Titan Missile Museum

Twenty-five miles south of Tucson, in the desert outside Sahuarita, a museum preserves the machinery of deterrence — and means it literally. The Titan Missile Museum, Air Force Facility Missile Site 8, Complex 571-7, went on alert in 1963 and stood ready for more than two decades before deactivation in 1984. It is the only place in the country where visitors can see a fully preserved intercontinental ballistic missile still in its silo.

Fifty-four Titan II sites once stood on alert across the United States. All were demolished after deactivation except two — this one and 571-3. In 1994, the site was declared a National Historic Landmark. It is now run by the nonprofit Arizona Aerospace Foundation.

The missile is 103 feet of Titan II — the largest operational land-based nuclear weapon the United States ever deployed. It carried a single W53 warhead yielding nine megatons. The warhead and fuel are gone; the dummy reentry vehicle on top has a prominent hole cut into it to prove the point. Under a US-USSR agreement, the silo doors are permanently blocked from opening more than halfway.

Underground, steel-reinforced concrete walls run eight feet thick in places, and three-ton blast doors seal each section from the next. The guided tour descends into a three-level Launch Control Center, continues through the cableways, and reaches level two of the eight-level silo — close enough to the missile to take in what that engineering actually meant. The crew who served here never knew their programmed targets, but Complex 571-7's designated target at closure was "Target Two," still classified, assumed to be somewhere in the former Soviet Union, designated for a ground burst. A hardened facility. Probably another silo.

The NPS puts it plainly: heightening the threat of nuclear war, or preventing Armageddon, depending on your point of view. Come down and decide for yourself.