Postcard: Cheyenne Mountain.

摘要

In a small control room buried in a mountainside fortress high above Colorado Springs, the cold war rages on. Behind 25-ton blast doors, U.S. and Canadian soldiers work 12-hour shifts in crews of five, their sole mission to distinguish benign rocket launches from missiles traveling toward North America at 4 miles a second bearing nuclear warheads capable of destroying cities. They have a matter of minutes to make the call that could unleash nuclear Armageddon. "It's a typical military watch," explains their boss, Captain Steve Thompson, Cheyenne Mountain division chief. "A lot of routine punctuated by moments of sheer terror." The mission of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (nor ad)-for which the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station was built in 1966-has changed considerably since the collapse of communism. It spends more time monitoring unexpected launches, like Iran's recent missile tests, than watching for a sudden Soviet strike. But cold war tensions persist: Moscow greeted a proposed U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe with promises of a "military technical" response on July 8. And with thousands of Russian and American warheads still ready to launch at a moment's notice, accidental annihilation remains a plausible threat. Reducing its likelihood has even become part of the election campaign: Senator Barack Obama vows to remove U.S. weapons from launch-ready status if elected, while Senator John McCain has pledged to review U.S. nuclear policy.