It's midsummer in southern Arizona, and I'm headed south on I-19 toward Mexico. It's 110 degrees in the shade, but I'm going someplace cool - not a movie theater, shopping mall, or even Biosphere II. I'm headed to a missile silo to see the last remaining Titan.
I pull off the highway at Green Valley, 20 miles south of Tucson, 40 miles north of the border. The only sign that there is a missile here, just a few hundred yards from the highway, is a fence, a small gift shop, and a few high-frequency antennas piercing the blue sky. The tour starts at 4 p.m. I take a seat in the briefing room alongside other visitors to the Titan Missile Museum and put on a hard hat.
From 1963 until the last missile was dismantled in 1987, the Titan II was the big stick of the Cold War, standing on 24-hour alert, able to launch with a key-turn set in motion by a presidential order.
Titan II was gradually replaced with a new generation of ICBMs, such as the Minuteman and the MX, which had multiple warheads. The megatonnage of the Titan II remains classified, but as our tour guide tells us gravely, it exceeded all bombs dropped during World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The missile rests in a silo with 8-foot-thick walls of hardened concrete. The topside motion sensors, which were once tripped by birds, are disabled. The 740-ton silo door is permanently left halfway open; a glass window covers the missile. This, we are told, is not for our benefit but so that Russian satellites can peer in and see that the old Titan II is not armed or operational.
We climb down steel steps and walk along a hall beneath suspended cables to the egg-shaped sarcophagus behind 3-ton steel blast doors. The walls are painted institutional cream; the control room chairs and controls are vintage '60s; the launch control electronics function today as they did then. The room is suspended from its hardened shell by massive shock absorbers designed to allow occupants to survive "all but a direct hit."
We run through the countdown procedures. Two officers must agree to commence the launch, simultaneously turning keys out of arm's reach of one another. "Once the missile's off," says the guide, a retired US Air Force man himself, "you're alone with your God. We're not told where it's going - we wouldn't want to know."
Ten years ago his words would have crept into my consciousness, giving new realism to my nuclear nightmares. Today they seem part of a distant history that persists, incredibly, despite its obvious insanity.
"I bet you couldn't build something like this today with all the environmental impact reports and such," one visitor remarks sarcastically, videocamera dangling from his neck.Let's all hope this weekend warrior is right.
Titan Missile Museum in Green Valley, Arizona: admission US$6. Contact: +1 (602) 791 2929.
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