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Bunker Down

Notes from the Cold War underground

It’s easy to see how the men of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing might begin to believe in ghosts. They worked, after all, in a concrete vault buried deeper than the dead. Down there, the floors of the command center hung from the ceiling on giant metal springs to absorb the shock of a Soviet strike. And so, these missileers—members of the Air Force who seldom saw the sky—spent much of their days quite literally in suspense. Remember, as well, that there wasn’t much to do on a twenty-four-hour alert. You could play cards; you could shoot the shit; you could watch all the soaps on TV. You could go a little crazy. You understood that a place so difficult to enter was also difficult to escape, and what had happened to the guys at the place they called “The Ghost Site” was proof of that.

The 1965 fire at silo 373-4 in Searcy, Arkansas—which housed one of the fifty-four Titan II intercontinental ballistic missiles deployed by the Air Force between 1963 and 1987—remains to this day the most lethal missile accident in American history. Although there’s some dispute as to how it started, according to the official Air Force report, a crew member was welding in the silo when his blowtorch nicked a nearby hydraulic line. The fluid caught fire, shooting up flames and sending smoke billowing through the facility. Within minutes, the fire had snuffed out much of the available oxygen. The lights went out, and in the darkness and confusion, many of the airmen who reached the escape hatch went the wrong way, descending deeper into the silo. Fifty-three of them—all but two—suffocated in the smoke. Many died clustered around the ladder to the hatch, where, after their bodies had been removed, their silhouettes remained visible, traced on the floor in soot.

Missile silos are creepy places by design, but 373-4 really did feel off to a number of the guys who worked there in subsequent decades. It freaked them out, these men who were used to working in freaky conditions. Things kept happening that they couldn’t explain. Lights would turn on for no reason; an elevator would arrive with no one on it. Today, they trade stories on blog posts and message boards, remembering how, in the morning, the mist at the site was as high as your waist; how, as you walked across the gravel topside, you’d swear you heard someone’s footsteps crunching behind you. At some point, someone painted the words “The Ghost Site” by hand over a mural of a haunted house on the silo’s blast door.

Today, many former Titan II sites aren’t indicated on any public map, but missile nerds have helpfully posted the coordinates of the silos online. This summer, I went out to site 373-4 to determine what, if anything, remained there to be seen. From Jacksonville, Arkansas, I plugged the coordinates into Google Maps and drove fifty miles through cattle farms until I arrived at a blue historical marker at the corner of a gravel road. The sign, across the street from a tractor repair shop, bore the fifty-three names of the men who died in 1965. But it revealed nothing of what caused their deaths, nor where they had died: the missile silo was some distance down the road, beyond a cattle guard and a NO TRESPASSING sign. Standing at an uncertain remove from the place it means to commemorate, the marker does little to conjure the nearness of the past. Mostly, it gestures at a lost material history—the disappearing architecture of the Cold War.

But disappearance isn’t the right word to describe the vanishing of places that were never quite visible to the public in the first place. Even when the sites were active, Soviet intelligence often had a more precise idea of where America’s land-based missiles were stationed than many of the people who lived alongside them. That irony points to the difficulty of memorializing a conflict that spanned forty years and yet had no active front—a war whose operations were undertaken in stealth or in secret. In recent years, a number of ventures have arisen that would seem to address this difficulty by offering up their own interpretations of America’s Cold War past. Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton has recently secured congressional approval to establish a National Cold War Center in his home state, at the former Eaker Air Force Base, where two B-52 bombers were placed on airborne alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In that same state, you can now book a $500-a-night stay at Titan Ranch, a Titan II silo that has been converted into a luxury Airbnb.

Both atomic attractions seem poised to participate in a venerable tradition: for more than half a century, Americans have engaged with the nuclear era primarily via triumphalist kitsch and cheap spectacle. Once, Vegas showgirls posed for photo shoots as “Miss Atomic Bomb”; today, influencers camp out in missile silos for clout. If all goes according to plan, the National Cold War Center will eventually be, in Cotton’s words, “a boon to local tourism”; its website promises “an immersive and authoritative experience.” It seems doubtful, however, that either the museum or Titan Ranch will capture the legacy of the state’s nuclear era as honestly as the ghost stories of the Titan II missileers. However apocryphal or embellished, their accounts are a reminder that the most immediate danger that Arkansans faced during the Cold War was not a strike launched from overseas but the Titan II missile itself.

