Titan II's were capable of being fired from within their silos. This was a huge advancement in technology as previous ICBM's such as the Atlas-F and Titan I, although housed in silos, had to be raised to the surface, fueled and then launched. That process could take as long as 30-minutes. The Air Force wanted that time trimmed since technology at the time only provided for warning time of less than 15-20 minutes. The Titan II used storable propellents and could be fired within 60-seconds from within the silo.
The Titan II's were designed for a 10-year life span but were in service for more than twice as long between 1963 and 1987. In 1981 President Reagan announced the retirement of the Titan II program and by 1987 they were out of service as offensive ICBM when treaties with the Soviet Union kicked in. Between 1986 and 1988 Titan II's served as military and civilian launch vehicles. All twelve NASA Gemini capsules were launched by Titan II's. A Titan II modified with a 3rd stage, called a Titan 23B, were used to launch over a dozen military reconnaissance satellites.
Of the existing 63 Missile silos, only two still exist. One at Vandenberg AFB and the one we toured south of Tucson. Only the silo at the museum has an actual Missile in it. And it is an actual Titan II Missile, minus the fuel, electronics and warhead of course. The treaty between the US and USSR required the museum to allow Soviet spy satellites to verify that the Missile had been rendered useless. To do that a transparent dome was constructed over the Missile and a large hole was cut into the side of the Missile Although the Missile in the silo is real and not a mock-up, it had never been fueled and was used to train Missile crews at Vandenberg AFB.
Our tour guide was a former commander at a Titan II silo commander. The tour encompassed about 90-minutes and included a complete tour of the topside of the complex plus a visit to the control room where a simulated launch took place. The guide related several stories about incidents occurring at the silo. The silos were initially guarded by Air Police but the Air Force, tired of the expense and manpower requirements, developed an automatic security system called "Tipsies". Operating on the Doppler principal, the Tipsies 'guarded' the site sending an audible warning to the underground crew when an intruder was detected. Upon detection the crew would report to a command center who would then dispatch Air Police to investigate. Initially there were tons of false alarms because the Tipsies would detect rabbits, birds and other wildlife. But once the system was tuned it operated pretty well.
One night a Tipsie alarm went off and the Air Police were dispatched. Upon arrival the Air Police found a truck outside the wire enclosure and several men inside the enclosure throwing bales over the barbed wire fence. This was back in the mid 60's when Tucson was considerably smaller than it is today and the silo was way out in the boonies. Turned out that the bales were bales of marijuana that had been dropped there by mistake by airborne drug smugglers. That was the first and only time a Titan II silo had been 'bombed'.
I asked a question concerning how the Air Force determined if a crew would actually launch their Missile if the order ever came. The guide related a story about the time a false alarm was broadcast by NORAD (North American Air Defense Command). During the height of the cold war it was common for the defense condition of the Missile corps to be at level 2 (DEFCON 2...there are five DEFCON levels with DEFCON 5 being a shooting war). At one point in the middle of the night an alert message came through raising the DEFCON level from 2 to 4! The crews who staffed the silos didn't live in a vacuum and knew that there was no reason for this...no 'Cuban Missile Crisis' type of confrontation was going on at the time. The crew, and their commander, our tour guide, were so rattled by this message that they were unable to copy the entire message, missing the information on targeting data, launch times and authorization codes! An alert message is normally repeated twice but in this case it was sent only once before a correction message returning the DEFCON level to 2 was sent. Even though the DEFCON 2 message had been sent in error, the next day there were a lot of crew commanders around the country who had to explain why they were unable to copy the entire alert message.
Our other tour guide was a retired Air Force communications officer who flew on the Looking Glass aircraft. Looking Glass is the code name for an airborne command center operated by the US Air Force and which provides control of all U.S. nuclear forces in the event that ground-based command is destroyed or communications with the ground command center is knocked out. This fellow, George Birch, who turned out to be a ham (AD7DH), related a story about NORAD. During the cold war the U.S. and it's allies monitored the Soviet's launch sites by many means...radar, manned aircraft and to a certain extent, satellites. One night NORAD's ability to detect a launch became a bit hyper-accurate as it confused the rising moon with a Missile launch causing some brief consternation. Someone asked him what checks and balances were in place to keep a president who had gone nuts from ordering a launch of nuclear weapons. He smiled and responded with a single word...'none'.
During the tour the guide was pointing out many of the radio antennas that dot the grounds. At this point Mr. Birch turned to me and asked if I had driven my HF (high frequency for you non hams) equipped vehicle to the museum. I was taken aback. How the heck did he know I was a ham because we hadn't been introduced at this point. After a few speechless seconds I responded that yes, I was a ham and no, I didn't have HF in my Jeep. He smiled and said he knew I was a ham and then pointed at my t-shirt. I had forgotten I had put on my Dayton HamVenton t-shirt that morning. We both had a good laugh about that.
<For the hams in the audience: There is a large, a very large, HF discone antenna in front of the museum (see photos). This is a working antenna and is available for local and visiting hams to use courtesy of the Green Valley Amateur Radio Club. One of the Missile silo HF antennas is plaquered as a 'Collins Hardened HF Antenna'. I'm assuming that this was manufactured by the same Collins Radio Company we all know but I could not confirm as Mr. Birch had left the grounds by the time I found this display. We now rejoin our regularly scheduled program already in progress.>
The underground control complex is made up of the silo and related work areas, the control room and crew's quarters. We didn't get to see the crew's quarters but we're told that they were pretty spartan. The entire underground complex is divided into two areas, hardened and un-hardened. Those areas are separated by a last door capable of withstanding a pressure wave up to 300 pounds psi. Once you cross into the hardened area through a massive yet perfectly balanced blast door one of the first things you notice is that everything...everything...is cushioned with springs, some of them huge. All of the light fixtures, equipment cabinets...even the floors...are cushioned with springs.
Redundancy is everywhere. There were multiple radio antennas, some 'permanently' installed while others could be raised like periscopes from the control center underground. The antennas fell into two different types, HF (high frequency or short-wave) and VHF/UHF for more localized communications. There are multiple antennas for each band. In addition there is a buried long-wave antenna designed to receive (but not transmit) signals from submerged submarines. There were 4-members to a Missile crew, two officers and two enlisted. Each crew worked a 24-hour shift and averaged 8-shifts per month. The typical training period ran for approximately 10-months.
While we were looking at the exhibits inside the small museum we saw all sorts of artifacts from the period including uniforms, shoulder patches, videos and the like. Seemingly out of place was a movie poster for 'Star Trek - First Contact'. Portions of that movie were filmed at the silo.
