Letters from the West
by John Taylor
JS:
My friend, John Taylor of Logan, Utah and Show Low Arizona, is retired
from NASA Public Affairs (Marshall Space Flight Center). The places he calls home now
are full of aviation lore and John's having a great time soaking it up, but some of it can
be a little startling. Read on..
Our Neighborhood Armageddon Machine.
Back in the mid-seventies my parents abandoned overpopulated and overtaxed California and retired to the Arizona desert. They settled in Green Valley, a retirement community of small homes and large golf courses located 20 miles south of metropolitan Tucson.
On our first visit to their new surroundings, my wife Marsha and I were enjoying the patio when I heard a familiar sound. The distinctive whap-whap noise preceded an Air Force P-model Huey helicopter, which swept over at treetop elevation. It was nose up, in a transition to hover...or maybe landing. Then the sound died away.
"Looks like they made a precautionary landing," I said to Dad, "I'd better go see if they need to use a phone." "I wouldn't think so," he replied, "they do this all the time."
At that point in my life I was an Air Force captain and an editor at Airman, the official magazine of the USAF. So I knew a little about a lot of Air Force missions. What, I mused, would bring a Huey to the same spot in the desert "all the time?" Hmmmm. Then a dark suspicion crept in. Ohmygod! No way. It can't be.
I walked quickly to the end of the street and crossed at the traffic light. There was a narrow road leading into the only undeveloped lot on the intersection of LaCanada Drive and Duval Mine Road. That seemed to be where the helicopter had descended. I didn't get far. I soon came to a sign on a wire fence that read, "No Trespassing! No entrance without written permission of the commander, Davis-Monthan AFB." My heart sank. I knew what that meant.
It was an Armageddon machine.
There, kitty corner across the street from the Circle C convenience store and a block or two from my parent's new subdivision, a Titan Intercontinental Ballistic Missile squatted malevolently in its silo. I knew it would be fully fueled, tipped with a large hydrogen bomb, and ready to start the music for WWIII. Daaaaaaaaaddddd!
Fast-forward thirty years..
Dad's gone, but we still have the family house in Green Valley. Unlike some Titan silos elsewhere, ours never did blow up. No one ever started the War to End All Us. Today it has its own exit sign on the freeway that reads, "Titan Missile Museum."
The beast has become, of all things, a tourist attraction.
The Titan Missile National Historic Landmark here is still owned by the Air Force, but the missile complex and adjacent museum are operated by the Arizona Aerospace Foundation. This is the same non-profit that operates the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson. (Ed: Go to Index of Previous Features to find John's story on Pima, published in 2003.)
Yvonne Morris is director of the Green Valley facility. She knows quite a bit about the Titan II system. "I'm a former Titan Crew Commander with the 390th Strategic Wing," she said. "In fact, I've pulled alerts right at this site." She doesn't look old enough to have had such a close association with a National Historic Landmark. Turns out she joined the SAC missile program in the early 80s as a newly minted "butter bar," 2nd lieutenant.
The mission of the museum and Titan complex, Yvonne explained, is "to preserve and illustrate the history and significance of the Titan II and its role in the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War."
On a recent Sunday, Marsha and I took the missile complex tour with a group of about 15 folks, both locals and visitors. At the museum we watched a 15-minute video on the missile site, the cold war and mutually assured destruction. Then docents Dean Hendrix and Dave Runt gathered us up for the tour of the missile complex. Dean started the one-hour visit by explaining that this particular complex, Titan 571-7, first went on alert July 15, 1963. It was one of 18 Titan II silos scattered around small but burgeoning communities like Green Valley, Avra Valley, Tubac, and Three-Points.
This complex came off alert Nov. 11, 1982, almost twenty years later. The SALT agreement allowed the two sides to maintain one site each for historical purposes. So of all 54 Titan II sites that the U.S. once operated in Arizona, Kansas, and Arkansas, this was the only one not destroyed. But there were restrictions. The SALT Treaty required that the heavy horizontal blast door be fixed in the open position so the Soviets could use their satellites to look down into the silo and see for themselves that the hydrogen warhead was officially gone.
During the above ground part of the tour, facts and figures come flying out of Dean at a furious pace. The walls of the complex are eight-foot-thick steel-reinforced concrete. The missile is 103 ft tall and has a ten-foot diameter. It was fueled with unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, which are hypergolic (they fire up when they come into contact--no ignition needed). The W-53 warhead was a nine-megaton hydrogen device with 700 times the explosive force of the Hiroshima bomb. This one warhead had more explosive power than all the bombs dropped by the USAAF in WWII. In terms of TNT equivalents, this same oomph worth of TNT loaded into boxcars would make up a train stretching from Tucson to Lexington, KY. So I'm thinking this would make for a really big kaboom.