Death Wears Bunny Slippers

Since the 1950s, the Air Force has maintained land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles as one leg of the “nuclear triad” that makes up the nation’s defense strategy. Along with strategic bombers and missile-armed submarines, these ICBMs were intended to allow the United States to hit dozens of targets in the Soviet Union at once, supposedly deterring a Soviet first strike with the promise of mutually assured destruction. The Titan II was able to launch in sixty seconds, a considerable advantage over the fifteen-minute launch time of its predecessor, the Titan I. It was developed in the early 1960s, in the wake of the USSR’s Sputnik satellite launch, when U.S. military strategists stoked fears that the Soviet Union had developed more advanced military technologies and a more powerful nuclear arsenal.

Inside the silo, she giggles as she struggles to open one of the six-thousand-pound blast doors.

In fact, this so-called missile gap was a fiction. In 1961, the Soviet Union had twenty-five nuclear missiles to the United States’ hundred, and its missile technology lagged far behind U.S. weapons advancement in virtually every respect. The Titan II missile—the largest warhead the nation ever deployed, twice as powerful as any other ICBM—was the real outcome of this fiction. It was installed in fifty-four silos throughout Kansas, Arizona, and Arkansas, comprising nearly 30 percent of the Air Force’s nuclear megatonnage, and remained in a state of readiness for nearly twenty-five years. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced plans to retire the Titan II ICBM system, citing safety concerns and its obsolescing technology; the last silo was taken off alert in 1987.

Some thirty years later, a man named G. T. Hill overheard a couple of old-timers talking about the silos in a barbershop in Searcy. Though he had served in Arkansas as a jet engine mechanic for the Air Force, he knew nothing about the Titan II program. When he got home, he did some Googling and soon found a silo for sale in Faulkner County, Arkansas. He bought the site for a reported $90,000. “I own the largest gun in the world, I just don’t have any ammo for it,” Hill now likes to say. But despite the Strangelovian soundbite, he’s ambivalent about nuclear weapons and unexcited about the prospect of armed conflict. Though he’ll allow that he’s a capitalist, as well as something of a libertarian, he would prefer to be “described rather than defined.” Whatever he is, he isn’t a joiner. Local churches have tried to recruit him; so have militias. As for the latter, he “just ghosts ’em,” he explains. “You don’t want to piss those people off.”

Hill is perhaps better known as DeathWearsBunnySlippers, his former handle on YouTube. Seven years ago, he began posting videos of his mission to convert a Titan II silo into a comfortable living space. At the time, Hill, who describes himself as “20 percent prepper,” had plans of converting the facility into a home. But during the course of the renovation—a process that took ten years and cost him roughly $500,000—he divorced and remarried. When it became clear that his second wife had no intention of living in a hole underground, he decided to turn the place into an Airbnb. In 2020, Titan Ranch fully opened for business. Since then, it has been a venue for all manner of events: teen girls’ birthday parties; Dungeons & Dragons summits; romantic couples’ getaways; Fallout fan meetups; even swingers’ parties—or so Hill infers, nonjudgmentally, by the pairs of ladies’ underwear that have turned up in unlikely places. Somewhat to my surprise, Titan Ranch hasn’t hosted many preppers, who are more inclined to purchase their own bunkers than plan sleepover parties at Hill’s. His guests, he muses, are drawn by the promise of having “something unique to put on social media.” During their stay, they may avail themselves of the silo’s many amenities: one king-size and two queen-size beds, two couches, a home theater system, iPad-controlled lighting, a waterfall shower, a full-size tub, two Keurig machines, and a fridge stocked with complimentary sodas. Outside, there’s cornhole and axe-throwing. Hill also offers drone-flying lessons on site.

