth where a human being might survive what felt like an inevitable nuclear armageddon, and how disappointed I would’ve been if I’d seen it then.

[Clip: “Let us face without panic, the reality of our times – the fact that atom bombs may someday be dropped on our cities. And let us prepare for survival, understanding the weapon that threatens us,” sound of bomb exploding]

Noel: This is the audio from a United States Civil Defense film from 1951. It was a kind of public service announcement that would’ve played at movie theaters before feature films. It shows a young, white couple with a young son in a cowboy outfit prepping for an atomic attack by stocking canned goods, a first-aid kit, and a flashlight in their basement. It's like an episode of Leave it to Beaver, if you’re old enough to remember that show. Everyone is calm and happy. The boy even shoots his toy pistol in the direction of the bomb exploding off screen before retreating to the basement of their suburban home.   

[Clip: “Stay under cover until you hear officially that it is safe outside. If you have been exposed to radioactive dust, wash the exposed areas. Pay particular attention to your hair. Get all the dirt from under your fingernails. If the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had known what we know about Civil Defense, thousands of lives would have been saved. Yes, the knowledge is ours, and preparation can mean survival for you. So act now. Some day your life may depend on it.”]

Noel: Cheerful public service messages like this, or the “duck and cover” campaign for children, would seem naive only a year after this film was made, when the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, also known as a thermonuclear fusion bomb over the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952. It was more than 700 times more powerful than the atomic bombs we dropped on Japan. 

And from there, the arms race escalated exponentially.  Bombs on both sides got more and more powerful. And how those bombs would be delivered, and how fast they would get there, got scarier and scarier, says Lance Blyth…

Lance Blyth: The bomber threat is not the primary threat anymore. It’s now, the threat is now ballistic missiles. 

Noel: The Russians successfully tested the R-7 rocket on August 21st, 1957. It was the same rocket they used to launch Sputnik into space less than 2 months later on October 4. The R-7 was capable of traveling 3,700 miles – far enough to reach from the northernmost regions of Russia to most major cities in Canada and The United States.

Brian Laslie:  We tend to think about the space race as the Soviets launched Sputnik and then they launched Yuri Gagarin and then we launched Alan Shepard, and then it was a race for the moon. But at the same time that that is going on – and that's a very publicly visible side of the space race – there is a rocket revolution going on. 

Noel: The following year, the US successfully tested its Atlas B rocket, capable of traveling more than 6,000 miles to deliver a warhead. 

Basements were no longer enough, and the United States began recommending the construction of fallout shelters, like in this 1959 animated Civil Defense film. 

[clip: “The best protection of all is the special shelter built according to specifications fo your local Civil Defense organization…” 9:07: “It would be a good idea to go right now to your local Civil Defense office and secure plans for the kind of shelter you want, and then to get busy on construction.”]

And then, on October 30, 1961,  just a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis…. 
 … the Soviet Union detonated TSAR BOMBA. 

To this day, it’s the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever detonated on earth. In the 16 years since the US had dropped the only two atomic weapons ever used on a civilian population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the race between the US and the Soviet Union to create bigger and badder bombs had led to this test over Severny, the northernmost Soviet island of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the arctic ocean.

Brian Laslie: Khrushchev is to have uttered a phrase, “This is too horrible to ever use.”

Noel: The explosion was the equivalent of 50 megatons, or 50 million sticks of dynamite. It’s often said that it was equivalent to 10 times all of the bombs used in World War II including both of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. If the explosions of Fat Man and Little Boy were mushrooms in a forest, Tsar Bomba was an oak tree. And it was only half as powerful as what Soviet physicists had calculated it could’ve been if they’d added uranium-238. 

Then came the Cuban Missile Crisis – when Khruschev tried to bring medium range ballistic missiles with thermonuclear warheads to launch sites in Cuba. 

[Clip: Kennedy address on Cuba: “Good evening my fellow citizens, this government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be no other than to providing a nuclear strike capability against the western hemisphere]

For those two weeks in October, 1962,  the United States and the Soviet Union came the closest to an all out nuclear war than anytime before or since. 

Brian Laslie:  What it essentially comes down to is: you have the bomb. I have the bomb. We both have a willingness to use it. So how do we keep this from spinning out of control, right?

Noel: It was high noon on a global scale. But no matter who shot first, both were guaranteed to die. All you could do was keep staring, refuse to shoot first, and refuse to stand down. 

