00:00Music
00:092,000 feet of solid granite sits above their heads
00:14and every single person down there signed up for that.
00:18Not as a punishment, as the job.
00:21Inside Cheyenne Mountain there's a facility built to seal itself shut
00:26and keep up to 800 people alive, fed and functioning
00:32through the exact scenario the rest of us hope we never have to think about.
00:37A nuclear war that's already started.
00:4125-tonne blast doors, its own power plant,
00:46enough water and diesel stored in carved-out rock
00:50to run for weeks without a single delivery truck from the outside world.
00:55So here's the actual question.
00:59If those doors ever swing shut for real and stay shut,
01:04what does Day 100 look like for the people trapped in there with each other?
01:10Because it turns out the mountain isn't the hard part.
01:15The mountain will hold.
01:17It's what 800 human beings do to themselves in a sealed box
01:23that gets complicated.
01:25Let's get into it.
01:27You'd start your day the same way,
01:29whether the world outside was calm or on fire.
01:33Because that's the point.
01:35The complex runs on a schedule that doesn't care what's happening on the surface.
01:40Somewhere around 0600, lights come up in a birthing space
01:44that looks less like a barracks and more like a submarine that got lost
01:49and ended up inside a mountain.
01:52Bunks stacked two and three high.
01:56A locker, a curtain if you're lucky.
01:58The air already tastes faintly of recycled metal.
02:02The same air that's been cycling through filtration systems
02:06built to strip out fallout, chemical agents
02:10and whatever a biological attack might carry with it.
02:24And that's the first thing that gets you.
02:27Not the danger, the air itself.
02:30Doing its job so well, you almost forget it's artificial.
02:35You climb out and you're moving through a small city
02:38that was carved directly out of a mountain.
02:42Starting in 1961 and finishing about six years later.
02:47Roughly 690,000 tonnes of granite hauled out
02:53to make room for 15 separate buildings.
02:57Each one sitting on top of massive steel springs.
03:02So the whole structure can shrug off a nuclear shockwave
03:06without so much as cracking a window.
03:09There aren't any windows.
03:12That's not a design flaw.
03:14That's the design.
03:16You grab coffee at a counter that would look completely ordinary
03:21anywhere else on Earth.
03:23A sandwich shop.
03:25Because somebody decided that even the people tasked
03:29with detecting the end of the world deserve a lunch that doesn't taste like a ration bar.
03:36It's a strange kind of comfort.
03:39A slice of the surface, buried under a mountain, built to survive the surface's worst day.
03:46But comfort only stretches so far because by mid-morning you're at your post on what everyone down there just
03:55calls the battle deck.
03:57Watching screens that track everything moving through North American airspace and space itself.
04:03And the job doesn't pause for lunch.
04:07If a missile launch shows up anywhere on that board, real or simulated,
04:12you are the first human being on the planet who's supposed to know it.
04:18That's a strange weight to carry before your second cup of coffee.
04:32Food isn't the problem.
04:34The complex stockpile's enough to keep everyone fed for an extended period
04:39that officials won't put a specific number on.
04:42And there's six million gallons of water sitting in reservoirs carved straight into the rock.
04:48Plus over half a million gallons of diesel to keep the generators running if the outside grid goes dark.
04:56On paper, survival is solved.
05:00Nobody down there is worried about starving.
05:03The mess itself is a strange split personality.
05:08Most days it runs like any other dining facility.
05:12Trays and a hotline and whatever the cooks pulled together that morning.
05:16But underneath that normal looking counter sits a second inventory entirely.
05:22Sealed cases meant to outlast weeks with the doors shut and nothing coming in from outside.
05:29Food chosen less for taste than for shelf life measured in years instead of days.
05:36You eat off the top of that stockpile without ever touching the bottom of it.
05:41And that's deliberate.
05:43The bottom of it is for the day the mountain actually seals.
05:48That split says everything about how the whole complex is built.
05:53One layer for the routine.
05:55A second, deeper layer underneath it that only gets touched if the world outside stops being routine at all.
06:04Almost nobody who serves a full rotation there ever sees that second layer opened.
06:11They just know it's under their boots the entire time they're eating lunch.
06:16What they're not as prepared for is each other.
06:29Because here's the thing, nobody puts in the recruiting brochure.
06:33800 people sealed behind 25 tonne doors with no sunrise, no sunset, no cell signal and no way to just
06:43step outside and clear your head for 10 minutes.
06:46By some accounts, the mountain is built to survive a blast in the tens of megatons.
06:53Whether 800 strangers can survive weeks on end of each other's company sealed shut is a completely different engineering problem.
07:03And it's one that doesn't have a blast door thick enough to fix.
07:08Sleep is where it starts to bend.
07:10Shifts rotate around the clock because a threat detection system can't close for the night.
07:17Which means someone is always trying to sleep while someone else's boots are echoing down the corridor outside their bunk.
07:26Your body doesn't know if it's 2am or 2pm because the lighting never changes and the mountain never tells you.
07:36People who've worked extended rotations there describe losing track of the actual date within the first week.
07:44Not because they're careless, but because there's nothing left to anchor it to.
07:48No weather. No sunset. Just the hum.
07:52That hum, by the way, never stops.
07:55It's the sound of air handlers and generators and a thousand pieces of equipment working to keep a sealed granite
08:03chamber survivable.
