Titan II Missile Site

[BEC]

Here is a few pictures of a Titan II Missile Site. This one has been turned into a museum. I spent what seemed like a decade back in the early 70s working at the 18 of these sites that were in Arkansas. This was a very scary place to work. Not so much because there were a bunch of nuclear warheads in the missile, but because of the extremely dangerous rocket fuel (unsymmetrical hydrazine) and the oxidizer (nitrogen tetroxide). Just mix the two of those together and they go "BOOM" No spark plug needed. The sites in Arkansas were old and past their design life when I was working at them in the 70s. Fuel leaks and oxidizer leaks were frequent. Nobody wanted to think about the day that a fuel and oxidizer leak occured at the same time.

http://dilidoo.com/2009/01/20/a_nuclear_silo_in_the_united_states_33_pics.html

Bob Crites

[dtel]

Some nice pictures, I knew they were big but I never realized how big they really are. What would cause fuel leaks ?

[BuyOtherSoundEquipment]

That is completely awesome. When was it decommissioned?

[greg928gts]

http://dilidoo.com/2009/01/20/a_nuclear_silo_in_the_united_states_33_pics.html

Man, the infrastructure cost! Impressive engineering. Can't imagine what the new stuff is like.

Greg

[oldtimer]

Are they for sale?

[Daddy Dee]

Some nice pictures, I knew they were big but I never realized how big they really are. What would cause fuel leaks ?

Here's a link describing a 1980 accident and explosion at Damascus, AR.

http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=2543

Bob, Thanks for the link. Most interesting. That's a scary looking place, too.

When one thinks about the mission of that missile.... sobering indeed.

[Arky]

Bob, are these the same type sites that are around Searcy? I remember as a kid going by the entrance roads that were chained. Never knew anything about them or thought much about them. Interesting.

[jdm56]

Interesting! Thanks for the link, Bob.

I work with a guy who, when in the Air Force, sometimes worked at the ICBM bases up here in SW Missouri. I'm not sure, but I don't believe these were Titans. MinuteMan's? ...I dunno. This would have been not long before they were all done away with. Anyway, I like hearing his stories about them, what they were like inside and how the system (control & command) worked. Fascinating stuff.

[Doc Robin]

Thanks Bob. I got to take a tour of the one outside of Rose Bud while in High School ROTC. It was very impressive. Each floor of the crew area was suspened by very large coil springs. Man that has been a long time ago. Later Bill

[Daddy Dee]

Interesting! Thanks for the link, Bob.

I work with a guy who, when in the Air Force, sometimes worked at the ICBM bases up here in SW Missouri. I'm not sure, but I don't believe these were Titans. MinuteMan's? ...I dunno. This would have been not long before they were all done away with. Anyway, I like hearing his stories about them, what they were like inside and how the system (control & command) worked. Fascinating stuff.

jdm,

Yeh. Minuteman is another ICBM and some upgraded versions of them are still in service in Montana, Wyoming and N. Dakota.

[Don Richard]

Wow. Liquid fuel rockets with atomic warheads? Kept in a silo ready to go? Dangerous indeed. The solid fuel ICBMs like Minuteman seem much safer.

[tigerwoodKhorns]

Here's a link describing a 1980 accident and explosion at Damascus, AR.

http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=2543

That is quite a story. I like this:

"A congressional inquiry into the accident found the Titan II missile program to be essentially reliable. It recommended, however, improved communications between the Air Force and local officials in case of accidents and a modification of the Air Force’s policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence and condition of nuclear weapons at an accident site. "

Uh, a guy dropped a wrench and one person dies, 23 injured and almost $250,000,000 in damage. Was the solution to tie wrenches and sockets to your wrists with string?

