It's springtime in the Sonoran desert. The saguaro and ocotillo are in bloom. Sun gleams on silken sand. Yet something far more menacing than all the rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, and scorpions that populate this broad and bony landscape lurks underground. It's a striking relic of the cold war, the most lethal missile ever built by the U.S. military, with many times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Once, 54 such Titan II complexes were poised to launch missiles from U.S. soil. Now just one still crouches in its silo at the Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona.
Part of the second stage of the Titan II missile and its black reentry vehicle (a 9 to 10 megaton warhead) stare upward toward a voyage that will never occur. Each Titan site took 18 months to build and cost $10 million, including the missile, in 1962 dollars.
Photographs Courtesy of Titan Missile Museum
Located 24 miles south of downtown Tucson on an arid plain overlooking the Santa Rita Mountains, Air Force Launch Complex 571-7 (as it was then known) was on 24-hour alert from 1963 to 1982. That was a nervous time, and a tour of the silo and the missile deep within evokes feelings of dread. Meant to withstand a nuclear bombardment, site 571-7 is a model of survivability. The 760-ton steel-and-reinforced-concrete door that conceals the missile from the world outside can lift and scrape away up to 6 inches' worth of post-holocaust debris that engineers envisioned might lie on top in a worst-case scenario. Despite its weight, the door rolls back 30 feet in just 20 seconds.