Ultimately, both Kennedy and Khruschev blinked. Krhuschev withdrew the missiles from Cuba in exchange for assurances that the U.S. wouldn’t invade. And secretly, Kennedy agreed to withdraw U.S. missiles from sites in Turkey and Italy. 

This, says Brian Laslie, was the beginning of America’s strategy of deterrence.

Brian Laslie:  And so what you end up with the kind of the ultimate take on this in the 1960s is what we would call mutually assured destruction. So if you launch, I'm going to launch and it's going to end up very bad for both of us. So therefore, the best answer is neither of us to launch. 

Noel: NORAD’s role in deterrence would be to keep the watch without blinking from inside the mountain, ever ready to sound the alarm the moment an attack might come. That way, the U.S. would have time to launch a counter strike. As long as NORAD was watching, we were safe. And it became a kind of symbolic fallout shelter for the American mind. 

[music]

Noel: Up until Chinese Surveillance Balloons began to float into American Airspace earlier this year, most Americans likely hadn’t thought about NORAD much at all in the past few decades unless they have young kids. Lance Blyth:

Lance Blyth: Probably around Thanksgiving of 1955, there was a Sears advert in the paper to call Santa. Best I can tell, looking at the phone books I've had from that time, the number was misdialed. A child got on the phone and misdialed it. Rotary phone, he mis-dialed it. And he ended up calling the operations center. And Colonel Shoop was the guy on watch. And I guess he's a little curt with the kid. But then Shoop, he’s a savvy guy – he went, “Oh, hey, wait a minute.”  So he goes to his public event, the PR people, and they put out a press release about “Ha ha, isn't this a funny story?” And then, Christmas 1955, NORAD realizes: Hey, this is kind of fun. It's about Christmas, about kids. And so they put out a press release to be released at 8:45 of like, “Hey, we've detected a sleigh, we’ve detected something coming from the North Pole.”  

Noel: And with that happy accident, America’s first line of defense against Cold War Soviet nuclear threats, became inextricably linked with one of the world’s favorite holiday fairytales. NORAD could detect anything coming into Canadian or US air space – even Santa Claus. 

Lance Blyth: It was a sudden realization that this was a way people could be told, um,  educated a little bit about this command that was there doing these things, but in a way that would, was not, was perhaps not as threatening, not as spooky.  

Noel: In the years that followed, the NORAD band (yes, there was a bi-national NORAD band) put out a Christmas record that they sent to radio stations. 

Lancy Blyth: And on the B-side of that album, of that record would be a series of announcements to be played at specific times saying, “Hey, we've detected, hey, we think this is going on” so the radio stations could play this.  

[clip: “Radar units at the North American Air Defense Command have been tracking an airborne object for some time now. It’s been tentatively identified as a friendly, one-man vehicle, and we are almost certain the pilot is Santa Claus. However, we are required to make positive identification through radio contact with the object. Hello, hello, this is NORAD. Please identify yourself over…. Ho ho ho ho ho]

Noel: For children listening, it became a tradition – blissfully ignorant confirmation that their presents were on the way. And for adults, it became a subtle, if dark reminder that NORAD still had its eyes trained on the Soviet’s nuclear arsenal.

[music]

Noel: In the 60 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, there have a few notable scares at NORAD that we’re aware of. And both of those were based on faulty information. 

On October 5, 1960, newly updated radar equipment in the Distant Early Warning line detected an attack. Here’s Joseph Jockel:

Joseph Jockel: It began to detect aircraft moving over the pole. It sent an alert of a Soviet bomber attack. And that would have been the signal for NORAD to have passed on the word to the president and Strategic Air Command that the United States was under attack and they needed to respond. But an alert Canadian general said, “Wait a minute, this is still new technology. Let's test it out.” And it was a signal off the moon that was causing this. 

Noel: Then, in the late-70s…

Joseph Jockel: There was a computer failure where NORAD did a computer system did begin to pass the message of an attack underway. 

Noel: Brian Laslie says this computer malfunction was, as least partly, the basis for the movie War Games. 

Brian Laslie: It was a NORAD computer erroneously saying the Soviet Union had launched nuclear weapons. They called Carter's Secretary of State, and that, that's literally 3:00 in the morning. Hey, you know, there might be missiles on the way. And, of course, it eventually comes out that, no, hey, this is a computer simulation. But it happened twice at NORAD, and it happened at least one time that we know of in the Soviet Union. So there is in the, especially in the early 1980s, a sense that we need to step back from the brink a bit.  

