A half-hour drive south of Tucson, Arizona, is the only remaining missile silo from the Cold War era. Launch Complex 571-7 is now a museum and has been a recent United States National Historic Landmark since 1994.
The underground complex in Sahuarita consists of three units, which are connected to each other by long corridors and are protected by airlocks with two hydraulically operated doors, each weighing several tons. The multi-storey control center, which is manned around the clock, branches off from the stairwell on one side and the silo on the other with the 31 meter high ICBM type Titan II.
Weird tourist attraction in the desert
These missiles were armed with the largest nuclear warheads ever built in the United States. The explosive power of the warhead, designated W53, was nine million tons of TNT. Such a destructive power corresponds to seven hundred times that of a Hiroshima bomb.
It took 137 tons of liquid nitrogen tetroxide and Aerozin 50 to launch. The weapon was operational within a minute and could fly up to 9900 kilometers at a speed of 25,000 kilometers per hour.
Between 1963 and 1967 more than 100 Titan rockets were produced for the bunkers and for training purposes. Most of the underground launch pads were adjacent to those near Tucson at Little Rock in Arkansas and near Wichita in the state of Kansas.
In the course of negotiations to limit the arms race with the Soviet Union and upgrade the weapon systems, the Titan launch pads were retired in the first half of the 1980s. Since 2010, the new START agreement – the abbreviation stands for “Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty” – has limited the number of nuclear delivery systems to just 700.
The decommissioned Titan II rockets were scrapped from 1988 or used as launch vehicles for satellites and space probes, the silos filled up or sold to private individuals. Only the “Launch Complex 571-7” near Tucson is still accessible today and became a Titan Missile Museum repurposed – with no warhead and liquids in the remaining ICBM.
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