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NORAD not moving — for now

Congress has put the brakes on a plan to relocate North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command from the secretive Cheyenne Mountain Air Station, Colo., to Peterson Air Force Base, Colo.

The 2008 defense authorization bill approved Dec. 6 by the House and Senate armed services committees orders that the move not go ahead until the Office of the Secretary of Defense submits to Congress a cost-benefit analysis and final plans for the relocation.

OSD must also include in its report a security and vulnerability assessment of the command’s proposed new home at Peterson.

The bill withholds $5 million from the Air Force’s 2008 budget that the service intended to put toward partially shutting down Cheyenne Mountain. Plans call for putting the facility in what it calls a “warm standby” status.

The report must be submitted by March 1, the bill said, and the Air Force will get its $5 million once OSD submits the report.

NORAD is charged with defending U.S. airspace, and for decades, it has used Cheyenne Mountain as a secure, blast-proof location from which to watch the skies for missiles, aircraft and other threats.

But Adm. Timothy Keating, then commander of NORAD and Northern Command, told the Denver Post last year that the need to maintain a 24-hour-a-day nuclear-proof facility has diminished because a nuclear strike by China or Russia appears unlikely.

Air Force Space Command decided last year to relocate its Joint Space Operations Center-Mountain from Cheyenne Mountain to Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., and NORAD announced in July 2006 that it would move most of its personnel from the facility.

The moves would leave the hardened Cold War-era complex nearly deserted. As recently as last year, it hosted more than 1,000 military and civilian employees.

Cheyenne Mountain was conceived in 1961, at the height of the nuclear threat. But it took so long to excavate 700,000 tons of granite and create a base deep in the mountain that the facility didn't become operational until 1966.

The complex is protected by 2,000 feet of granite above and 25-ton blast doors.

The facility secured a place in the popular imagination by serving as the basis for movies such as 1983’s “War Games,” in which a rogue computer nearly starts World War III.