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Toured the Titan Missile Museum Today

CastleRubric

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Nov 11, 2011
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50ampfuse.blog
Wanted to show my dear children what a 9-Megaton ICBM could do
titan-missile.jpg


Tour featured above ground exhibits, videos, former crew chiefs and a trip down into the last remaining silo that's now just a static display (and STILL required, by treaty, to keep the blast doors open)

Titan and Atlas came on board at roughly the same time - under Eisenhower i believe
They were our first ICBMs

Titan missile silos were here in Arizona of course - but also in Kansas and Arkansas

One shot - and it was 9-megatons

They went offline in or around 1987 - about the some time Ed Lavender was rockin the goggles and scoring at will (except with Chapman's girl......)

the house we're building is about a 30 min walk to one of the old silos that was decommissioned etc

4 man crew ran the whole silo
2 officers
2 enlisted

The lawyer that I work with at my company was the first female to go into a ICBM silo for the USAF - SAC bases were no damn joke back in the day

You had the airborne command post in the air 24/7 so a counter strike could be coordinated / launched from the skies in the event silos were knocked out

and you had B 52's sitting on many tarmacs with their engines running - ready to scramble at a moment's notice


Fun fact -- for about 13 years --- Titan's had no "safety"
The Air Force had an "HONOR SYSTEM" for launches because a single Airman - could potentially enable and arm the weapon and get it on the way to whatever target was doomed

(the crew only knew they had "Target 1 and Target 2" with the options for airburst/ground burst)

They installed an elaborate system of countermeasures eventually of course


Titan_I_missile_emerges_from_its_silo_at_Vandenberg_Operational_System_Test_Facility_in_1960.jpg
 
There is a good book called "Command and Control" that details the events of the nearly catastrophic Titan II missile accident at a similar missile complex in Arkansas in 1980. The incident was hushed up at the time during the Cold War. Only in the last few years have the details of what happened emerged.

PBS produced an American Experience episode about the event. You can watch it on-line. Scary stuff! It started when a workman dropped a wrench in a silo puncturing a missile and releasing hypergolic fuel. Eventually the missile exploded in the silo ejecting the second stage of the rocket which also blew up. The 9 Megaton warhead landed on the perimeter of the complex. The safety mechanism of the fusion device was damaged and only luck prevented a nuclear explosion that would have killed tens of thousands and rendered much of Arkansas uninhabitable.

American Experience: Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons and the Illusion of Safety
 
There is a good book called "Command and Control" that details the events of the nearly catastrophic Titan II missile accident at a similar missile complex in Arkansas in 1980. The incident was hushed up at the time during the Cold War. Only in the last few years have the details of what happened emerged.

PBS produced an American Experience episode about the event. You can watch it on-line. Scary stuff! It started when a workman dropped a wrench in a silo puncturing a missile and releasing hypergolic fuel. Eventually the missile exploded in the silo ejecting the second stage of the rocket which also blew up. The 9 Megaton warhead landed on the perimeter of the complex. The safety mechanism of the fusion device was damaged and only luck prevented a nuclear explosion that would have killed tens of thousands and rendered much of Arkansas uninhabitable.

American Experience: Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons and the Illusion of Safety
I saw a great documentary about an Air Force general in the early 1960's that ordered a nuclear bomb to be dropped on Russia. Must've been made pretty soon after it all happened, cause it's all filmed in black and white.
 
I saw a great documentary about an Air Force general in the early 1960's that ordered a nuclear bomb to be dropped on Russia. Must've been made pretty soon after it all happened, cause it's all filmed in black and white.

MM III is the last Air Force Strategic Nuke that I know of
They'd do the job if they got off of course

That ref to the general ordering the bombing in the early 60s COULD have been during the Cuban Missile Crisis - same timeframe (1963 IIRC)

I understand that we had a Naval blockade in place

Soviet navy (w/nuke capable subs) were streaming in with order to run through said blockade

USSR sub's had nuclear capable torpedoes and were given free reign to fire on the blockade with them

They blinked

Kruschev said that he learned he could possibly trust a Western leader (Kennedy) and was shortly after that -- replaced by Leonid Brezhnev (and declared an enemy of the people in the process I THINK)

My dad was a B29 mechanic and had orders in KOREA to deploy and prepare to support a Hydrogen Bomb drop on China

Eisenhower's recent biography confirms this - he may have single handedly stopped that one

The bomb's were moved in theater to Okinawa and we were going to fry 100's of thousands of the General Tso's
 
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