“The most asked question is some variation of ‘Hey, we still have nuclear missiles?’” says Leonard of people’s disbelief. Though plenty plan ahead-summer tours book months in advance-many visitors are accidental, stopping by on their way from Badlands National Park less than 10 minutes away. Visitation to the latter has more than doubled since 2011, and last year, 144,000 park visitors brought about $10 million to the local economy. Recognition of a public need to preserve Cold War missile sites came swiftly: The Titan Missile Museum actually opened before the Cold War ended, and MMNHS is one of the only national historic sites to be listed while less than 50 years old. “And if national parks are a place for dialogue about what America is and how America works, this is a pretty important subject.” “The American nuclear arsenal hasn’t grown, but it hasn’t particularly gone anywhere,” says Leonard. Today, Leonard and Morris oversee the world’s only two intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) preserved for the benefit of the public. More advanced versions of the weapons that once killed 120,000 people in seconds formed part of the same sites that housed beds, kitchenettes, kitschy morale art, and comfortable chairs. Yet the presence of immense violence lived alongside the trappings of daily human life. The weapons’ sheer destructive power was too great a risk and too heavy a responsibility to entrust to only one officer the crew commander and their deputy always acted together. Crews filled the hours with gruelingly thorough, top-to-bottom inspections of the missile’s every gauge, light, pump, fan, and belt, Morris says.Īt both Titan and Minuteman sites, it was absolutely impermissible for a single person to be in the launch room alone. To ensure a missile was always ready to launch within minutes of receiving an order, crews pulled alerts-24-hour shifts that were a dissonant balance of ritualized routine, constant adrenaline, and eerie domesticity.Īfter a top-secret security briefing on the day’s threats, officers had to prove and re-prove their identity before even getting into the bunker, where they secured the launch codes in the war safe with their own personal padlocks. “ enabled us to stand toe to toe, to look each other straight in the eye, and not go to war with each other,” says Morris, who pulled alerts at all 18 Titan silos around Tucson, Arizona, from 1980 to 1984. That strategy of mutually assured destruction has been the prevailing rhetoric of the nuclearized world. But the other perverse part of nuclear weapons is, when you’re building weapons that powerful … the very fact that you have them and they’re ready to go is intended to serve as a deterrent against America’s enemies so that they don’t attack.” “What it’s designed to do is erase a city from Earth,” says Leonard. Only 54 Titans were deployed, mostly in the Southwest-but each of these carried a payload of 9 megatons, enough to decimate an area larger than Maui. In the 1960s, the Air Force planted 1,000 Minuteman missiles across the Great Plains, each with a payload of a little over one megaton. “The distance between mundane and extraordinary is pretty fast.” Then you get close enough to read the signs: Use of deadly force authorized. “From a distance, it looks like something unremarkable,” says Eric Leonard, superintendent at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site (MMNHS) in South Dakota. Underground on the front linesĪt ground level, the missiles were nearly invisible, their presence marked by antennae, barbed wire fences, and the launch duct door like a small basketball court. and the U.S.S.R agree to reduce their deployed nukes, and people were eager to think the threat had passed.Īll the while, thousands of warheads remained buried on high alert beneath ranches, homes, and highways. And though fears of nuclear war resurged during the global proxy conflicts of the eighties, another wave of disinterest followed after the Cold War’s end in 1991: The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) saw the U.S. The national preoccupation with nuclear war nearly disappeared again after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, thanks to a test-ban treaty and the growing impenetrability of nuclear technology and strategy. But in the mid-fifties, fallout from American and Russian atmospheric bomb tests-miles of ash, dead fishermen, radioactive rain, radioactive milk-renewed public terror. In the years immediately following World War II, the United States had an “obsessive post-Hiroshima awareness of the horror of the atomic bomb,” Boyer writes.
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