[seti]

I'd love to have one. It would be the ultimate IT Disaster Recover Data Center. They would have to be cheaper in Arkansas.

http://www.missilebases.com/

The one in Roswell was owned by Bob Lazaz.

http://www.siloworld.com/SITES%20FOR%20SALE/SitesForSale.htm

[BEC]

In the pictures from the link I posted, you can see the large HF antenna. The HF system was the "last ditch" communications system if everything else failed. Land lines were the primary means of communications. Actually the one in the picture would be expected to be blown away in an attack. There is another "hardened" HF antenna that would shoot up out of the ground and would be expected to be the only means of communications left after the attack. We called that one the "Doomsday Antenna". Hello, Hello.....Is.... anyone out there?

I was at one of the sites one time when a bull dozer cut all the land lines to that missile site. Loss of communications is assumed to be from an attack. The Site Commander and Deputy put in the keys and started getting the missile ready to lanch. They then got on the HF radio and called SAC to find out if the indications they had of an attack were real. Then they went back to normal alert status after being told there was no attack in progress. I was glad my HF radio that I had gone out to repair was working right by that time. Would have been a bummer for WW3 to start because I messed up a repair on a radio.

Bob Crites

[JJkizak]

It's the little things that count. Was the ham set tubes or solid state?

JJK

[sputnik]

This stuff fascinates me. My dad worked on the Titan II propulsion system while he was at the Martin Company in the late fifties and early sixties. The Titan II booster was also used for the NASA Gemini program.

If the contracting all works out, my company will be doing the environmental compliance work for closing the fuel systems to the back-up power generators for a recently inactivated Minuteman squadron. The Minuteman missiles are deployed in squadrons of fifty unmanned launch facilities (LFs) controlled by five manned launch control centers (LCCs). Each LCC controls ten LFs but can monitor all fifty LFs in the squadron. The Minuteman missiles use solid fuel and I'm not sure how many warheads each carries. I'm pretty sure they carry a smaller payload than the Titan IIs did.

I was able to go down into an inactivated Minuteman LCC and LF last summer. If the project goes forward (crossing fingers), we'll be at the missile sites all summer. I was also able to view (from outside the security fence) an arctic Russian radar base when we were doing some work over there in 1996. At the same time we were also working at an inactivated SAC radar base here in northern Montana. Interesting stuff to see both ends of the cold war.

Here is a link to a site showing photos of an abandoned Russian missile site in Kazakhstan.

http://englishrussia.com/?p=2189

[Islander]

I'd love to have one. It would be the ultimate IT Disaster Recover Data Center. They would have to be cheaper in Arkansas.

http://www.missilebases.com/

The one in Roswell was owned by Bob Lazaz.

http://www.siloworld.com/SITES%20FOR%20SALE/SitesForSale.htm

Could be an ideal supervillain's secret lair...

[jacksonbart]

These guys look a little stiff.

[jacksonbart]

I was at one of the sites one time when a bull dozer cut all the land lines to that missile site. Loss of communications is assumed to be from an attack. The Site Commander and Deputy put in the keys and started getting the missile ready to lanch. They then got on the HF radio and called SAC to find out if the indications they had of an attack were real. Then they went back to normal alert status after being told there was no attack in progress. I was glad my HF radio that I had gone out to repair was working right by that time. Would have been a bummer for WW3 to start because I messed up a repair on a radio.

Bob Crites

That had to almost as scary as when in 1983 Mathew Broderick broke into WOPR at NORAD and almost set of WWWIII. Luckly disaster is narrowly averted when Lightman teaches WOPR to play tic tac toe against itself, resulting in endless drawn games. Realizing that the game is impossible to win, WOPR then cycles through all the nuclear war scenarios it has devised, all of which end with no winner due to mutual assured destruction. WOPR observes that " the only move is not to play" and simply ceases playing. Finally, WOPR decides it would prefer "a nice game of chess."

You may have read about that one.

[Saturn5]

Very cool pics.

I remember the hazard training I had at Kennedy Space Center about the Shuttle's monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, and I can't even imagine working around that crap with frequent leaks. That's just scary.