| |
After World War II, the U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Command constructed a weapons storage facility in the foothills of the Manzano Mountains on the eastern edge of what is now Kirtland Air Force Base, just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. The storage facility, originally named Site Able, was renamed Manzano Base in February of 1952.
At the onset of the Cold War, four research plants, multiple warehouses, and miles of tunnels—many large enough to drive trucks through—were hewn out of the mountain. For a time, a large part of America’s nuclear stockpile was stored in the Manzano complex. (The weapons were stored in reinforced concrete and steel bunkers apart from their nuclear warheads.)
The facility had other intended uses: During President Eisenhower’s administration, the military built an emergency relocation center deep inside the mountain. The Manzano facility was designed to serve as a devolution command post for the president and his staff in the event of nuclear attack.
The military built one hundred twenty-two magazine bunkers around and into the foot of the mountain to protect the complex. Forty-one of those magazines provided direct entrance to the facility via tunnels. Two electrified fences and an intrusion zone surrounded the mountain; armed forces guarded the perimeter.
That was then. Today the facility sits mostly empty and unused. The primary tunnels (comprising a fraction of the complex) are employed to train military and Department of Energy personnel. While America’s nuclear arsenal is now stored elsewhere and the Manzano facility is essentially abandoned, the many secrets of the mountain remain largely unknown.
To most people.
Image seen on following page: Manzano Weapons Storage Area, Google Earth 2008. Retrieved January 27, 2015 from The Living Moon.