Noel: And in 1983, there was what became known as The Able Archer Incident. Able Archer was the name of a NATO war game exercise conducted every year in Europe. It simulated the kind of escalation that could lead to a nuclear war.   

Brian Laslie: But there are reports (and whether or not these these can be believed or how truthful they were) that the Soviets thought this was a precursor to an invasion. Therefore, they put their bombers and their missiles on high alert. We actually came really close to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. 

Noel: When the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late-80s and early-90s, NORAD’s mission and budget came under intense scrutiny. But they quickly found a new mission. Here’s Canadian military historian James Ferguson. 

James Ferguson: After the end of the Cold War, no one in Canada realized that what NORAD started to do was assist in the war on drugs, providing surveillance input for civil authorities, policing authorities, to intercept airborne drug carriers coming into North America.

Noel: Brian Laslie:

Brian Laslie: But with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and into the 2000s, there, there's a sense that…Does NORAD still have a mission? Well, obviously, yes, the Russians still have nuclear weapons. There are still other countries that that poses harm. But there is a period of the unknown in the nineties until 2001. 

Noel: But then, on September 11, 2001, NORAD found itself facing a threat it had never anticipated. 

Brian Laslie: NORAD is up and out, looking out in a way they were not looking really for internal threats on September 11th 2001. NORAD is actually running an exercise on that day. And when the FAA calls NORAD, the guy who picks up the phone says, “Hey, is this real world or is this exercise?” 

Noel: NORAD did scramble some jets that morning in response to the hijacking, and was eventually able to shut down North American air space. But, says Lance Blyth…

Lance Blyth: The protocols for hijacked aircraft were basically just: Follow. Because, previously, all hijacked aircraft were then flown somewhere and landed, and demands were made. 

Noel: Up until that point, any objects originating within the United States were considered friendly, or non-threats. 

But 9/11 fundamentally changed that. And not just for NORAD, but for the entire country. The Soviet Union had been a conventional enemy – a nation-state with nuclear capabilities that was clearly outside our borders, over there on the other side of the globe. If an attack came, it would be ordered by the political leadership. 

Joseph Jockel: NORAD had been postured to deal outwardly. Its role was to detect and respond to a Soviet or Russian bomber attack or missile attack. There was some capability domestically, but that wasn't the orientation within the entire system. So it was caught by the 9/11 hijackings unaware. 

Noel: And with 9/11, the idea of clearly delineated threats, and where those threats might come from, was completely upended. We’d gotten so good at looking outward for big, existential threats that we forgot to look inward and see that we were vulnerable to much smaller, asymmetrical attacks that could happen anywhere at any time without warning. And the  fears we once had of an apocalyptic, planet-killing event gave way to broader fears of the unknown. 

[music]

NORAD and its mission haven’t changed all that much since 9-11, says Brian Laslie. It still keeps watch over major international nuclear threats like North Korea, Russia, and China.

Brian Laslie: At its heart, it still provides a very similar service that it did in 1958. So, again, as you mentioned, it is this very large umbrella of defense of the North American continent. And the threats have changed. They've morphed. They've come back under different names. 

Noel: But one of the biggest threats – one that NORAD’s vigilant focus on external threats obscured from its beginning in the 1950s –  is America’s own nuclear arsenal. 

[music]

Eric Schlosser: My name's Eric Schlosser and I'm the author of the book Command and Control.

Noel: If you don’t know Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control, you’ve probably at least heard of his book Fast Food Nation about the history of the fast food industry, its exploitation of low wage workers, and its impact on the nation’s health. Schlosser did much of his research on fast food chains in Colorado Springs. And while he was here in the late 90s, he visited the Cheyenne Mountain Complex and Peterson Air Force Base where NORAD is now headquartered. 

Eric Schlosser: I decided to write something about the future of war in space and started spending time with members of the Air Force, the US Space Commands. And I thought it was fascinating. But many of the people at Peterson Air Force Base had begun their careers as ballistic missile launch officers. It was sort of a logical career path to go from, you know, involvement with missiles to space command. And they started telling me stories from the Cold War about accidents and incidents involving nuclear weapons. And I just had never heard anything like it. I mean, these stories blew my mind. And one of them told me the story of an accident at a Titan II site in Damascus, Arkansas, which had the most powerful nuclear warhead that we ever built on top of this missile. And I just was amazed that I'd never heard this story. 