Since starting his YouTube channel, he’s built a following of some sixty thousand people. (By contrast, the Titan Missile Museum in Arizona, another preserved Titan II silo equipped with a disarmed Titan II missile, has only a little over two thousand subscribers on YouTube despite valiant attempts to establish a web presence.) His videos remain of special interest to what you might call the “bunker community,” exemplified by TikTokers like Underground Living, who stitched one of Hill’s videos to argue with his assertion that missile silos make the best underground residences. (“Bunker beef,” jeered one of the commenters.) It’s more mainstream YouTubers, though, who have provided him with his best publicity. Most notably, the #vanlife couple Kara and Nate (3.9 million subscribers) stayed at Titan Ranch in 2021 and recorded a seventeen-minute video of themselves gamboling around the property.

That video, titled “SLEEPING IN A LUXURY DOOMSDAY BUNKER (full tour),” has since accumulated nearly two million views. “We’re headed down the road to the most unique Airbnb in the entire state,” enthuses Nate from the back of the couple’s pristinely renovated Sprinter van. He has distractingly white teeth and a sibling resemblance to his wife, Kara, who is pretty and dark-haired and speaks with a winsome hint of a country twang. Inside the silo, she giggles as she struggles to open one of the six-thousand-pound blast doors. On the second floor, Nate jumps up and down on the suspended floors like he’s on a trampoline. Topside, Hill escorts them around what there is to see from the surface. “You would never know that we are standing over a missile bunker right now,” Nate says, for the benefit of the camera. “Is the missile in there?” asks Kara, half-whispering. “It is not,” Hill says, perhaps a touch sadly. I wondered if that question had inspired him to expand his vision, for Titan Ranch now boasts a missile of its own: a one hundred-and-three-foot-long, ten-foot-wide replica of the Titan II, which Hill hopes to turn into another Airbnb.

When I visited this past summer, the missile was still under construction. But the exterior, as far as I could tell, was complete: a long metal tube narrowing to a black point, like a pencil, with “Air Force” printed down its length. It was an impressively exact replica of the actual Titan II, and yet, resting on its side on wooden stilts in a largely empty field, it had the appearance of an orphaned amusement park ride. Hill led the way up a pair of wooden steps into its interior. It was roasting in the Arkansas heat. There was little to see except pale wooden beams that we tiptoed across, wiping sweat from our brows and minding a number of enormous buzzing wasps. He directed my attention a few feet away, toward the missile’s nose, which he had outfitted with what he believed to be an authentic Titan II reentry vehicle. He pointed toward a greenish coil of metal at its tip: the actual trip wire, he explained, responsible for detonating a warhead almost six hundred times more powerful than the one used in Hiroshima. “I’m thinking of putting a king-size bed here,” he said thoughtfully.

Hill is mordantly aware of his place in the experience economy. “Like Disney World, I normally take you through the gift shop at the end,” he joked when we were back underground. Heaving open another blast door, he guided me into the long, dark, rusted-out tunnel that had once led to the missile chamber. It now housed a display of memorabilia: the mugs, T-shirts, and other merch that Hill assured me he wasn’t upselling. Most sported the words Titan Ranch in a serious font. Some featured a cartoon reaper illustrating Hill’s former YouTube handle, DeathWearsBunnySlippers—a reference to an old Air Force joke about how missileers expected they might be dressed when they unleashed Armageddon. “That’s an original,” he said, pointing to a white T-shirt that I was inspecting. A friend of his had found it at a garage sale. It looked soft with age, and featured a drawing of a rocket overlaid with text reading, “Where were you when Titan II blew? Have a blast in Damascus, Ark.”

Road to Damascus

Damascus is the site of the most famous accident associated with Titan II, an event that cast a much longer shadow than the fire at 373-4—not because it was more deadly but because it could have been. In 1980, at a silo about a thirty-minute drive from Titan Ranch, a missileer was performing routine maintenance on the missile when the socket on the wrench he was using fell off. He watched in horror as the head of the wrench, which weighed nine pounds, plummeted down seventy feet of the silo, bounced off the platform, ricocheted off the walls of the blast chamber, and pierced the metal skin of the missile like a bullet. Immediately, white clouds of fuel—the chemical Aerozine-50, which also pressurized and stabilized the missile—began to flood the blast chamber.

