America's Secret Bases Still Operational

America's Secret Bases Still Operational

(August 5, 1998 00:30 a.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) The underground installations, ultra-secure manufacturing plants and once-secret laboratories America needed to wage the Cold War are still intact despite federal downsizing policies that have gutted many other military and civilian programs.

The Clinton administration during its first five years increased the staff at the massive Cheyenne Mountain Air Force and Army complex in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. That famous underground vault where thousands of military strategists and technicians were, and still are, prepared to fight World War III is undergoing a $1.7 billion renovation to improve its computer systems that track missiles and orbiting space vehicles.

Nearly as healthy are the Department of Energy installations still used to assemble, refurbish and maintain the estimated 10,000 warheads in the United States' nuclear stockpile. And more hale than ever are the four major national laboratories that discovered atomic fission, the much more destructive nuclear fusion and the means to develop them into history's most dangerous weapons.

"It's like the sorcerer's apprentice," said John E. Pike, director of the Space Policy Project for the Federation of American Scientists. "We created this infrastructure originally to deal with Hitler half a century ago, switched it over to deal with the Soviets and now we can't turn it off."

A Scripps Howard News Service study of federal civilian payroll records at 10 of these facilities found that employment at these institutions has declined about 8.8 percent during the Clinton administration. That's only about half of the manpower reductions made throughout the military and in the rest of the civilian government.

The so-called "peace dividend" predicted by former President George Bush has come in modest drabs to the Cold War's high technology infrastructure under Clinton. The 10 military bases, laboratories and production facilities in the Scripps Howard study had a total civilian workforce of 27,627 full- and part-time employees in 1992. They still maintained 25,191 workers in 1997.

But taxpayers received little benefit from these cuts because many of the jobs that remained are among the highest paid in the federal government. The study found that the total payroll at these 10 facilities grew during this five-year period from $994.5 million to $1.14 billion, or a 15 percent rise.

Only one facility, the White Sands Missile Testing Range in New Mexico, experienced a modest decline in civilian payroll costs.

Total employment at Cheyenne Mountain rose by 12 civilian jobs during this period, increasing from 6,646 workers in 1992 to 6,658 as of Sept. 30 last year. This small increase makes the vast underground complex one of the few U.S. military bases to increase in size during the 1990s.

"I'm not surprised by that. Some people have the idea that Cheyenne Mountain is an anachronistic, Cold War structure," said Maj. Mike Birmingham, an Army spokesman for the Colorado base.

"But we still have the air sovereignty mission for Canada and the United States and all of the other missions we originally started with. All that has happened is that we have added more missions."

Birmingham said the base still watches for the launch of any high-altitude missile system anywhere in the world, and monitored Iran's launch of an intermediate range ballistic weapon last month. "Missile warning is as much a worry today as it ever was; not the thought of 10,000 missiles coming all at once, but the thought of a rogue nation launching one or two," he said.

The center also tracks more than 8,500 objects in earth orbit to warn manned space flights of possible collision threats, and assists the Justice Department and U.S. Customs in illegal drug interdiction programs by trying to track aircraft suspected of carrying narcotics.

In addition, Cheyenne Mountain operates military communication and navigation satellites that have become vital to Western armies. "Space support basically allowed U.S. forces to perform that famous 'left hook' operation (during the Persian Gulf War.) The Iraqis assumed no one could navigate that well in the desert," Birmingham said.

Pike said he has no criticisms for the continuing work of the Colorado facility, or its expensive upgrade. The missions of Cheyenne Mountain are necessary, he said, but less certain are the justifications for dozens of other Cold War facilities still in full operation.

The Scripps Howard manpower study found that the huge Department of Energy research facilities -- Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in northern California and New Mexico's Los Alamos -- have survived despite White House downsizing policies.

These facilities were privatized decades ago and are operation centers for commercial research contractors. Even so, Department of Energy employees who remain to monitor the work performed at the labs have suffered only modest declines, dropping from 1,961 federal workers in 1992 to 1,615 employees last year.

The overall employment at these laboratories is much, much larger. Only 77 workers at Los Alamos, N.M., are directly employed by the Department of Energy. But the vast lab facility managed by the University of California employs about 10,000 non-government works.

The overall contract work at these facilities grew as the labs conducted increasingly diverse research into basic physics with applications for industry and other non-defense government agencies. But their original mission of designing nuclear warheads, apparently, also has not suffered despite international agreements like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

"The labs have been growing quite a bit. The Cold War is over, but we are spending more money on this stuff now than ever," said Jeff Moag, a researcher for the Washington-based National Security News Service.

"Because of the test ban treaty, these labs have to ensure the reliability of the nuclear arsenal without ever exploding a warhead, so they must model nuclear explosions on computer. That takes thousands and thousands of brilliant minds."

The arms race with Russia is, officially, over. But the construction, assembly and development facilities that built the warheads and test the delivery systems continue with slightly reduced staffs.

Total employment declined by 8 percent at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which produces bomb-grade uranium; the Pantex Plant in Texas, which assembles warheads; the Redstone Arsenal complex in Alabama ,which produced Cold War missile systems and continues to design weapons for the U.S. Army; and the several secured facilities scattered across the Nellis Air Force Bombing range in southern Nevada, home of the Nevada Test Site.

These four groups of facilities employed 14,182 civilian workers in 1992 and 13,045 as of last year.

The Scripps Howard study is based upon civilian payroll records maintained by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The records provide information about 2.2 million federal employees as of Sept. 30, 1992 and for the 1.8 million employed on the same date last year.

By THOMAS HARGROVE, Scripps Howard News Service