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Titan Missile Site / Davis Monthan Air Force BaseApr 8, 2008
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Outside the missile silo
The missile from the top - It goes down 9 stories
The retractable cover - 760 tons!
| Today we spent the day in the Tucson area. First we stopped at the Titan Missile Museum. This museum is an old Titan nuclear missile (ICBM) site. There are only two left their kind in the US; the remaining 152 were destroyed. These nuclear missiles were later replaced by the minute man missile. The purpose of maintaining these sites is for historical as well as educational reasons. We took an hour tour long that took us down into the actual missile silo. The tour was given by a former commander of one of the Titan sites. She talked to us about the security procedures employed at each of the sites. She also emphasized that the intent of building these nuclear missile site was purely for retaliatory purposes; they would only have been used if the Soviet Union fired a nuclear missile at us first. They were built in response to the fact that the Soviets had a missile that could reach the US in 30 minutes. Before Titan, it would have taken over an hour to respond – thus too late. Each site was manned by a 4 man crew working a 24 hour shift (new minute man missiles require 2 people for 10 sites and each missile can carry more warheads). The site command station was located 40 ft underground. Basically, everything at the site was built on giant shock absorbers, so it could withstand a nuclear strike. Some of the walls were 8ft thick of solid concrete. The walls were poured all at once and not in blocks, so there were no seams. It was a great tour and well worth the couple hours!! It was cool to see the missile! We learned a lot – much of the information is missing from above. Our next stop was at Davis Monthan Air Force Base. We went to the air museum there and we also toured The Boneyard or the storage area for thousands of plane to be used for parts or to be called back into service. The dry weather and the hard desert ground (no paving necessary) were the two main reasons Tucson was selected as the site for the Boneyard. One of the major differences between this air museum and others were the folks volunteering at the museum. We met many WWII veterans that shared personal experiences and their personal knowledge of the aircrafts we were looking at. One of the gentlemen we met was shot down over Poland and spent 40 days with the Polish underground, who eventually got him back to the US. He was told he couldn’t go back overseas because if he was ever caught by the Germans, he could be considered a spy and shot immediately - When he was underground he had worn civilian clothes. The other highlight of the museum was that we viewed the SR-71. Bob was never happier! The SR-71 came into service in the early 60s as a spy plane. It was recently taken out of service and replaced by satellites. It still holds the world records for altitude and speed at 85,000 ft and MAC 3+, respectively. No interceptor or missile could fly high enough or fast enough to catch it. Anecdotally, it was originally designed to carry missiles, but because of how fast it could go, they were afraid it would shoot itself down. The plane was built out of titanium and with enough flexibility that on the ground it leaked gas until the seamed tightened up at altitude. |
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