According to the 2013 book Command and Control by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, the local sheriff evacuated nearby civilians as Air Force command frantically attempted to control the leak. Nine hours later, the missile collapsed. The subsequent explosion destroyed the silo, killing an airman named David Livingston and launching the warhead out of the facility. It was found several hours later, intact, in a field. Had it detonated, the resultant explosion would have been about three times more powerful than all of the bombs dropped by all combatants during World War II.

In 2017,Command and Control was adapted into a documentary of the same name. It is one of many movies, all vaguely disaster-related, which Hill has supplied for his guests to watch in Titan Ranch’s enormous home theater. On Facebook, he posted a picture of Oppenheimer’s title card projected onto the silo’s walls. That film in particular has done much to revive popular interest in nuclear history and, with it, atomic tourism: in 2023, the Wall Street Journal featured Titan Ranch alongside other museums and tourist attractions like the Nevada Test Site and the Greenbrier Bunker in West Virginia. But it’s strange to think of Titan Ranch as a destination for nuke nerds, war voyeurs, or students of history, given that there is very little at Titan Ranch that invokes its history specifically. Indeed, this was by design: Hill avoided any explicit “military theme” in the silo, he explained, in the hopes of making it more “inclusive” for visitors seeking, in the language of his website, “a unique experience like no other.” Unique seems to be the most frequent adjective employed for Titan Ranch, whether by travel influencers on TikTok (“MOST UNIQUE STAY IN ARKANSAS”) or reviewers on Airbnb.

But absent that “military theme,” it was unclear what, exactly, people were paying to uniquely experience, other than to experience themselves having a unique experience. It was true that I was sleeping in the housing of one of the most destructive weapons ever made. And yet that reality felt curiously abstract, even as I was surrounded by it. The silo looked less like a weapons facility than a jungle gym: the spiral stairs, the bouncing floors, the escape tunnel all seemed like so much playground equipment. I didn’t feel like an intrepid tourist as much as I did a naughty child, playing in a place I didn’t belong. But even that feeling of gentle transgression quickly faded. After all, the space was an expensive, eccentric location for people to do what they would be doing anyway: producing and consuming content.

I was no exception. After I had tired of jumping up and down on the suspended floors, of admiring the beautiful stand-alone waterfall shower on the third floor (“Cold War chic,” in the words of its designer on Instagram), I padded down the spiral staircase to the home theater on the bottom level. I was too tired to watch all three hours of Oppenheimer, as Hill had jokingly suggested, and too missiled out for Command and Control, for that matter. I settled, instead, on watching a Netflix show about cheerleaders. Sipping from my complimentary Diet Coke, I watched with slack-jawed absorption as they kicked, flipped, and cried; daubed at their mascara; said, “Yes, ma’am”; dedicated their dancing to Jesus Christ; and performed their small, star-spangled part in the martial pageantry of American football. Projected on the whitewashed walls of the silo, their faces were as big as they’d be on any jumbotron, and I forgot where I was entirely. Such amnesia was the Titan Ranch’s most impressive—and most American—achievement.

Veterans of Domestic Wars

In 2012, historian Jon Wiener road-tripped across America to understand how, in the twenty years since it ended, the Cold War had faded almost completely from collective memory. Visiting a range of Cold War sites across the nation, including the Titan Missile Museum, Wiener discovered that public attempts to commemorate the conflict did so in decidedly conservative terms. It was primarily Republicans, Wiener writes in his resulting book, How We Forgot the Cold War, who had pushed to memorialize the Cold War, claiming the collapse of the Soviet Union as the moral and military triumph of the Reagan administration. But despite “immense efforts by conservatives to shape public memory,” he argues, “the public did not embrace a heroic story of the triumph of good over evil” that their Cold War monuments and museums offered. Republican-backed legislation to secure a National Cold War Museum had failed.

