Write , and for the number of primes above . The Galois group acts transitively on those primes, with stabilizer . The fundamental identity for prime decomposition and the orbit-stabilizer theorem therefore give
It remains to establish that the residue action has image of order , rather than assume this in the desired equality.
Use the decomposition group of a prime and local Galois group identification . A generator of the finite field extension has a separable monic minimal polynomial of an algebraic element. Lift its coefficients to . The Hensel lemma lifts each of its distinct residue roots to . One such lift has field degree at most , while its residue generates the degree- finite field extension, so its field degree is exactly and its ramification index of a prime ideal is one. It therefore generates an unramified extension of degree , and sending it to each of the other lifts gives its embeddings. Because is a Galois extension, these embeddings extend to its automorphisms. Their reductions realize every automorphism of . Thus the residue action is surjective, and
Now let be cyclic of order , and let be its unique subgroup of order . In a tower of Galois extensions, inertia maps onto inertia in the intermediate extension. This also follows from the just-proved order formula: its image has order , using multiplicativity of the ramification index of a prime ideal in a tower. If ramifies in , this image in is nontrivial. Every proper subgroup of is contained in , so inertia upstairs must be . Hence
The fundamental identity for prime decomposition then also forces a single prime above and residue-field degree one.
Let and let lie over . These primes define two extensions to of the -adic absolute value on . The conjugacy of extensions of a valuation to a normal extension says that some carries the first extension to the second. Equivalently, . This proves the transitivity of the Galois action on primes.
The decomposition group is the stabilizer
Each such automorphism extends continuously to the completions, and restriction gives the decomposition group of a prime and local Galois group isomorphism
For the splitting field of , the global Galois group is . Since , the field contains . The local splitting field is therefore , an Eisenstein, totally ramified cyclic extension of degree three. Hence there are
primes of above , and the decomposition group of each is the normal subgroup