First, yes. I did take my knitting with me, which was nice because we had a forty minute wait for the tour.

Yesterday, as part of my summer staycation with the kids, we went to the Titan missile museum. After posting a pic on Facebook, I found out just how unnervingly close to home a bunch of these suckers were back in the early 80s, when we all knew how long we had until we were dead once the buttons started being pushed.

However, only one of these silo has been preserved and is now open to the public.

I was a bit conflicted going down to the site, not because I thought it would be a waste of time (it wasn’t), or because I thought it would scare the kids (it didn’t), but because I have a pretty negative memory of the Cold War.

I don’t know if anyone has happy memories of it (maybe Cheyney?), but I know that teaching college students these days, the whole thing’s just ancient history to them—and it’s unnerving.  I get the sense that they have a more tangible relationship to something like WWI than they do to the Cold War—probably because you can watch movies about the hot wars, but The Manchurian Candidate or Failsafe or Good Night and Good Luck might be the closest you can get to what the Cold War did to everyone but not what it was like. How do you explain what it’s like to live under Mutually Assured Destruction, or during that to have a president who jokes about pushing the button (okay, he didn’t know the mic was on, but still!), or know for a fact that we could blow the earth up 100,000 times (not Russia—the Earth), or know that you might be sitting there in HS English class, and if the sirens go off, you have 8 minutes.

Eight.

It’s really hard to communicate that to kids who are used to a different (wackier?) kind of paranoia (the Birthers?). But that’s a blog post for another day. And probably another blog, so we’ll let that drop.

What I really wanted to share was this: I was impressed.

The other thing is I took pics so I’m going to take you on the tour as best I can. The only thing that’s still classified is the targets (each silo had three preprogrammed targets, and just like a firing squad’s single bullet, no one in the bunker knew where they were aiming) so I don’t think showing you this will mean I’ll be getting picked up by a black helicopter… yet.

So, first, you spend about 20 minutes topside, walking around the grounds. There are the boys, looking at the back end of the silo door.

See those ginormous cement blocks just behind the sign? Those are designed to be seen via satellite to prove that this is no longer an operational missile base. They’re positioned on the door’s tracks. (And btw, the enormous sliding door/lid wasn’t electronic, it was hydraulic. It lifted and slid differently than you’d think. Just in case power had already been lost. They thought of everything.)

So. Safety. Security redundancies.

Hey, you other countries, we tell you we can’t launch it. You can see that we can’t launch it, because if you can’t open the door, you can’t fire the missile.

It’s that simple.

Here’s a better pic of the block on the track.

Okay, now here come the pictures of the nose cone from topside. This first picture is me trying to communicate how thick that top door is. But I had no frame of reference, so I can only say, guessing here, that it’s at least 5 feet thick? All steel and concrete. Then I tried to get a pic looking down into the silo itself. There’s some wicked glare, but even without, you wouldn’t have seen the bottom…well…maybe you’d almost sort of see the metal ring with the exploding bolts that the missile was attached to, or maybe not.

All I’m sayin—it’s mad deep, yo.

Then you start downstairs. There were systems and layers of security which I won’t go into, but rest assured that it was nigh on impossible to get into (or out of) the dang thing if you didn’t have clearance. It was quite a system which included the incoming staff (they worked 24 hour on/48 hour off rotations) having to bring in a slip of paper with an access code on it, read the code into this phone, then burn (or eat, if you forgot your lighter) the code and put the flaming paper into the little red can.

I am not joking.

Cool sidenote before I forget: Part of a Star Trek NG movie was filmed here (Contact, I think) and they had clips of the film in the museum holding pen. That was fun.

Thing 2 and Thing 1 below left, (Thing 1 in the hardhat—we agreed we’d both be best served by wearing these. We were right. We’d both have cracked ourselves a good one at a couple of different points down below.) in front of the doppler-based intruder alert system.

Sadly, our tour guide was all but unintelligible unless you were right in front of him, which was too bad because he really knew his stuff (he’d built the rockets themselves back in the day) so I was left to think that these sensors worked kind of like the perimeter fence in Lost. So sue me.

The part I was able to hear was that the system’s sensitivity was so high in the early days that birds would trip it. That had to be a scary moment!

Different view of the silo lid to the right. The peaked roof structure behind is not original. During the Cold War the site would only have been a sand colored lid and a bunch of antennae. And that’s it.

Descending.

I was tempted to say, “…into the Pit of Despair…” but I couldn’t really fulfill the joke in the blog format, you know? (You younguns will just have to watch The Princess Bride and look for the albino. Then you’ll get the joke. I didn’t say it was a good one…)

The second of four security/entrance phones is on the left of the left side pic below. The right hand picture is Thing 2 (tired and hungry—great combo) in front of the THREE TON steel and concrete door. I think you can see the bolts (facing you) in their chambers and the receiving holes for those pins on the door, almost in the middle of the picture. The hinge between is made of zillions of precision machined ball bearings. As a consequence, the kids were able to move the door. All 6000 pounds of it.

There’s a better look at the  hydraulic pins. The door is still hanging as it was originally hung in the late 40s. Wish our front door was like that!