Actually, while he talks mega-tonnage what I'm thinking about most is the other guy's missiles coming in our direction. This place would have been a major Soviet target. I'm wondering just how accurate the Russian stuff was and how many thousand trainloads of TNT it would take for the blast to reach my parent's house two blocks from here. Oh well, let's not go there.
Next we all line up and look thru a glass cover over the mouth (ok, you gotta call it a "yawning maw") of the silo and look down at the beast in its lair. To actually descend into the underground complex, Dean divides us into elevator riders and regular folks who can take the stairs. We all elect the stairs. The stairwell looks like one of those metal staircases on a Navy ship. Except for the two signs that say, "Watch For Rattlesnakes;" signs which I don't recall seeing aboard the Hornet. We go down about 30 feet, and then through security doors and two really sturdy blast doors. Then we trek down a long tunnel and into the complex's control center.
This control room looks like the crewmembers just stepped away for lunch. Blue uniforms hang neatly on a regulation, gray metal coat rack; rows of logs, handbooks and manuals stand ready for inspection or study; a rack holds a dozen brick-sized walkie-talkies for the two-person maintenance team to use to stay in contact with the launch crew. This was one place where no one ever worked alone, by the way. SAC had a strict two-man crew concept for safety and security reasons. I watch you and you watch me.
Dean explained most of the low-tech-looking hardware in the room, and rattled off the commands the crew would have heard when a President had decided to blow away the eastern half of the Earth.  Then two small boys sitting in the commander and deputy commander seats were given the awesome responsibility of turning the keys. They twisted. I flinched. And listened for a nearby rumble that, happily, didn't come. The world is safe. Until the next tour group arrives.
Standing in that room I'd wondered about the mindset a crew member would have had when coming here for a day a the office. Did their thoughts dwell all the time on turning that key?
According to Yvonne, the answer is no. "You never had time," she explained. "Our days were filled with details that ran from the critically important to the mundane. You are very much aware that your job, if you were ever called upon to do it, would have terrible consequences.
"But the foreparts of our brains were kept wrapped up with duties like painting, cleaning, site beautification, training, setting up schedules and so on. I think that was very deliberate."
But I digress.
On the tour, Dean is herding us back down the tunnel to the other end where we will visit the missile itself, up close and personal. From below it seems bigger and fatter and -- well -- really ugly. Just as you would expect. He doesn't mention that this missile had to be kept fully fueled in the silo because otherwise it would have taken an hour or so to put the gas in the tank when the "balloon went up." The problem here is that the skin of this missile is pretty thin, so after keeping the most caustic chemicals known to mankind aboard for 20 years there were lots of, well, leak issues. Dean does promise that this empty missile had been a training vehicle so it is perfectly safe. Now, anyway. You have to give those maintenance people credit.
Safety is clearly still a big issue at the Titan complex. Visitors must wear charming blue hard hats when they go underground, and Dave's job is obviously to stay back behind the group and maintain a close safety watch on everyone. I was allowed to bang my hard-hatted head several times on overhead cables, so I can see that the hats are much more than just set dressing.
Finally back up where the sun shines, the tour group is invited to ask questions, take more  photos and poke around topside. I get to talk to Dave for a few minutes and learn that in his youth he too was a Titan II missile crew commander. At McConnell AFB in Kansas. He now lives way up in Phoenix but drives down here two Sundays a month to volunteer at the Titan museum. That's a five hour round trip! And did I mention this particular Sunday was Easter? These folks are dedicated. And I'm not surprised. The people who crewed these sites were the front line fighters of the cold war. This facility and its docents are here to honor the crewmembers, the maintenance people, security troops, contractors and as Yvonne says, "all those who were part of the Titan team and who played an important role in the peaceful end of the cold war." Amen.
As we talked with Dave and Dean, I'm able to gaze past the top of the silo toward the expanse of Green Valley stretched out like a big bowl beyond and below the site. But that's the background view. In the immediate foreground is a big Safeway store, strip mall, gas station and apartment complex.
What were they thinking!
To get to the Titan Missile Museum, head south from Tucson on Interstate 19 (this is the freeway spur to Tubac, Nogales and Mexico). Get off at the first Green Valley exit, Exit 69, Duval Mine Road, and go west. A tenth of a mile past the first traffic light you will see the museum sign on the right. Tours start daily at 9:00am and the last tour departs at 4:00 pm, every day except Christmas and Thanksgiving. There is a fee of $8.50 for adults (seniors and military $7.50); children 7-12 are $5.00 and children 6 and under are free. Combination passes are available for both the Titan and Pima Air and Space museums. For information call 520 625-7736.
John Taylor  ..remembering Slim Pickens ..
For another "Letter From The West," Click Here.
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