The Last Silo Standing

Just off the interstate, buried under the desert floor, sits a relic of the era when human civilization came closest to ending itself. This is the Titan Missile Museum, the only fully preserved Titan Two intercontinental ballistic missile site left in the world.

For two decades, from nineteen sixty-three to nineteen eighty-four, the city of Tucson was encircled by eighteen missile silos like this one. Each held a Titan Two missile armed with a nine-megaton nuclear warhead, six hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The sites were spaced at least eight miles apart so that a single Soviet warhead could not destroy more than one. Together, the ring around Tucson represented enough destructive force to trigger a nuclear winter.

This particular site, designated five seventy-one dash seven, was officially known as Air Force Facility Missile Site Eight. A crew of four worked twenty-four-hour shifts in an underground complex three stories beneath the desert: two missile combat officers, an analyst, and a facilities technician. The launch procedure was designed to take fifty-eight seconds from presidential order to missile in flight. The warhead would reach its target in the Soviet Union in approximately thirty minutes.

When the Titan Two program was decommissioned in nineteen eighty-four as part of arms reduction agreements, all the other sites around Tucson were demolished. This one was preserved specifically so the world would not forget what was buried here. In nineteen ninety-four it was declared a National Historic Landmark.

Today you can descend into the launch control room, sit at the actual console, and experience a simulated launch sequence. You can walk a two-hundred-foot tunnel to peer through a grate at the inert Titan Two missile still sitting in its silo. The missile is real. The warhead is gone. And the silence underground is the kind that makes you reconsider how thin the line between deterrence and catastrophe actually was.