Noel: Instead of writing a book on the future of war in space, Schlosser decided instead to write about the near-catastrophic incident in the silo in Arkansas when a rocket technician dropped the head of socket wrench that pierced the fuel tank on the Titan II missile and set off an explosion that could’ve detonated the warhead and destroyed Little Rock, Arkansas. More broadly, it’s a cautionary investigative history of America’s underreported accidents with its nuclear arsenal and weapons control systems.  

Eric Schlosser:  So, oddly enough, the book Command and Control really began in Colorado Springs, like my previous book did.

Noel: The book is terrifying. And the word control in the title comes loaded with irony.  

Eric Schlosser: Much of the book is about how this technology was out of control and difficult to control and always on the verge of catastrophe. And I mean, they weren't sure when they detonated the first atomic bomb, and later when they detonated the first hydrogen bomb…. They were not sure whether the detonation might set the Earth's atmosphere on fire and kill every living thing on Earth. I mean, they did all kinds of mathematical calculations, but they didn't really know until they did it.  

Noel: The story of the Titan II missile incident in Arkansas is the most chilling of the close calls in Schlosser’s investigation. But it's the accretion of the dozens of other near-misses that could’ve had the same unthinkable consequences that makes the book so harrowing. 

Among the details: the reckless ways the military handled the dispersal of warheads around the world; the painful number of decisions made as matters of military ego and scientific arrogance;  the almost constant need for maintenance and the increased likelihood of human error in handling that could lead to accidental detonation; the often spectacular lack of accountability; the frequent carelessness of above and below-ground testing, and the willful ignorance of the dangers of radiation. 

Eric Schlosser: When they detonated the Bravo test in the South Pacific, the explosion was like two and a half times more powerful than they had anticipated. And I spoke to someone who was on the boat, one of the one of the ships observing it, and he was a physicist. And the fireball just got bigger and bigger and bigger. And they just had no idea when it was going to stop getting bigger, that they had made some improper calculations. And it did not set the Earth's atmosphere on fire, but it created an incredible amount of radioactive contamination.  

Noel: Then there were the odds. Over the 10 year life span of the US’s entire arsenal of hydrogen bombs, the likelihood of an accidental detonation was put at 1-in-5. And those odds were considered acceptable. The military presumed that the American public would view the accidental detonation of a thermonuclear weapon as an act of god – no different than a hurricane, a forest fire, or an earthquake. 

And of course, there were the vulnerabilities in the Defense systems – NORAD being the largest and most complex. 

Eric Schlosser: NORAD is state of the art. And it's remarkable this, you know, incredibly complex system of sensors and satellites and radars. But the reality is, I mean, you mentioned, you know, when the ballistic missile early warning system was just coming online, NORAD had warnings that the United States was under attack and it was the moon rising. I think this was in 1960. And we were reassured it wasn't a nuclear attack because the head of the Soviet Union was in New York City addressing the U.N. And so they probably wouldn't kill their own leader.  

Noel: There have also been many incredibly smart and thoughtful people who’ve tried to design systems and protocols that would be failsafe. But the problem with failsafes is that they don’t exist. And, says Schlosser, the safer we feel, the more likely we are to be at risk. 

Eric Schlosser: The best way I could put it is, some software designers came up with a phrase: “The Titanic Effect.” And what it basically says is, the safer you assume the system to be, the more dangerous it's becoming. And what that means is you cannot show any sense of arrogance about a complex technological system that you've created. 

Noel: This paradox of safety and security being dependent on a constant sense of insecurity is sobering where our standing thermonuclear arsenal is concerned, and especially at a time when the growing complexity of the internet and artificial intelligence technologies add massive amounts of vulnerability to every aspect of our daily lives. 

[Music]

But I wanted to know how vulnerable our nuclear arsenal could be, and how safe NORAD might actually be able to make us, from the kinds of external and internal nuclear accidents that Schlosser documents. So I called Bruce Schneier. 

Bruce Schneier: I'm Bruce Schneier, I’m a security technologist. I work at the intersection of security, technology, policy and people. I teach at the Harvard Kennedy School, and I actually just wrote a book called “The Hackers Mind,” published last month.  

Noel: Schneier is one of the smartest people in the country thinking about systems security and safety. He also coined the term “security theater” in a profile of him and his ideas that came out in The Atlantic in 2002. 

Bruce Schneier:  Security Theater  is something I coined as a security measure that looks good but is largely ineffective, right? So its value is in perception. 

