- When NASA launches into orbit
they get years to build the payload,
months to inspect the rocket, and a four day countdown.
When you're launching a Titan II Cold War nuclear missile,
you get three minutes.
I am in Silo Eight, 10 meters beneath the Arizona desert,
and we've just received orders to end the world.
(tense music)
If the order to launch our missile ever came,
then it would be received by that antenna.
It looks like a disc stuck on top of a cone,
which is what gives it the unimaginative name
of disc cone antenna.
The shape lets it receive a wide range
of different frequencies across the entire horizon,
which makes it incredibly resilient to jamming.
That said, you could still knock it over
with a well placed truck
so there are a couple of backups.
𝔅𝔢 𝔫𝔬𝔱 𝔞𝔣𝔯𝔞𝔦𝔡, for we have a backup, low frequency,
low bandwidth Sferics antenna, buried underground.
This is able to receive any message,
just really, really slowly.
There are also some pop-up antennas
which get deployed as needed.
In order to spot any uninvited guests
we have the TPS-39s or Tipsies.
Today they're guarding the AC unit, but back in the day
it was a vent taking fresh air into the silo.
A beam of radio waves is emitted
from one to the other, forming a invisible wall.
If anything passes through, this tips off an alarm
and a team is sent out to chase off
what is either a Soviet spy or Wile E Coyote.
The only way in is through this hatch,
which will take us down 10 flights of steps.
There were 58 of these silos
scattered across the United States,
each housing a Titan II missile
with enough firepower to fight World War II
three times over, including the nuclear bits.
Because of this, if the Cold War ever got hot,
striking one of these stations
would've been priority number one for the Soviets.
Therefore, it needed to be built
to be able to survive an attack,
most likely a nuclear attack,
and then come back fully armed and operational.
As we reach the bottom of our staircase,
we reach the hardened bit of the bunker,
starting out with two massive blast doors.
These are made of welded I beams
able to survive a 70 bar overpressure.
For context, your house can survive
about 0.2 bar overpressure,
meaning these things are insanely strong.
The doors are opened in sequence like an airlock
to ensure that no blast can ever get through.
Once we're through an entranceway, we reach the corridor.
Down that way is the command center,
which is used to launch the missile,
and 50 meters that way down this corridor
is the missile itself.
Let's go take a look.
There are two key things we need to protect against
during a nearby nuclear strike.
First of all is the percussive impact.
To protect against that, the walls and floors
are up to one and a half meters thick
of reinforced concrete.
The structure is sort of domed in shape,
which will help to redirect that energy.
Now, you'll notice
that I'm not walking on the concrete directly,
but rather a sort of steel raised platform.
This and everything else in the facility
of any sort of importance, including the missile itself,
is being held aloft
and supported by these massive shock absorbers.
These allow the structure to rattle and roll,
but it won't break.
Any of the cables
and all the piping also has a lot of extra slack,
allowing it to move around a bit without becoming severed.
The next thing we need to worry about
is the electromagnetic pulse which comes from the bomb.
This could be even more deadly as it would destroy
any of our sensitive electronics.
To protect against that, everything is encased
in up to a centimeter of battleship grade steel,
which like a Faraday cage will redirect the pulse.
All the wiring also passes through these EMP shields,
sort of like a surge protector, which will stop that pulse
from destroying our sensitive electronics.
Surviving the first strike, it's time to retaliate,
and we do that with this thing,
the Titan II missile in her natural habitat.
The goal of our missile is to launch
and get outta the silo as quickly as possible.
And in that way, the Titan II is a significant improvement
over its predecessor, the Titan I.
In all ways except payload, a ICBM is practically identical
to a space rocket.
With NASA's upcoming Artemis missions,
the actual rocket is being powered by a mixture
of hydrogen as the fuel and oxygen as the oxidizer.
For the real rocket,
they're used in their ultra energy dense,
super cool liquid forms, and after it gets loaded in
you can see some of it boiling off and being vented out.
If you were to load the rocket too early,
then it would all just evaporate
and you'd have to cancel the launch.
Fortunately today, I'm using them in their gaseous forms
so we're not going to need to worry.
The hydrogen and oxygen get combined in the engine.
