Titan Missile Museum

The Titan II missile is the largest missile built by the United States.  During the Cold War period in the 1960's as many as 54 of these missiles were built and placed in underground silos (18 each near Wichita, Kansas, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Tucson, Arizona); missiles were active and ready to launch if state of war was declared.  In 1982 Titan Missile sites were decommissioned and all operational silos were demolished, except one...located south of Tucson this site has been preserved as a National Historic Landmark.  Public tours are now available.
   We visited the site, starting out with a video presentation about the Titan Missile Program. After that we walked into the yard and descended 55 steps to the control room doors...massive amounts of steel and cement protected the control room.  Walls at least 4 feet thick and 3-ton, 2 feet thick blast doors sealed various areas of the site from the surface. Huge springs and shock absorbers were built into the underground structures to help them withstand explosions from above ground.  Along the way were three stations where persons entering the site would have stopped to call from a wall mounted phone and give their security information in order to proceed further into the tunnels.

   Once in the control room we watched as our guide took us through the steps involved for a missile launch: Two-person teams worked together if the call to launch was received. It came in secret code; both persons took their key and opened the double locked file cabinet to remove the secret files used to interpret the code.  The code told which of three pre-programed sites was the intended target. Once the target was chosen, again two keys were turned in separate areas of the control room and a red button flashed...at this point there was no turning back!

   From the control room we walked through one cableway, or tunnel, to the silo where a Titan II Missile stands; no fuel remains in the rockets and the warhead is absent, allowing it to be safely displayed to visitors.  Huge concrete doors above the silo are partially open, so from outside you can look down into the 150 foot deep silo.  Also outside were various antenna towers for communication and motion detecting devices used for security.

   During the tour one was reminded of how much technology changes...secret codes, double turn keys, locked file cabinets, computer programs on reels of tape, data hard drives the size of refrigerators...what a different time it was!