Titan II Missile Museum

 Fifteen miles south of Tucson is the the only remaining Titan II missile site left on the planet.  At one time there were 54 such sites in America, 18 in Tucson, AZ, 18 in Wichita, Kansas, and 18 in Little Rock, Arkansas.  The Titan II was the penultimate weapon of destruction in its' day at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and we went, "eyeball to eyeball" with the Ruskies to determine if Capitalism or Communism was to be the dominant ism on the planet. Considering what we saw I am so happy the Titan II's of the U.S. nuclear arsenal never had to be fired in anger.

This particular site sits just off the freeway (I-19) about 1/2 mile, and PBS was busy filming a documentary on the Cold War and the Titan II missile sites.  It is a very non-descript, flat, smallish area, in the middle of the Sonoran desert that looks like it could have been a place where somebody kept a lot of propane or other chemicals not fit for human health.  The site went online and hot with a missile in December 1963

The Titan II was simply the state of the art rocket booster of its day.  It was even used to boost a number of astronauts into orbit around the earth to include people like Gus Grissom, in the halycon days of the Gemini shots in the mid-sixties.  Its' credentials to do this or fire a nine (9) megaton explosive H-bomb 6500 miles downrange at incredible speeds are legion.  It stands 104 high, and the first stage booster rocket motors when fired, instantaneously develops as much thrust as two huge Boeing 747 jets at full power.  If the call, from the President of the United States, to fire this behemoth ever came in, and the men, and later women, of SAC (Strategic Air Command) in this silo outside of Tucson did have to fire it, the Titan II would clear the Silo in 58 seconds from the time of the order from the president until it was airborne.

Upon launch, more than 5,000 gallons of water was dumped instantly into the bottom of the missile silo, and as those gigantic rocket motors fired it would be instantly turned into steam by said rocket blasts.  This, along with hundreds of fiberglass tiles in the silo, acted to buffer the missile from its' own power by dampening the effects of the noise, and the vibration of thousands of pounds of thrust being fired off in such a small space.  Without the steam and the fiberglass the Titan II could literally vibrate itself into the side of the silo and explode.  Within four seconds of actual rocket motor ignition this leviathan would clear the silo and immediately accelerate to 25 times the speed of sound (16,000 miles per hour) burning nearly 200 gallons of rocket fuel per second to do so!  At 50 miles high, the first stage would be empty and would be jettisoned and the second stage would fire boosting the attached 9 megaton warhead some 200 miles up into space.  At this point the guidance system gyros, and smaller 'gimbal' rockets attached to the actual warhead, would kick in and literally guide it to the point it descended onto its' target from outer space.  It would be fired up over the north pole, and could strike anywhere in Russia, landing within 8/10's of a mile or less of its target, in 35 minutes or less.

The nine megaton warhead deserves some description here, since it was the reason the whole operation existed in the first place. A Megaton is the equivalent, in explosive power, of one million tons of TNT.  To give you an idea of what nine megatons means, it would take a freight train with 90,000 boxcars, stretching more than 1534 miles, The distance from Spokane, Washington to Nogales, Mexico, full of TNT to equal the destructive power of the warhead found on the top of a Titan II missile!  The warhead was designed to be detonated in one of two ways, an air burst, or a ground penetrating burst.  If maximum destruction over a large area, like a gigantic city such as Tokyo, Los Angeles, Moscow, or Shaghai, was desired the warhead would be set to be exploded at 14,000 feet above the ground, or about the height of Mount Rainier, Washington.  The fireball at this altitude would be immense, more than a mile across roiling at about 40-50 million degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the interior of the sun.  It would smash into the ground below and totally incinerate and destroy 900 square miles of territory!  In other words an area 30 miles wide and 30 miles long would be burned to a crisp, buildings knocked down, all living entities burned up, with thousands upon thousands of fires igniting spontaneously in the materials knocked flat by the gigantic fireball and concussion of the explosion.  A city the size of Los Angeles, Moscow, or Shanghai would simply cease to exist in the blink of an eye once this hydrogen bomb detonated at 14,000 feet above the city.

If the warhead was set to explode in a ground penetrating explosion it would gouge out a hole in the earth more than half a mile wide and 400 feet deep.  Enough so that no hardened military site on the planet could withstand it.  This is an area equal in size to the meteor crater outside Winslow, Arizona.  The concussion would cause an earthquake in the immediate area of the explosion that would literally collapse any hardened military structures.  In either instance, an air burst or ground burst, those on the ground where the explosion occurred would experience what they would probably believe to be the end of the world.  For them it would be, there would be no chance for escape--it would, in a word, be "hellish", as if the bowels of hell had opened up and consumed the planet.  

The man who was leading our particular group of visitors to this silo, and I should mention here that everything that I have mentioned here is declassified and the last Titan II's deactivated in the early '80s, was an old crew member in both Atlas and then Titan II missile silos.  He had served as a ,"missile launch officer" for more than eight years in these two missile programs, and he recited, from memory, all of the specifics I just wrote about and more about this incredible set of circumstances.  He was an old, "cold warrior" and man I was glad he had been on our side.  His mind, and he was well into his seventies, was like a steel trap as he went through in chapter and verse, while in the missile silo command room, what would occur in a cascade of events as the missile launch order came in from the President of the United States, and highly trained, and dedicated men such as he, went into actions that would totally change the world forever.  He must have been a pistol when he was 25 years of age, and I had no doubt of his devotion, once again that word "devotion", to his duty as he saw it and was trained to perform it.  There is no doubt in my mind that if the order had ever come down, he and men just like him, would have performed their duties flawlessly as they unleashed the most powerful destructive force known to mankind.

We were led out to view an actual, deactivated Titan II, sitting in the silo here in Tucson, just as it did in the sixties.  It reminds one of a huge rattlesnake, sitting there coiled and ready to strike, and this almost brought me to tears.  At this point, this man stopped and said, "There were more than 40 Titan II's fired downrange from Vandenberg Air Force Base during its' time in the Air Force's arsenal of missiles."  He explained that about every six months the U.S. Air Force would retrieve one of its' missiles from one of the 54 sites, and one had come from the very site we were at, trucked to Vandenberg Air Force base California, and then fired it 6,000 miles downrange to Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific (without a warhead of course.) He said the Russians had a spy trawler just off the coast of California to monitor the launch, and one in Kwajalein to watch it strike in the small inlet there.  He said, "We just wanted them to know about every six months or so, that at any given moment the U.S. Air Force could put 54 huge warheads in somebody’s backyard in Russia if we wanted to do so. It was our way of keeping the peace."   In other words, "Don't Tread on Me."  The result would be so catastrophic there are not words enough in the English language to explain it.

Cynthia and I witnessed the power of devotion, to create, and to destroy, in just six short hours.  Human kind is really something else, to say the least, and life is absolutely terrific.