If there are any so-called victims of communism in Arkansas, they are surely outnumbered by those killed in that state by the country’s own nuclear arsenal.

In the twelve years since Wiener published his book, the Cold War has begun to feel less historically remote. The war in Ukraine has escalated tensions between Russia and NATO powers; Russia’s arsenal of battlefield nukes has put nuclear weapons in the news again; and America’s right-wing legislators, laying the groundwork for a new Cold War with China, have succeeded where their predecessors failed in spearheading new commemoration efforts. After Tom Cotton introduced a bill proposing the National Cold War Center in 2020, Rick Crawford, a Republican congressman also from Arkansas, extolled the museum in a press release for “remind[ing] us of the threat that communism poses.” But if there are any so-called victims of communism in Arkansas, they are surely outnumbered by those killed in that state by the country’s own nuclear arsenal. Though the Titan II has long since been decommissioned, many Titan vets believe the missile is killing them still.

Terry N.—who asked me not to use his last name, as he imagines that the military “can’t be too happy” with him for his efforts over the years—is the creator of the website Titan II Missile Veterans Health and Wellness, where he’s built a community of some 250 veterans and spouses who believe that their time working on the missile made them sick. He was only twenty-one years old when he started working on Titan II in 1975, and, perhaps like all guys that age, he wasn’t inclined to worry over his health. When his commanding officer would ask him to work a double shift—to spend forty-eight hours in the silo on alert—it wouldn’t have occurred to him to say no. Nor did it occur to him to think twice about why, exactly, he and the other guys were given a cooler full of bottled water to drive out to the missile bases, all of which had running water. While they drank from the bottles, they took water from the taps in the silos too, using it to make soup, or else drinking out of the eyewash station like it was a water fountain. “We were dumb,” Terry says, chuckling sadly.

In 1980, a year after his release from the Air Force, he collapsed. All the muscles in his body had begun to painfully and inexplicably spasm. For years—Terry was twenty-five when it began—these episodes would recur every few months. He sought help from Veterans Affairs but, as he recalls, was met with “glazed eyes from every VA doctor.” (The VA did not answer requests for comment.) He consulted oncologists, neurologists, and physical therapists to understand the source of the spasms, to no avail. Then, in 2003, his doctors discovered a small, calcified tumor in his lungs; in the subsequent years, he would be diagnosed with two more benign tumors in his hip and femur. Though he began to suspect that his condition resulted from toxic exposures during his years working on Titan II, “nobody could ever put it together,” he said. It wasn’t until he was referred to the VA’s War Related Illness and Injury Study Center in New Jersey that the “lights really went on.” There, the doctors acknowledged the possibility that his ill health was service related. While they offered emotional support, they had no medical solution.

Terry started his website around 2005. In 2013, he hired a lawyer and won a nearly twenty-year struggle to receive support from the VA for his illnesses. These days, he’s covered for most of them—his fibromyalgia, his depression, his tinnitus, his asthma—but not all. Since he won his appeal, he’s undergone surgery for a rare condition known as a spinal arachnoid web. His website is an attempt, in part, to assist other veterans in their struggles with the VA. He has posted documents he discovered in his research which, he believes, demonstrate the Air Force’s knowledge of, and culpability for, the illnesses that he and other Titan II vets have contracted in the years since their service. He’s also posted letters he’s received from other Titan II vets, as well as their widows. Most of them have been diagnosed with some form of cancer, or multiple cancers, along with muscular and immune problems.

