March 11, 2008
Four Minute Warning
My other touristy stop in Tucson was the Titan Missile Museum, the only remaining Titan II silo in the country. It's a fascinating and unsettling relic of the Cold War. The tour took a little over an hour and provided a look at the outside of the facility, the bunker & command center, and the ICBM itself. The guide provided a great deal of information on the facility, which -- eerie as it is -- is an engineering feat. He also walked us through the process that would have occurred in order for a launch.
The Wikipedia pages give a pretty good overview. For more pictures, check out this News.com photo essay. You might also be interested in last year's New York Times story on "atomic tourism". Finally, trekkies should note that part of Star Trek VIII was filimed at the silo.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these Cold War sites is their simple tangibility. It's one thing to talk about game theory and the "rationality" of mutual assured destruction, to comb through historical details of the Cold War, or to shake your head over nuclear near-misses. It's quite another to see and touch the physical proof of how close the USA and USSR truly came to ending civilization. (It's also worth mentioning that there is still an abundance of warheads and other nuclear material still sitting around -- enough to create 300,000 bombs. It is dangerous to speak of the nuclear threat in the past tense; I shouldn't do it.)
One thing that struck me while visiting the museum was the almost unthinkable number of security measures and failsafes designed to prevent sabotage, accidental launches, and the like. It was very apparent that the weakest link was not the ICBMs, the facilities that housed them, or the launch crews. Instead, it was the president of the United States and his close advisors. It would have been nearly impossible for the missiles in this particular facility to be launched without direct order of the president (although I can't say the same for other launch sites like submarines).
When you think about some of the commanders-in-chief we've had during the last sixty years or so (and their political and military advisors), it's very disconcerting. Just the other day, I linked to a clip with one of those classic lines from Dr. Strangelove: "Now then, Dmitri. You know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb. The bomb, Dmitri. The hydrogen bomb." It's funny because it's true: the fate of civilization was (is) in the hands of a few politicians, whose sanity and "rationality" was (is) difficult to guage.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Wired published an article that claims the following:
Frustrated, Nixon decided to try something new: threaten the Soviet Union with a massive nuclear strike and make its leaders think he was crazy enough to go through with it. His hope was that the Soviets would be so frightened of events spinning out of control that they would strong-arm Hanoi, telling the North Vietnamese to start making concessions at the negotiating table or risk losing Soviet military support.
Codenamed Giant Lance, Nixon's plan was the culmination of a strategy of premeditated madness he had developed with national security adviser Henry Kissinger. The details of this episode remained secret for 35 years and have never been fully told. Now, thanks to documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, it's clear that Giant Lance was the leading example of what historians came to call the "madman theory": Nixon's notion that faked, finger-on-the-button rage could bring the Soviets to heel.
Lovely.
(The title of this post comes from the UK's four minute warning. See also: 1, 2)