Visiting Arizona: the Titan Missile Museum

It's been pretty quiet here on the ol’ blog this month, due to me spending the first two weeks in Arizona: first at the ADASS 2023 conference, then a week visiting my parents for an early Thanksgiving. Those were two rather packed weeks, so after a week to decompress I'm finally sifting through the many photos and videos I took at various places; enough for a few posts, at least.

The first place we visited, after I flew in overnight and a day before ADASS started, was the Titan Missile Museum, located twenty minutes' drive outside of Tucson. It's a real Titan II missile bunker, the only one not destroyed as a result of disarmament treaties (though rendered permanently inoperable), and contains a real Titan II missile in its launch silo (though sans warhead, of course). You can walk down a few floors to the underground command station, see the authentic computers still in place, and then walk down a long corridor to see the missile itself.

Here it is, though this is only about half of the it; the rest extends downward further below. You can see how the top of the shaft is half-blocked by the immense door covering it, ensuring this silo is truly disarmed and can't be used.

Remarkably, when I asked about whether there drone restrictions in place, it turned out there weren't. Which allowed me to get this great shot of the entire complex:

You can see the outside of the silo here (what little there is of it above ground), and the half-open door blocked by huge weights. When it was active, it could apparently fully open in just 58 seconds. The glass roof allows looking in at the missile, both for viewers on the ground and – no joke – spy satellites, to ensure the missile doesn't have a functional warhead.

Not sure how they can actually see in, though.

Overall it was a neat experience, one that can recommend. It was also a somewhat sobering experience to hear the guide dispassionately explaining just how quickly these missiles could be launched (58 seconds), with their 9 megaton-TNT-equivalent warheads (large enough to pretty much vaporize 30 square miles). Definitely worth checking out if you're in the Tucson area and enjoy a bit of history! A hui hou!