The Last Silo

National Review Online, November 4, 2001

 © Andrew Stuttaford

The desert south of Tucson, Arizona, bone dry, rocky, and mountainous, looks a bit, some say, like the end of the world. And that is just what it could have been. Take I-19 towards the Mexican border and, not far from a town with the optimistic name of Green Valley, the visitor can turn off the Interstate and take a narrow approach road to a place that could once have triggered the Apocalypse. It is quiet around there now, the only visible excitement seems to be Monday-night bingo at the American Legion, but it was probably quiet there then too, 20 or 30 years ago, except that at that time a very different game was being played a few yards on from that peaceful, dusty spot, a game that could have meant that all our numbers were up. In those days, any travelers who wandered a little further up the approach road would have come across a curious spider-web antenna on the right-hand side, and beyond that, a chain-link fence, some lights, and behind the fence, a slightly elevated chunk of concrete, the top of a storage tank, perhaps. Scrambling over that fence would have been a very, very bad idea. It would not have been long before the guards came, seemingly, from nowhere and as they carried you off, they probably would not have taken the trouble to explain that, yes, you were quite right. That chunk of concrete was indeed the lid of a storage tank.

 © Andrew Stuttaford

And what that tank contained was a nuclear warhead perched on top of a Titan II, the largest intercontinental ballistic missile ever developed by this country. The actual payload has never been disclosed, but it would have well been over one megaton, some claim as many as nine. A single megaton represents an explosive-force equivalent to the detonation of a million tons of TNT or, to put it another, bleaker, way it is around 80 times the power of that firecracker they let off over Hiroshima.

This monster, fortunately, had keepers. Four-person crews from the 390th Strategic Missile Wing watched over the Titan's silo in rotating 24-hour shifts that combined boredom, tension, and routine in a way that would have been very familiar to any sentry in any of mankind's past wars. And so, as two decades passed, the missile's guardians checked and double-checked and waited for the order that never came, the command to launch their rocket, that projectile that could have ended the world. In a strange kindness, the crews were not told the identity of their Titan's selected target. That, it was felt, would have been too much to bear. Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk? Better not to know.

The Green Valley silo, Complex 571-7, became operational in July 1963, part of a program that involved the construction of a total of 54 Titan II silos in Arizona, Arkansas, and Kansas. For more than 20 years these underground sentinels remained on alert, safe in their discreet, intimidating fortresses each containing just one missile, four men, and enough power to annihilate a city and, maybe, a civilization. The missiles endured and, it is no coincidence, so did we. Built in the era of Khrushchev, at a time when Berlin's wall was a still fresh obscenity, they were the brilliantly engineered product of a country realistic enough to be able to identify the danger it faced, and sufficiently tough to be prepared to do something about it.

The Titan II missiles were eventually phased out in the early 1980s, and the silos were decommissioned. Some were dismantled, some were abandoned and, this being America, some were sold as potentially prime real estate for the really nervous homeowner. Green Valley is now the only silo that remains reasonably intact. Turned into a museum in 1986, it still houses a Titan II, but this last surviving guard dog is toothless (the warhead has long since been removed from the missile). Even now, however, the ageing weapon still merits a little respect: This complex must be the only museum in the world set up in a way designed to satisfy satellite scrutiny. The silo's 760-ton door is permanently kept half open, and before the defanged missile was replaced in its launch duct, it was, very publicly, made inoperable. As is noted in the museum's guidebook, "Treaties deal in numbers, and it would not be wise to count a museum as part of our arsenal".

There were not many visitors to "big missile country" the time I visited Complex 571-7. It was hot, even for Arizona in August, just another mellow, lazy afternoon in that long untroubled summer of 2001, that tranquil, slumbering season which was to come to a terrible, unimagined end just three weeks later. But back in that now hopelessly remote then, in the deceptive peace of a country where Mohammed Atta was already making his final arrangements, unfashionable conflicts drew few crowds; the sites of our neglected Cold War triumph were, it appeared, of fairly limited appeal. There were two or three history buffs, earnest with note pads and questions, and a family group, father, young son, granddad (but no wives — the Titan museum, I suspect, is one for the guys).

 © Andrew Stuttaford

To reach the silo's command post, it is necessary to climb down a steep staircase that leads to a small cage 35-feet below ground. This "entrapment area" is the last holding point before entrance to the corridor to the bunker's reinforced core. The mesh gates open, and we are in. It is a functional place, all metal walls and lime-green institutional paint, a little bit like the below decks of an elderly aircraft carrier, until that moment when, after walking through long corridors and past enormous blast doors, you find yourself on the set of the Starship Enterprise.

It is a vision of Shatner chic, high-tech, 1960s style, clunky steel boxes, punch-card computers, illuminated buttons, and old-fashioned digital counters, only this was no science fiction, these were the controls of a rocket that could really fly. A genial guide talks us through Armageddon's rituals, the warning message over the speakers, the walk to the safe containing the launch codes, their insertion into the command console, the final authentications, and then that last stage before irrevocability, the two simultaneous flicks of two separate keys into two separate mechanisms (kept sufficiently far apart so that one man alone could not send off the missile). After that, there would have been nothing to do but wait. This was a procedure that left no opportunity for second thoughts. Once the keys had been turned, the missile would take off a minute later. There would have been nothing that the men at Complex 571-7 could have done to stop it. As the missile shot five hundred miles into the sky, its former custodians would have had little to do other than contemplate the remains of their future. The silo contained enough food, water, and air for 30 days. After then, well, no one could say.

The guide is standing by the console. He summons a small boy out of our group. Side by side the guide and the child insert the keys to doomsday, they turn them, make believe, but accomplished Strangeloves, with perfect synchrony (the keys have to be turned within two seconds of each other if the system is to work). As a proud grandfather applauds, Hell's ignition light goes on. Klaxons sound. Lift-off! Except, of course, that it wasn't. The missile cannot be launched; that old Titan was, as we all knew in that safe, deluded August, a harmless, spooky souvenir of more dangerous decades, a reminder of an era when this country was under constant threat of attack, a time, we thought then, that had passed forever.

In the long years of its operation Complex 571-7 was never a place for such illusions. Built and run by men who could contemplate destroying a planet to save it, it is a palace for pessimists, blast-proofed, locked and barred, much of its equipment, even, mounted on springs, able to bounce back from the tremors of a nearby nuclear explosion (the silo could survive almost anything other than a direct hit) with no great damage. It was a last line of defense, the threat that kept the peace, and everyone knew it. The Titan II was the weapon to be used when all else had failed. So the crews that lived with it beneath the earth did what they had to, relentlessly, dutifully and accurately completing those dull daily chores that made Mutually Assured Destruction credible and, as a result, impossible.

You can see some of their faces in photos that line the site's frugal visitor center, fading now as fast as the memory of their unsung vigil, those unknown heroes of an essential struggle, dedicated individuals who understood that to win a war it takes time, courage, patience, determination and, if necessary, a willingness to do the unthinkable.

Is that, I wonder, something that enough of us still understand?