Article – Nuclear missile bunker: yours for less than $400k

One local newspaper described the sales listing, with calculated understatement, as a “mid-century fixer-upper”: an underground bunker built to withstand a nuclear attack, and to house the fire power to retaliate.

The decommissioned nuclear silo in southern Arizona was once home to the Titan II, the largest intercontinental ballistic missile deployed by the US Air Force.

Yawn..another article about a flooded missile base being up for sale, right? True enough. But the 3D virtual tour is utterly fascinating. Highly recommend. It’s like a video game.

I’m still rather partial to the old decommissioned long-line microwave relay stations that dot the US. I looked at one in Whitehall years ago and it was a nice, unassuming little bunker with some serious muscle to it. Ah well…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else whats a heaven for?

12 thoughts on “Article – Nuclear missile bunker: yours for less than $400k

  1. I’d be concerned that some antiquated Soviet-era missile guidance system was never updated and still had a first-strike nuke trained on exact location of my new “shelter.”

    • That seems ridiculously unlikely. Given the cost of an ICBM, and the (supposed) limitations on producing new ones, it would seem far more likely that the entire inventory of missiles is regularly updated with targetting information to prevent ‘wasting’ an irreplacable nuke. I would think the only way a defunct base would still be a target is if the base’s defunct status was unknown to the aggressor….which seems unlikely given the replacement cost of the nuke.

  2. “Just a fixer-upper.” Commander you were right the video tour link was really cool. It reminded me of the layout in Doom 3.

    It would be cool if one had the cash to totally retrofit the bunker as a liveable space. Airbnb for those who want to get away from it all?

  3. It takes serious resources to rehab, maintain, and power these facilities. The silo based launch sites in particular because they were never meant to be lived in. Only the crew (launch) capsule was manned. Everything else was above ground and the missiles themselves were housed in their silos and scattered about. Most deactivated silos were destroyed in compliance with START treaties and then filled in leaving only the crew complex to rot.

    The Titans were liquid fueled and were literally ticking time bombs – one of the worst Titan accidents was in Arkansas when a tech slipped and dropped a wrench down a occupied missile silo. It bounced off the wall, hit and punctured the skin of the missile’s O2 tank and it blew up. Threw a 10 MT warhead 500 ft in the air and into the woods. The Minutemen are solid fueled and much safer.

    As I recall from doing a little research years ago, the best and most easily converted facilities are Atlas F launch sites from the early sixties. They are above ground launch sites where the missile lay on its side in a heavy rectangular blast shelter. When it was readied to launch, the roof would roll back, the missile was erected on an elevator, fueled, and then sent to roof level to launch.

    The way those sites were built as fully contained facilities made them ideal for rehabbing and living. I’ve seen some really nice ones in Kansas and the Midwest. I think at one time in the early 80’s you could buy one for about 60K…

    Regards

    • Those ‘coffin launched’ Atlas were the Atlas-E, the Atlas-F were silo launched… If you’re going to be in an Atlas, the -F is the way to go, I think: Personally I’d rather have an intact Titan-II site with 3 missile silos and a LCF.

      And the Titan I and II were not time bombs: Had the maintenance crew followed the correct procedures the accident would not have happened at all: Then the AF screwed up the remediation. The socket that was dropped was not the correct one, and didn’t have a security lanyard to tie it off. Then, after bouncing off the missile body and silo wall a couple of times, it holed the fuel tank. Unfortunately the propellent crew was ordered back into the silo to turn on a fan: The fan apparently arced, igniting the fuel, which then ruptured the oxidizer tank.

      Even with all of that, only one person (the guy turning the fan on) was killed. The second-stage ignited after clearing the silo, the silo door was thrown a couple of hundred feet away, and the W54 warhead (9 MT) did exactly what it was supposed to do: NOTHING at all. The warhead was recovered and returned to PANTEX, and the valuable pieces reused.

      • Oh, and btw the Titan didn’t have oxygen tanks, the oxidizer was Dinitrogen Tetroxide (N2O4) and the fuel was Aerozine (50:50 Hydrazine and Unsymetrical Dimethyl Hydrazine)…

        And I misspoke: The warhead was a W53, the W54 was the ‘suitcase’ nuke SADM

        • I bow to your superior research! As I said, been a few years since I was looking at these things. I was stationed at LRAFB just down the street from the SMW headquarters and they still had a plaque to the accident there.

          They actually punished one maintenance guy who went in against directions to hold (bad ones) to try and get it under control before it blew. He later said “I went in there for God and Country to try and stop a disaster and all they could do was use me as a scape goat”. He was badly disabled from the oxidizer that penetrated his suit and they gave him a world of grief over medical treatment as I recall.

          “No good deed ever goes unpunished”

          Regards

  4. The virtual tour was interesting. I’ve seen a few of those abandoned silo’s online over the years and the graffitti and vandalism rats had their way with a lot of them, that one looks pretty clean in comparison. It would be an interesting project to tackle for the person who has it all and wants something unique and secluded, and who has the money to burn. The surrounding landscape looks like something out of a Sergio Leone movie, or when you exit the caves at the beginning of Fallout 2, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing..

  5. Missilebases.com has a couple of relay sites in Kansas ready to go….and they look a lot more appealing than an LC.

    A few years back, my wife and I seriously considered buying a Titan-I site in the Denver area…but spending a couple of years working in moon suits and paying for hazmat remediation (lead paint, asbestos everything, contaminated water) didn’t impress.

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