Minuteman

Sometimes the best historical adventures come when they're unexpected. Or at least partially unexpected. Minuteman National Historical Site is the only NHS dedicated to the Cold War. I've known of it for sometime, as did Joe. We tried to secure a tour of the launch facility, but only one ticket was available. I reserved it for Joe. Now, before it seems like I was being noble in doing so, I fully expected some lucky break that would get at least one more of us on the tour.

All five of us ended up going!

Few historical sites have surprised me as much as this one. In many ways, everything it presented came upside down from what I expected. I thought it would be a super-secret site. Instead, as the interpreter put it, this was the rattle of the rattlesnake. The Soviets knew it was there. I expected all the action to be up top. Really, the officer in command were 31 feet below the earth. I thought missiles would be at the site for us to see. Actually, the missiles at its control were located miles away.

The tour lasted one hour. Our interpreter met us at the gate, the gate being outside one of only two buildings off that particular exit of I-90. She guided us around the front of the property and took us into the residential area, a building that looked like four modular homes put together. From the outside it was pretty homely. Inside it resembled a college dormitory, 1990s style. When active, this was the domain of enlisted men. Maintenance mostly, security secondarily. Typically a crew of 8 would serve 72-hour watches there.

A photo of the launch facility before it was covered up.

Caroline and Sam exit through the four-foot-thick capsule wall.

An elevator took us to the second part of the tour which gave us access to the missile launch center. It was 31 feet below ground. In the days of the Cold War, it would be manned by two junior officers for 24-hour watches. They were the missiliers who had the ability to launch the missiles.

One of the missile control panels.

A seat from which missiles could be launched.

Well, they had something of an ability to launch the missiles. There were five different launch facilities in control of 50 missiles radiating out from the nearby Air Force base. Two officers at one of those launch facilities had to order the launch at the same time as at least one other pair of officers in the complex. It was a double-vote system.

Oh, and it was possible for the missiles to launch without any input from the missiliers. They could be launched remotely by Looking Glass. By the way, once launched, they couldn't be recalled. There was no abort switch or self destruct feature. Once launched, they were launched.

So a lot of Hollywood-like impressions of what nuclear deterrence looked like got burst that day. The finality of knowing that once the missiles were gone they couldn't be reversed unnerved me. As did the fact that once those missiles were fired, there really wasn't a point to the launch facility any more, and the missiliers would be coming back to the surface of a world that might not be much of a world any more.

Redundancy.

There was contingency after contingency in that launch center, though. The interpreter called the seats in which the missiliers sat the most over-engineered piece of equipment at the site. The seats had five-point restraints and were locked onto rails on the floor. The whole launch facility was predicated on a two-man concept: one could never be alone there. Shovels and an escape hatch would allow the missiliers to come out in the event the elevator collapsed. This was an amazing glimpse into the mentality of deterrence.

But it wasn't Hollywood. The interpreter observed that these missiliers probably never saw themselves having that duty during their Air Force careers. I was left to wonder how much of the set-up (the over-engineered chairs, the command structure, the aesthetics of the control center) was planned to address the frame of mind of these men doing something profoundly tedious and profoundly deadly.

Caroline gets sworn in as a junior ranger.

The art on the launch center door.