Noel: In the Atlantic article, and in his book Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World that Schneier published in 2002, he points to the Transportation Security Administration and the protocols that it created at airports in the deeply uncertain years after 9/11:
 
Bruce Schneier: And a good example are ID checks at airports, like what are we doing here? Everyone's got an ID. Getting a fake I.D. is easy. So now it's gotten better. But, you know, the notion that we're going to look at an I.D. and use that as a proxy, whether you're an evildoer or not, is just plain ridiculous. But it's something we saw. And there are a lot of security theater measures after the September 11th attacks that, you know, made people feel better but didn't actually add to security. So now the discussion here is whether these early warning systems just make people feel good.  

Noel: ID Checks, taking your shoes off, 4 oz liquid containers. If you’ve traveled by plane in the past 20 years, you’re familiar. And there’ve been countless documented subversions of these protocols – sometimes by would-be terrorists, other times by intrepid journalists, or hackers. And the fact is that there is no security protocol that could effectively stop all threats and get the roughly 1.5 million daily travelers to their destinations from the world’s airports on any given day. 

Bruce Schneier: They want to make people feel better and they also make people feel wary, but they also want to be effective. So they're not just security theater, but there's definitely a theater aspect of them. 

Noel: In other words, the highly imperfect theatrical aspect of some security measures should only be one layer in a much larger series of security measures that add up to something much closer to perfect. Schneier likens it to a stack of Swiss cheese slices.  

Bruce Schneier: So there'll be lots of holes in your security, but they're not going to line up, right? You know, you cannot pick up a block of swiss cheese and see through it.

Noel: Designing an effective system for safety and security requires accepting that there will always be vulnerabilities in any one layer of that system, says Schneier. Two-factor authentication for email accounts, for example, is a basic form of layered security. Sure, your password might suck, but a hacker would have to have both your password and your phone to gain access. 

Bruce Schneier:  And if you're building systems that are more critical, like a nuclear system, is the most, you spend a lot of time on each one of those layers and on the fact that you have many different layers. 

Noel: In Schneier’s swiss cheese model, NORAD is just one slice of America’s air defense and overall nuclear security. The hijackers on 9-11 exploited a vulnerability in that air defense. NORAD fixed it, and now monitors both internal and external threats, not to mention naval threats. So whether its security theater or not,  NORAD continues to project its capability to detect and stop any threat to North American airspace. 

Bruce Schneier: And we are so good. We're going to detect your missile at launch. We're going to have all this early warning. You'll never get away with it. So it is in the best interests of all those systems to project that, regardless of whether or not that's true. Because if the value is deterrence, deterrence is about perception. 

[music]

Noel: But no matter how great the defenses, real or perceived, there will always be holes. 9-11 was a painful reminder of this for NORAD. And even if we could predict and prevent every threat from bad actors, the problem of accidents remains. And it’s difficult to design security around incredibly complex systems that always include the possibility of human error. You can’t hack accidents. 

This is what keeps Eric Schlosser up at night. 

Eric Schlosser: There's never been an inadvertent nuclear war. But when you look at the history, we've come close, again and again and again, to nuclear catastrophe. And so, and this isn't my view – this is a view of weapons designers and Air Force, high ranking Air Force officers I interviewed for my book. There is all this managerial skill and technological skill, but there's also been a remarkable amount of luck. And the question is, at what point does luck run out? And do you want the future of your society and of human civilization to be based on luck? 

Noel: But for as terrifying as near-catastrophic accidents like the 1980 Damascus, Arkansas incident that Schlosser recounts in his book might be, Bruce Schneier says that the gigantic stack of security Swiss cheese built around our nuclear arsenal – whether its NORAD or the layers of authorization it would take to launch an ICBM, or the many steps it takes to arm a warhead – have, thus far, worked. 

Bruce Schneier: Occasionally, you know, a bomb is being flown from here to there and it falls off the airplane. But it hasn't been armed, right? So it's designed, that if it falls off the airplane, it doesn't explode. It just falls. And everyone says, oops, and hope nobody notices it and we cover it up. But there hasn’t been an above ground nuclear explosion.

Noel: Yes, there have been close calls. And those close calls have shown us further vulnerabilities in the system. And the way Bruce Schneier sees it, even Eric Schlosser's book adds another slice of security just by bringing those accidents and close calls to public attention. But true security works by constantly seeking out those vulnerabilities, those holes in the swiss cheese. And when we find them, we add a new slice so that the failure of one will never compromise the whole stack. Schneier calls this approach failing well.