For the moment they're fine,
but to ignite it, we need a spark.
It takes nine hours to fuel up Artemis,
requiring an insane amount of support infrastructure.
While that might be okay for a space mission,
it is entirely unacceptable for a missile.
Instead, the Titan I substitutes the liquid hydrogen
for kerosene.
As you can see, it's a liquid at room temperature,
meaning that it can come pre-installed.
Unfortunately, the kerosene plus oxygen reaction
isn't quite as reactive as oxygen plus hydrogen,
but it was a fair trade off.
After getting the order to launch,
the procedure was to fill the remaining tank
with 90,000 tons of liquid oxygen.
This took about 15 minutes.
Then lifting out of the silo, taking five,
and only then actually have it ignite.
It was a good procedure
but there was still room for significant improvement.
Titan II uses a completely different class propellant
known as hypergolics.
The reagents were Aerozine as the fuel
and dinitrogen tetroxide as the oxidizer.
Because these were both liquid at room temperature,
they could come 100% preloaded.
I'm using Mentos and Coke today though
because the real things are way too dangerous
for me to be playing with.
A benefit of this, though,
is that you didn't need a fancy igniter
to start the reaction.
All you needed to do is bring them together.
Another speed up that we had is that
rather having to lift the actual rocket
outside the silo, bring it to ground level,
and then launch, instead we would do the entire reaction
and launch inside the silo itself.
And yeah, as you might be able to guess,
it did get incredibly messy.
As our friends over at SpaceX recently found out,
a rocket can really tear apart your launchpad.
And although this one was only designed
for single use, you do need the missile
to actually leave the silo before said silo falls apart.
A water deluge system directly beneath the engines
captures most of the vibration,
and thick sound tiles lined along the side of the silo
capture the rest.
A W-shaped wedge redirects exhaust up and out.
Of course, none of that can happen
without the carefully choreographed dance of death
going on in the command center.
So we've survived the first strike
and we've got our missile.
It's time for the mutual bit
of mutually assured destruction.
This is the command center.
You need to have four people here at all times,
the commander, deputy commander, and two enlisted personnel.
Upstairs is where we have the crew quarters.
You could sleep or make something to eat.
And downstairs is where we have some power generation
as well as backup coffee reserves.
And here is the command level.
You need to have two personnel here at all times,
one of whom was either the commander or deputy commander.
Take a seat.
Let's launch a missile.
(electronic beeping)
Our message comes in through the radios,
and then you immediately start writing down what you hear.
Once you've written it down, you switch it
with whoever's running this station and you double check
to see that you've both got the same message.
At around this time, the Sferics antenna would probably
have received its message as well,
and that'll give you a third point of confirmation.
If those match, we then head over to this safe.
You open your lock, the deputy commander opens theirs,
and outta the safe you get a cookie.
Breaking open the cookie gives us
some more characters, which we'll use to decode
that original message.
This gives us instructions of where we're targeting.
We can either select from three pre-programmed destinations,
or put in a new one using ticker tape.
We need to put in the code for a butterfly valve,
located in the oxidizer line of the rocket.
Without it, we cannot physically launch the missile.
We also flip a circuit breaker over here,
which charges up the onboard flight computer.
The missile is now ready for one final confirmation.
The commander has one key, deputy commander the other.
You cannot reach between the two of them, I have tried.
On three, we turn them.
Three.
It's now out of our hands.
The batteries activate, silo doors slide open.
Targeting is handed over to the onboard computer.
The engines ignite and we're off.
Stage one lifts our rocket to 80 kilometers up
and 80 north, stage two 300 up and 650 north.
Eventually, we've reached 1200 kilometers,
three times the height of the International Space Station,
with the stage three vernier engine adjusting trajectory
so that it hits our target within an accuracy of 900 meters,
really, really ruining someone's day.
Inside the silo, there are a couple
of fires that need putting out
and blast doors that need to be closed.
But beyond that
the instructions are to await further orders,
orders from a government that may no longer exist.
Down here there's enough oxygen and food to last
for about a month, but what happens afterwards?
Do you stay here and suffocate
or climb up the escape shaft and into the unknown?
This has been James Dingley from the Atomic Frontier.
Keep looking up.
(pensive music)