Having served as a wing staff officer at Bentwaters (I’ll be happy to point out my place in the command post 🙂 ) it wasn’t all THAT “ominous”.
While the unit kept busy with training and sending aircraft and crewed to “Advanced Operating Locations” in Germany, the atmosphere was nowhere near as tense as it was on SAC bases I served at.

Years before that, as a young lieutenant at a B-52/KC-135 wing, I would have to fill-in for my boss at the daily staff meetings, which began with a classified briefing on the locations of Soviet SLBM-equipped submarines off the coast…and the approximate flight time of the missiles before they struck our base…thus giving the commander a window of a few minutes in which to launch the alert aircraft.

Now THAT was ominous.