Bruce Shneier: We're going to get security because we have a lot of different systems, they failed differently at different times, in different ways, and it's really hard to get the failures to line up. 

Noel: NORAD has always been a thick slice of our national nuclear security. And Schlosser and Schneier agree: there is no perfect system. And with renewed nuclear threats not just from Russia, but the growing number of states with nuclear weapons, the well-known vulnerabilities of the internet, the ongoing threat of domestic and foreign terrorism, and the new uncertainties of A.I., the threat of both hacks and accidents only seems to grow.   

Eric Schlosser: And when you get back to the Titanic Effect, what we really need is a constant questioning of these systems. And what will keep us safe is a constant feeling of doubt. 

[music]

It’s been 40 years since I first saw the movie War Games; 39 since I saw The Day After, and I still live just a few miles north of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in this western town that the military built. It’s ironic to me that living so close to North America’s Air Defense Command, surrounded by the armed forces, I always felt less secure. Even if NORAD is a thick slice of America's security swiss cheese, we’re still in a big hole.  

I asked my friend in the Air Force – the guy who got me inside Cheyenne Mountain for a tour over a decade ago – what kinds of close calls he’d seen in the years he worked there. “You don’t wanna know,” he said. “There’s a lot of bad people out there.” He half-laughed and raised one of his arch eyebrows. Then he took a long toke off his cigar, which he smoked like an actor – with exaggerated affect. He was the kind of guy who kept secrets and enjoyed letting you know that he knew, and he’d never tell. 

“We’re inside the mountain so that when you look at the mountain all you see is the mountain,” he said like some diabolical Zen monk. 

I’d never see it that way again, I thought. Not after being inside. Not after doing this episode. 

But then, just last weekend, a couple friends invited me out to Cheyenne Mountain State Park, which sits right below the road up to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. It was a warm Spring afternoon in the high 50s with just enough breeze to rustle the last brown leaves clinging to the scrub oak. The campsites were full of RV’s and one of the campers had just lit the coals on a barbecue. Magpies bobbed their long black tails from the tops of Ponderosas. 

For two hours, I forgot that we were hiking in the long shadow of NORAD while looking out over Fort Carson. I didn’t think about the fact that Vladimir Putin was rattling his tactical nuclear sabers in Belarus, or the fact that we were standing right there at ground zero where the thermonuclear warhead on an ICBM would detonate 30 minutes after the start of World War III and vaporize everything in a radioactive ball of fire, like a sudden sun.    

I heard a red-tailed hawk make its high-pitched Ninja squawk and looked up and followed it as it soared and circled around behind me, then banked in front of the craggy granite folds of the mountain. 

And all I saw was the mountain. 

[Theme and Credits]

Lost Highways is a production of History Colorado and History Colorado Studios. It’s made possible by a generous grant from the Sturm Family Foundation, with particular thanks to Stephen Sturm and Emily Sturm. And by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor.

If you enjoyed this episode of Lost Highways and want to support it, please subscribe, rate us, and write us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Also: tell a friend and share one of your favorite episodes. You can find links to individual episodes at historycolorado.org/losthighways.

Many thanks to our Producers, María José Maddox and Dustin Hodge, and a very special thanks to Craig Richardson, who produced this episode.

Special thanks also to Susan Schulten, our History advisor; to Chief Creative Officer Jason Hanson, to Publications Director Sam Bock; to Ann Sneesby-Koch for her newspaper and periodical research; to Tyler Hill, our story editor; and to Lori Bailey, our problem solver extraordinaire.

Thanks to our volunteer transcribers for this season, Clint Carlson, Barry Levene, Ivy Martinez, Erin Wilcox, and Sharyn Zimmerman. If you'd like to see a transcript of any of our episodes, either as a matter of accessibility, or because you'd like to use Lost Highways in your classroom, you can find them at historycolorado.org/losthighways.
 
Devin James Fry composed the music for this episode, and our theme is by Conor Bourgal.

Many thanks to our editorial team:
Shaun Boyd
Kimberly Kronwall
Jose Ortega
Angel Vigil
and Marissa Volpe

And to our Advisory Group:
Stephen Sturm
Emily Sturm
Thomas Andrews
Jonathan Futa
Charlie Woolley
Susan Schulten
Tom Romero
and Cara DeGette

Noel: Finally, a huge thanks to the entire staff at History Colorado. And thank you for listening. I’m Noel Black.