March 24, 2016

March 24, 2016

Tucson has lots of attractions for the visitor.  We went with my sister and her family to the Titan Missile Museum.  This is a relic of the Cold War that we last visited in 2007.

Titan II was an enormous liquid fueled rocket used not only for the Gemini space launches by NASA but also for defense.  Three clusters of Titan II ICBM rockets with 9-megaton hydrogen bomb payloads were built in the early sixties to “dissuade” the USSR from starting WWIII.  Despite being accident-prone, manpower intensive, and very expensive this missile platform lingered in our arsenal for many years, eventually being replaced by Minuteman solid fuel rockets.  All 54 Titan launch sites were destroyed by SALT treaty except for this lone Tucson silo.  Most of the facility is far underground.  Only a massive sliding door and a few antennas grace the surface.  Climbing down the stairs we look inside the missile silo (by treaty always open) and tour the central control room. This visit seemed more interesting, maybe because this time we had a guide that actually worked here many years ago as a young teenage Air Force crewman.  He added a lot of color and realism no one else could have.