Visiting a Titan II ICBM silo

While in Tucson, the opportunity came up to visit the Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile museum. This is a single-missile silo housing a rocket with a thermonuclear warhead — the most destructive ever installed, at 9 MT (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was approximately 63 kT). Since then (the 1980s) warhead yields have been decreasing, while multiple warheads are installed on each missile and their accuracy is increasing.

The Titan rocket served as the launch vehicle for the Gemini mission. The fuel was the hazardous hydrazine — any tank rupture meant serious trouble…

The underground complex is enormous. The heart of it — the control room where the crew manages the complex — is actually quite a small space. The silo itself is vast: everywhere you look there's concrete, steel, and large, heavy doors.

The procedure for launching the missile was not particularly complex — you cross-reference the codes, set the target (location 1 or 2 — the crew didn't know the actual target), set whether the detonation would be airborne or on contact, and then it was just 58 seconds to launch. According to the crew members, they were essentially just going through a checklist.

In the US these silos are presented as protection against a Soviet attack — mutually assured destruction. From the perspective of someone from a country sitting between the two superpowers, that's not the most comfortable thing to hear. Fortunately nothing like a nuclear war actually happened. Let's hope it never does.