Titan Missile Museum

Visits to places like the Titan Missile Museum don’t sit well with me. They represent war, death, destruction, chaos, and the darkest side of humanity. A nuclear warhead is the antithesis of all I hold dear – peace, harmony, and the end of all wars in the world. But, if nothing else, there is history to be learned in a place like this, and it doesn’t do to stick one’s head in the sand and pretend this never existed. Perhaps, at best, we can take the lessons of the past and move forward in a more positive direction. Imagine!

The Titan Missile Museum is a walk through the Cold War era between the United States and former Soviet Union. The facility prefers to label this period of time as “keeping the peace”. I know there are many things in the world that make no sense, and that I’ll never understand, but keeping the peace by theoretically delivering a 9-megaton nuclear warhead to targets more than 6300 miles away in about 30-minutes sounds like the beginning of annihilation to me – the beginning of the end. As the museum website states, “For more than two decades, 54 Titan II missile complexes across the United States stood "on alert" 24 hours a day, seven days a week, heightening the threat of nuclear war or preventing Armageddon, depending upon your point of view.”

This preserved Titan II missile site is all that remains of those 54 sites that were in operation from 1963 to 1987. During our tour we were walked through a typical day at the facility when it was in full operation, including a 35-foot descent into the underground missile complex and a visit to the launch control center where we experienced a simulated launch of the missile. The reality of what could of happened, the immensity of the possibilities, was a sobering experience.