A fire-engine-red refrigerator marks the open kitchenette, which stands on one side of a sitting room anchored by a central concrete pillar. Inside the Airbnb, the concrete is obscured by drywall and wooden partitions, the walls and wainscot done in military browns and tans. Like the silo, the control center is a concrete cylinder, this one 44 feet across. Behind us, at the end of a 100-foot tunnel broken up by more blast doors, stands the empty silo, an immense vertical tube lit by floodlights. Two stories below the desert, we face a two-ton blast door that protects the former control center. He escorts me past framed photographs of missile sites in various stages of construction. Bernal opens its steel door a concrete staircase leads underground. Close by, a low triangular structure seems to disappear into the earth. When I arrive at Site 4, the silo’s doors are closed. An American flag flaps in the constant wind. As I pull onto a dirt track just off the highway, I spot oil derricks at the northwestern edge of the Permian Basin and smell raw petroleum in the air. There are flying saucer pictures and signs everywhere and little green men at gas stations and outside pecan orchards. You can’t swing a dead extraterrestrial around here without hitting a reminder of the UFO that supposedly crashed nearby in 1947. The fact that they are able to live here is amazing.Earlier that day, a string of telephone poles are the tallest things I pass while driving east from Roswell, about 20 miles away. "The history alone is overwhelming," said Polly Figueroa. Several former Atlas sites have been converted into private homes by buyers interested in something different to live in. In 1965, the billion-dollar Atlas-F missile program was replaced by more dependable, less expensive Minuteman missiles. One of America’s deterrents were the Atlas missile sites in Nebraska. The Cuban nuclear crisis was averted when the Soviet Union backed down and dismantled its missile sites. Because you aren’t going to live after it.” "If I were you, if you heard there was warheads coming our way. "The launch crews did not know if we were going to have to go to war," Duffy said.ĭuffy called home to tell his family what to do if the Soviets launched nuclear missiles. military on high alert after learning Russia was building nuclear launch sites on Cuba. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and placed the U.S. "Most of the whole time I was here I was in a missile silo," Duffy said. The Atlas-F nuclear missile could be ready for launch in 15 minutes.Įighty-year-old Dan Duffy of Lincoln was a technician on one of the Air Force launch crews that manned the Atlas sites at the height of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The steel framework within the silo equals the height of an 18 story building and weighed about 1,500 tons. Through three more blast doors is the massive Atlas silo itself, now mostly filled with water. They have, really, I mean, all the basics that you would need." "So they've got hot and cold running water, and they've got an electric furnace as well as a wood burning stove. "They've got two wells to fill up four 500 gallon water tanks," Mike Figueroa said. The doors open into the two-story living area that used to be the missile site’s command and control center. At the thickest point it looks like it’s probably close to a foot.," Mike Figueroa said. Thirty-feet underground we pass through the first of five steel doors built to protect the Air Force launch team from nuclear attack. Some of the hottest times in the Cold War." "Lincoln had some of the first missile silos ever built in the United States. "Basically when Atlas missiles came along it was this brand new science that the Air Force really took and ran with to supplement their bomber force," Branting said.īranting says the former Lincoln Air Force Base commanded 12 Atlas Missile sites in Nebraska. Cold War historian Rob Branting, a native of Lincoln, is supervisor of North Dakota’s Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Historic Site.
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