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There were nuclear missile silos in New Mexico!
Happy happy joy joy!
For those of you who may not know this about me, I love missile silos. There is a Titan missile silo south of Tucson, AZ that is the only one in the world -- all of the others were destroyed to comply with a SALT treaty, this one was preserved for a museum, with the permission of the USSR.
We have a new guy at work, and we were BSing, and he mentioned driving up north of where I live and seeing missiles sitting on the ground. They were driving off-road, and apparently they stumbled upon a silo being deactivated. A quick Yahoo search for "New Mexico Missile Silos" reaped immediate hits.
Apparently there was an airforce base near Roswell, NM. It closed in the early/mid 60's, but it was the home to a dozen or so Atlas silos. The Atlas was an early ICBM that carried a small nuke warhead, the rocket was later used to shoot John Glen into orbit. It was rendered obsolete by the Titan rocket, which also had the advantage of being able to be launched from within the silo: the Atlas had to be lifted out of the silo, fueled, then launched.
Anyway, now I'm going to have to learn more about the base and plan a weekend excursion up there, hopefully without getting arrested for trespassing. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_silo
http://www.579sms.com/
http://www.infiltration.org/abandoned-roswell.html
For those of you who may not know this about me, I love missile silos. There is a Titan missile silo south of Tucson, AZ that is the only one in the world -- all of the others were destroyed to comply with a SALT treaty, this one was preserved for a museum, with the permission of the USSR.
We have a new guy at work, and we were BSing, and he mentioned driving up north of where I live and seeing missiles sitting on the ground. They were driving off-road, and apparently they stumbled upon a silo being deactivated. A quick Yahoo search for "New Mexico Missile Silos" reaped immediate hits.
Apparently there was an airforce base near Roswell, NM. It closed in the early/mid 60's, but it was the home to a dozen or so Atlas silos. The Atlas was an early ICBM that carried a small nuke warhead, the rocket was later used to shoot John Glen into orbit. It was rendered obsolete by the Titan rocket, which also had the advantage of being able to be launched from within the silo: the Atlas had to be lifted out of the silo, fueled, then launched.
Anyway, now I'm going to have to learn more about the base and plan a weekend excursion up there, hopefully without getting arrested for trespassing. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_silo
http://www.579sms.com/
http://www.infiltration.org/abandoned-roswell.html