08:05And after enough hours, it stops registering as sound at all.
08:10It becomes the silence.
08:12People who've spent real time down there say the thing that actually gets under your skin isn't the alert klaxon.
08:20It's coming back to the surface afterward, and for a full day, missing the hum.
08:36Hygiene is its own small negotiation.
08:39Water isn't scarce down there the way it would be in a foxhole, but the showers run on a schedule
08:45like everything else.
08:46And after enough weeks, the whole complex starts to smell like the same recycled air, the same handful of soaps,
08:55the same 800 people.
08:58Nobody complains about it out loud because there's nowhere to go to escape your own complaint.
09:04You learn fast that the guy in the next bunk snoring is a problem you solve with earplugs, not a
09:12transfer request, because there is no transfer.
09:16There's just the mountain, and however long the lockdown runs, and whoever's next to you for all of it.
09:25And that's before you get to boredom, which sounds like the smallest problem on the list and turns out to
09:32be one of the biggest.
09:33There's no scrolling your phone during downtime, because a granite mountain built to block a nuclear shockwave also blocks a
09:43cell signal without even trying.
09:47Whatever entertainment exists down there, you brought it with you, or you built it yourself.
09:53And after the third week, guys who've done these rotations say the same card game stops being a way to
10:01pass time and starts being the only thing, keeping the days distinct from each other.
10:08Somebody's birthday gets a cake from the galley, and for one evening, a run of identical days finally has a
10:16landmark.
10:17So you push through the disorientation, and you keep working, because the isolation is a known cost of the job.
10:26But then you get to the part that has nothing to do with routine at all.
10:41On the morning of June 3, 1980, a phone rang at 3am in the White House.
10:48On the other end, the message was that Soviet submarines had launched 200 ballistic missiles at the United States.
10:57Real count, real alert, flashing across the exact kind of board the people inside that mountain watch every single day.
11:07For several minutes, this wasn't a drill, and it wasn't a rumour.
11:13It was the system doing precisely what it was built to do, telling the people responsible for the end of
11:20the world that the end of the world might be nine minutes out.
11:26It was a false alarm.
11:27A faulty computer chip, later traced and fixed, had generated a phantom launch that looked, on every screen that mattered,
11:37exactly like the real thing.
11:39But for the handful of minutes before anyone confirmed that, the 800-person question stopped being theoretical.
11:47It became the actual job description of everyone standing watch inside that mountain that night.
11:55Figure out, in minutes, whether the worst thing that can happen to a species is currently happening,
12:03using nothing but data and training and the composure to not flinch first.
12:10That's the part the brochure leaves out.
12:13You don't join to survive a nuclear war.
12:16You join to be the person who has to decide, correctly, whether one is actually starting.
12:23While a country's entire population sleeps through it upstairs.
12:30General Gregory Guillaume, the officer who currently oversees the complex as head of NORAD and Northern Command,
12:38inherited a facility built for exactly that job and nothing else.
12:44Every system inside that mountain, the springs, the reservoirs, the sandwich counter, the bunks stacked three high,
12:53all of it exists in service of one requirement.
12:57That the people watching the board never have to stop watching it, no matter what's happening to the rest of
13:05the country outside.
13:16And that's what makes the isolation different from any other kind of confinement.
13:22It's not a punishment.
13:24It's not an accident of circumstance.
13:27Every person down there chose it, understanding exactly what the mountain would cost them in sunlight and sleep and ordinary
13:38human rhythm.
13:39Because the alternative is a command post that goes dark at the exact moment the country needs it most.
13:47By the time your shift ends and you're walking back toward the birthing space, past the same 15 buildings on
13:56the same steel springs,
13:58you start to understand the actual trade being made down there.
14:03The mountain will survive almost anything.
14:07The blast doors will hold.
14:10The reservoirs will keep the water running long after the world outside has gone quiet.
14:16The only variable the engineers couldn't solve for is what Weeks with No Horizon does to 800 mines that all
14:25volunteered for it anyway.
14:28Every part of that facility was engineered against a threat that measures itself in megatons.
14:36And every one of those systems has held for over half a century without ever being tested for real.
14:44But the part that gets tested constantly, every rotation, every shift change, every birthday cake handed across a mess hall
14:54table under 2,000 feet of rock,
14:57is something much smaller than a nuclear blast.
15:02It's whether 800 people can hold together, with no sunrise to mark the difference between one day and the next.
15:12Nobody drafts these people.
15:15They apply, they train, and then they walk through 25-ton doors knowing exactly what they're trading away for however
15:25many months their rotation runs.
15:28Not danger, mostly.
15:30Time.
15:31The ordinary shape of a day, gone.
15:34Replaced by a schedule that only the mountain keeps.
15:38So would you take it, knowing the granite holds no matter what happens outside.
15:44But the only thing actually standing between a country and its worst possible morning, is a shift schedule.
15:51An air filtration system.
15:53And 800 people who agreed, on purpose, to lose track of the sun for as long as the job requires.
16:01To be clear, they do things like午 they're trading in.
16:01Either way it's биologie 상태.
16:01Your eyes at home.
16:01There's always.AH
16:01you guys? Tßenbeck
16:02is a great person to get nothing to go andRA instal. Fuck Franz Кто's
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