What I tried to get here wasn’t just the insane wiring. Look over on the right, before everything goes into the box, you’ll notice a certain amount of “extra” wiring kind of bulging out from the box. Got it? Okay, now look up at the cage lights hanging from the ceiling. See what they’re mounted on?

Springs.

The whole place was like a Weebul mounted inside a system of shock absorbers. Even the LIGHTS were on shocks.

Okay, now we’re in the control room. The book to the left in the first picture was the list of what each 4 man (and woman!) crew had to do on each 24 hour shift. There were lots of places that said “NO LONE ZONE” where you were never allowed to be solo. And these folks weren’t sitting around chewing gum. They had to check and recheck EVERY COMPONENT in the system. Twice a day!

Nice!

You also see two red binders. Those were the decoding manuals. If calls came in (one for the captain, one for  the second) they’d each decipher their code, compare, then if the messages match, THEN they’d go to the red cabinet (see below) and get the key, crack the card, insert the keys…and I get ahead of myself. Hang on.

The right side pic shows you some of the high tech equipment that was running this thing. I know. I know! But I’ve got to tell you, after being down there and hearing the solid CLUNK of those switches being thrown, it was way more calming than writing and executing code (where operator error is much easier to achieve. I like the stability of the binary switches: armed, unarmed). There was something very solid and stable about this set up which I really came to appreciate.

Note the 24 hour clock above our guide’s head. The low panel between us and the guide was the Captain’s console. Right now, only the “Target 2” light and the “stand by” lights are on. Key slot located above the larger button (the targeting button) wasn’t explained, but there’s another keyhole above and slightly left from the smaller light and that’s where THE KEY (or one of) would be inserted.

Below is the Second’s desk to the left of the Captain’s console (I swung the camera just a bit to the left). Note the different time on the clock. That’s Greenwich Mean Time. Look below the clock. See the little knob sticking out of that console? That’s the OTHER keyhole for that other key. It is impossible for ONE human to insert both keys and turn them at the same time (a requirement for arming the system). Phew.

Also note the dial pad on the desk for the phone that’s hanging off the front of the desk.

Hey. It worked.

Pic on the right shows the setup a little to the left (line up the clocks in your mind) and look behind the green computer bank. See the giant spring?!

Toldja.

Looking over to the right, now. Again, giant spring behind tall man in blue hat.

Pic on the right is THE cabinet which was actually directly behind me. The Captain and Second had keys to the padlocks. I missed where the combo lock came in, but maybe that was part of the coded message that they had to decipher? Above in the shadow box are real keys with the snap-apart cards.

Happy to see none are snapped.

Next was the Cableway (this is in the Star Trek film, btw, Pickard and Data walked through here). See the joint at the arrow on the floor and the accordioned part of the wall behind it? That provided flexibility to the tunnel. Again, the whole thing was built to take a shock. In fact, were a missile to have been launched (the silo is at the far end of the cableway from the control room) the folks in the sealed control room wouldn’t have been able to feel A THING.

Doorway to missile and hallway to right of missile.

Side of missile (it’s hard to get a good pic, the thing is so bloody huge!)

In the pic below and on the right, look between the O and the R—see the joint there? That’s where a rocket stage would separate.

In this position we were 35 feet underground…and I think it went down another eight floors… Thing 2 was a bit crabby and I missed some information.

So the takeaway?

We had some extraordinarily smart folks working on the space and missile programs in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s (still do). Smart because the rocket design and planning was amazing, but also because of the failsafes and security that had been built in. I’m not a huge fan of war, but I’m enough of a techhead to get all geeked out on stuff like this (and enough of a Drama Queen to get choked up at the same time). It’s awesome—in the original meaning of the word, to inspire awe—to stand next to something like this*. It’s also hugely sobering.

Listening to the guides, they’re damn proud that their rockets and hard work never actually saw a moment of action. As far as they’re concerned, a launch would have been a failure. They build these systems as deterrents. Or at least that’s what they say—and as far as our guide goes, I really think that’s how he thought at the time. And hell, it worked, right? After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we haven’t seen one of these bad boys go boom, have we?

I spent a lot of my teen angst being furious at nuclear weapons build-up (and I’m still on the fence about nuclear power for other reasons, but that’s a different blog post too) because on some level I identified those weapons with the preening peacocks in politics who were all “we’re number 1” at the time instead of, “this is a terrifying power we’ve tapped into. We never want to see it used. But since we can’t trust each other for now, we’ll just make sure we never let YOU have a reason to use it on US.”

I think our honorable behavior during the Cold War (no preemptive strikes) stood us in good stead. At least it did.

Our guys in the bunkers sure never wanted to fire that thing. They’d have had 58 seconds of “normal life” left.

Then in 15 days they’d have to decide whether to crawl up an air duct (at that point, their only way out) and out into the potentially blighted landscape or stay in the command center and suffocate.

So. No winners on that one.

As I said, Thing 2 was a bit of a pain, so if there are inaccuracies in here, please leave comments and I’ll fix the post.

After all of that, we were hungry.

This is how the boys looked at lunch. Completely unperturbed by war or missiles or fear.

Thank God.

* The missile you see here is REAL but was never fueled. The fuel required was super insane and had the fumes made contact would have torched the place. Thus, anything that HAD been fueled was dismantled. This was a training missile that had been kept in TX and was brought over when the museum was built.