From DC Database

NORAD

Gallery

Official Name

North American Aerospace Defense Command

Aliases

Norad

Location Details

Universe

Real World, New Earth

Galaxy

Milky Way

Star System

Sol

Planet

Earth

Country

United States of America

State

Colorado

Locale

Cheyenne Mountain

Characteristics

Dimensions

Population

Over 250,000 personnel (numbers vary depending upon decade)

First appearance

Unknown

History

NORAD is a joint organization of the United States and Canada that provides aerospace warning and control for North America. It was founded on May 12, 1958, as the North American Air Defense Command. Since 1963, NORAD's main technical facility has been the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center in Colorado, and for this reason NORAD is sometimes unofficially referred to as Cheyenne Mountain.

Prior to becoming a member of the Teen Titans, young Cody Driscoll proved his bravery and foolhardiness by breaking into NORAD's command center. ^[1]

NORAD is also the site of the mainframe computer that links to the satellite station known as Brother Eye. Former administrator Buddy Blank brought the ailing time traveler Val Armorr to NORAD to see if there was a link between Brother Eye and the disease that was slowly killing Armorr. ^[2]

Residents

• Buddy Blank
  

See Also

• Appearances of NORAD
• Location Gallery: NORAD
  
• Catalogued images related to NORAD

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From The Vault

The heraldry crest of NORAD. The current motto is: Deter. Detect. Defend.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD, is the principal aerospace and strategic defense command center for the North American continent. Conceived as a joint defense venture between the United States and Canada, but operated as a United States Armed Forces facility, NORAD protected the citizens of both countries through the darkest days of the Cold War and continues to watch over and defend them today.

History and Mission

Established May 12, 1958, NORAD was tasked with defending all of North America from the threat of the Soviet Union's ballistic missile fleet. To that end, NORAD became the nexus of all early-warning systems currently deployed, including BMEWS radar installations, satellite launch detection assets, and other sensor systems installed in Alaska, Canada, Hawaii, and the continental United States.

The base is constructed inside Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado. The decision to situate the command center within the granite mountain was based on simple practicality: while the construction effort would be difficult, the protection afforded by the mountain could not be turned down.

The mission of NORAD was threefold:

• DETER - By unifying the detection and response chains of the military, NORAD created a highly efficient means to respond to any threat, nuclear or conventional, against the United States and Canada. Any aggressor would almost certainly suffer grievous consequences in very short order.

• DETECT - Constant monitoring of the airspace over the poles (the shortest land-based missile trajectory), activity in space, launch sites, and submarine activity gave NORAD an unparalleled ability to detect enemy activity. In particular, a Soviet missile launch would be detected nearly immediately, permitting the response chain to be brought into action quickly.

• DEFEND - Although the decision to use American nuclear assets lay, and continues to lie, only with the President of the United States, NORAD was the central command for the disbursement of the order, if and when it came. Once the decision was made to deploy nuclear weapons and a legitimate order was transmitted to NORAD, American missiles would be in flight in very short order. The promise of fast response was a defense in and of itself.

As of June 2008, the Commander of NORAD is General Victor Renuart, United States Air Force. Lieutenant-General Charlie Bouchard, CMM, serves as the Deputy Commander.

Appearances and Significance to the Fallout Universe

As the heart of the defense network, NORAD predictably found itself a primary target in the hypothetical war written by Chris Avellone in the Fallout Game Bible. According to both the game bible and design documents for Van Buren, the entire area was reduced to a severely radioactive crater.

Insofar as Fallout 2 was concerned, NORAD was listed merely as a footnote, buried in the network script of the Gecko Power Plant computer terminal. NORAD is listed as "offline."

However, in the non-canon Fallout Tactics, Cheyenne Mountain - and, by extension, NORAD - formed the "center" of the Vault network, Vault 0. The complete lack of damage in the area makes this interpretation unlikely at best.

External Links

NORAD Official Web Site

Wikipedia article on NORAD