As Thomas Novelly reported in a series of articles last year for Military.com, the Air Force has long overlooked evidence of cancer clusters among servicemen who work on missile bases. Recently, Danny Sebeck, an airman at Malmstrom Air Force Base, began gathering evidence that missileers, many of them as young as twenty-five, were contracting and dying from cancer at alarming rates. Sebeck himself had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2022. Though missileers had been appealing to the Air Force for decades to take their health claims seriously, Sebeck’s efforts proved more successful, and in recent years, the Air Force initiated its first health study of the missile community since 2005. This May, they published findings that PCBs—carcinogens banned in domestic manufacturing by the EPA since the 1970s—were present in seventy-one samples taken from active missile facilities and from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara, four of them at levels higher than the EPA threshold. The memo acknowledges that the Air Force is “unable to sample decommissioned sites for the Peacekeeper and Titan systems” but concludes that “PCB-containing components were likely used in those alert and control facilities.” (The Air Force Medical Service did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

To Terry, this finding was “a joke.” The memo doesn’t indicate whether the PCBs at decommissioned sites would have exceeded the EPA thresholds. The Air Force’s conclusions feel to him both like a statement of the obvious and a denial of the degree of danger to which he and other vets were exposed. The report also doesn’t mention any of the other hazardous chemicals—for instance, the pesticide Agent Orange, which was tested and manufactured in Arkansas—that Terry and other Titan II vets are convinced they handled during their service. Most of the vets I spoke to echoed Terry’s disappointment with the Air Force study, including Frank Gibson, who served on Titan II in Arizona in the 1980s. “It seems to me that they are saying what they think they need to say to acknowledge there were problems, but without taking any responsibility for the health problems that veterans have experienced as a result of exposure to those substances,” he wrote to me. The Air Force’s epidemiology review gathers data from 1976 through 2001, and they expect to have reviewed all the relevant data sets by next year. But Titan II vets are conscious of the fact that, for them, time is limited. “I’m a time bomb,” said Art Greenlee, who served on Titan II bases in Arkansas. “One of these things”—by which he meant either his prostate or his bladder cancer—“are going to kill me.”

By nature, war-related illnesses are hard to prove, and the etiology of cancer makes it especially so. It is, perhaps, the least spectacular way for a servicemember to die: over the course of months or years, countless doctors’ appointments, legal consultations, and skirmishes with the VA. Such suffering is implied but seldom shown in dramatic depictions of nuclear war. From The Day After to Oppenheimer, the image of the mushroom cloud has long served as a visual shorthand for the horrors of nuclear technology, as well as its most thrilling spectacle. Since the earliest days of the Cold War, as media scholars Ned O’Gorman and Kevin Hamilton have noted, the mushroom cloud has served as a metonym for state power. It proliferated throughout culture like a meme, spawning everything from women’s hairdos to the indelible imagery of Lyndon B. Johnson’s daisy ad during the 1964 presidential campaign. Today, it remains the Cold War’s most compelling filmic artifact. At the National Atomic Testing Museum in Nevada, visitors watch footage of nuclear explosions in an exhibit called the Ground Zero Theater. Presumably, the promise of the Trinity test is why so many Oppenheimer audiences shelled out to see a three-hour biopic in IMAX.

Yet this most enduring image of nuclear war is quite literally a bloodless one. The sublime horror of the mushroom cloud tells us nothing about the effect of nuclear technology on human bodies, nor does the culture of spectacle that remains the Cold War’s popular legacy. While the passing of time has ensured the safety of van-lifers filming content in old Titan sites, it’s done little for the health and safety of the vets who worked in them.

Fallout

Perhaps it is unsurprising that a weapons facility, even one with such a literally toxic legacy, has been absorbed so seamlessly into the experience economy. Why should the average selfie-snapping visitor to Titan Ranch feel themselves to be trivializing war, when even the Department of Defense denies that the Cold War was a war at all?

In recent years, some modest congressional efforts have allowed for greater recognition of Cold War veterans. Though they’ve long been excluded from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, they’re now welcomed into the American Legion. To date there is no nationally recognized Cold War service medal, only “Cold War Recognition Certificates,” which were created by the 1998 National Defense Authorization Act. In 2022, however, Massachusetts Democratic congressman Jim McGovern secured approval for an Atomic Veterans Commemorative Service Medal—a euphemistic honor that elides the name of the war in which most “atomic veterans” served. Practically speaking, their status remains ambiguous, which only heightens the difficulty they face in receiving support from military institutions. Terry noted the skepticism he encountered from VA doctors when he described his history of toxic exposure as a “peacetime veteran.” Cold War veterans are also only selectively included in the category of “protected veterans” that offers employment and hiring protections.

