I was fairly new to working out on the missile sites.
At the age of 19, you know, you’ve got that no fear mentality.
Right above us was a nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead.
To see the magnitude of that weapon within ten feet from you.
It was a monster waiting to go off.
When you think about working on a weapon of mass destruction,
you’re counting on everything to work perfect all the time,
and things just don’t work perfect all the time.
The first thing that my commander heard are the words “uh oh.”
The fuel vapors in the silo are just climbing and climbing and climbing.
We need to get the hell out of this complex 'cause this thing’s gonna blow up.
Do we let the world know?
Do I run out and say, “we’ve got a potential nuclear explosion?"
What do you do?
Complex 3-1 has a phase-14 missile age inspection.
Complex 3-2, instructor crews scheduled...
That day, September 18th, it was basically five days before my 24th birthday.
So I was 23,
Lieutenant Childers was 24, as the deputy.
When we went out on alert on a Titan system, we were on alert for 24 hours,
that's what a tour was, 24 hours.
We had 18 silos that were spread all the way out to the eastern corner of Arkansas.
We went to a complex where there was supposed to be very little maintenance and that was 4-7.
We went up the main highway to a certain point and then you had to pull off the highway
on to much smaller roads.
Until you came over a particular rise, you wouldn’t even know that the missile complex was there.
As we drove up to missile complex 4-7, it’s very unassuming.
There’s not a lot there.
There’s this huge door, and there’s some antennas.
However, underneath that door was the most powerful warhead that the US has ever operated.
Before you left the base, they gave you some codes that gave you access to the complex.
You would read the code to the commander and then you would take a lighter,
set the codes on fire, and drop them down into a box so they would burn up
and no one else could use those codes.
All four of the crewmembers went down three flights of stairs.
At the bottom of that, you got to a blast door.
There were a series of blast doors: 6, 7, 8, and 9.
So you’d walk through this and you’d step into the middle level of the launch control center,
with all of the equipment that you needed to maintain the missile.
When we took charge of a complex
that meant that we owned that missile until the next crew came out.
So, if we went to war, we were prepared to launch those weapons on command.
Aps power, silo soft, guidance go, we’re standing by for fire engine.
We never knew what our specific targets were,
because you didn’t really want to know who you were going to destroy.
You had to be prepared to destroy an entire civilization,
and we were trained on that.
I still today refer to myself and other missileers as crew dogs.
You had to almost be rote in your actions and not question the fact that you were going
to destroy an entire civilization if you had to launch those ICBMS.
As heartless as it sounds, I never had a problem with it, I was doing it for my country, I
was doing it to protect my country.
The whole reason I sat out there was to prevent that kind of thing from happening,
that's what deterrence was about.
But deterrence is worthless if you don’t demonstrate that you’re willing to do it too,
and we always had to demonstrate that I would walk out there and turn those keys
in a second and I would kill ten million people and never hesitate.
Every time I went on to a complex,
every time I saw the Titan II missile,
I had the same sense of excitement.
You couldn’t see the warhead from the bottom 'cause you were eight stories down
and the cone of the warhead disappeared off in the distance.
The warhead on top of the Titan II was three times as powerful as all the bombs used by
all of the armies in the second World War, including both the atomic bombs.
When the crewmembers successfully turned the keys,
the 330,000-pound missile would lift up out of the silo.
And it would head out for about five minutes of powered flight to the edge of space,
fly for another twenty minutes, and hit its target halfway around the world.
Before September 18th, the only warheads that we thought would go off in the United States
would be Soviet warheads.
We never considered that our own warheads could detonate on our own continent.