The "war room" of the NORAD/CONAD Combined Operations Center at the Chidlaw Building in Colorado Springs took over operations in 1963 from the nearby Ent Air Force Base command center. Eventually designated the "Combat Operations Center", the air defense command center operations were superceded by Cheyenne Mountain's full operational capability on July 1, 1966 (NORAD and other headquarters remained at the Chidlaw Building).
The war room was similar to the blue rooms in the SAGE Direction Centers (DCs) that provided the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment to operators and commanders and for which groundbreaking was in 1957 ("full 22 site deployments in 1961"--the last completed "SAGE direction center became operational at Sioux City, Iowa, in December 1961)." The Chidlaw computer system was the initial deployment of the Burroughs 425L Command/Control and Missile Warning System, "a fourth automated program…into existence by this time.[fall of 1962]…to correct 416L's inability to provide an automated facility for the top eehelon of the air defenses in Colorado Springs.[1] The 1963 Chidlaw system's 425L digital computers allowed on June 3, 1963, the vacuum tube AN/FSQ-7 systems at Marysville CA, Marquette/K I Sawyer AFB (DC-14) MI, Stewart AFB NY (DC-02), and Moses Lake WA (DC-15) to be planned for closing and to be replaced with Back-Up Interceptor Control (only 6 DCs remained in 1969.)
Date
published] after April 1965 ("has been the Commander-in-Chief since April 1965") and before the 1966 redesignation of NORAD regions when the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker became operational ("present Combat Operations Center will be replaced in the near future by a new site beneath Cheyenne Mountain").
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{{Information |Description=The "war room" of the NORAD/CONAD Combined Operations Center at the Chidlaw Building in Colorado Springs took over operations in 1963 from the nearby Ent Air Force Base command center. Eventually designated the "Combat Opera...