A National Cold War Center will presumably do little to change this state of affairs. After all, there is a fundamental contradiction in our popular mythology of the Cold War: as a military triumph, on the one hand, and a triumph of global peacekeeping on the other; as “the war that saved the world,” in the language of the museum, and also a war that was heroically prevented. This contradiction would seem to arise from one of the favored narratives about the nuclear arsenal: that a weapon like the Titan II served as a “keeper of the peace” and “kept the wolf at bay,” in the words of its manufacturer, the Martin Marietta Corporation, which later merged with the Lockheed Corporation to form Lockheed Martin. This justification of the nuclear program necessarily minimizes the contributions of the people it employed and erases the harm done to them by the American nuclear arsenal. Indeed, the National Cold War Center’s framing of the conflict as the one that “saved the world” makes light of the enormous human cost in the state where it’s located. Arkansas is home to the largest population of Marshallese people outside the islands, some of whom have been in permanent exile since the United States’ above-ground atomic testing there. And it is also the place where many service members, unprotected by Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations for labor safety, died in accidents or contracted lethal illnesses at work.

A deeper reckoning with the sacrifices of America’s Cold War veterans would call into question the moral necessity of a war that Tom Cotton and other conservatives are so eager to romanticize. Such a reckoning would also probe the logic of deterrence itself. As historian Richard Rhodes has noted in this magazine, Americans have broadly accepted the idea that a strong nuclear arsenal is necessary to ward off a first strike by other nuclear powers. Yet America’s actual nuclear strategy has long prioritized winning a nuclear war over preventing it, as Daniel Ellsberg argued in his 2017 memoir The Doomsday Machine. “Deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack—or responding to such an attack—has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations,” he writes. Better known as the whistleblower behind the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg also worked for years at the RAND Corporation alongside Herman Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War, who became infamous for his insistence that a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union was survivable. The purported inspiration for Dr. Strangelove, he served as one of many architects of the United States’ nuclear strategy.

Kahn died in 1983, shortly before Carl Sagan, in collaboration with a team of scientists, published research suggesting that even a relatively contained nuclear war, “in which a mere 100 megatons were exploded, less than one percent of the world arsenals,” could trigger a devastating nuclear winter. Yet Kahn’s influence endures. Buoyed by his hawkish optimism, Ellsberg writes, the United States developed its nuclear arsenal “into a first-strike force,” which is what remains in place today. It’s in service of this destructive technology that missileers continue to grow sick.

As a veteran himself, G. T. Hill holds the Titan II vets in high esteem. He’s hosted two reunions for them at Titan Ranch and expressed hope that, by doing so, he has helped them achieve something like “closure.” By saving the silo from ruin, he’s surely rescued a small part of their past. And yet the site, by his design, has transformed nearly beyond recognition the place they once knew. To enter into that place was to enter another world—a “machine world,” as one vet described it to me, where every surface threatened to “cut or bruise” you; a place where more than fifty men could suffocate in a matter of minutes. I wondered if seeing another silo, however destroyed, might give me a better glimpse of that world, and to that end, Hill generously offered to take me to a semi-excavated site nearby.

Careening past cattle farms in Hill’s black pickup truck, we spoke of his kids, his neighbors, his ideas of how to best survive a zombie apocalypse. Then he slowed to a stop in an overgrown field, where wooden steps down into the silo were visible through the tall grass. After clearing some of the weeds, Hill took out a gas gauge—just in case, he explained. The first time he went into his own silo, he inhaled so much methane his voice changed pitch. “It’s like a shipwreck down there,” he warned. We descended several stories into the cramped, concrete entrance chamber, cushioned by a soft layer of mud. When I braced myself against the frame of the blast door, flakes of rust gave way beneath my hand. I peered into the darkness; another blast door hung open, giving way into a still greater darkness within. The two of us lingered at the entrance without venturing further. Certainly now it seemed too perilous to enter, as indeed it always had been.


This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.