25 comments
Upshot: Probably still has 2 nukes pointed at it. Better to have a front row seat than be a “survivor”.
That should be in the listing. Pros: immediate painless surprise death in case of nuclear war. Cons: damp, bit of a fixer upper.
If not a direct hit, more likely an extended entombment after the entrance stairwell collapses and blocks the blast door. Maybe that's the second reason missileers carried sidearms.
Russia knows the sites were decommissioned, so it wouldn't waste a missile on it.
Even if some people know, are we sure if it was disseminated across all Classified channels up and down and then the people in charge of the lists updated them? :p
It also means they could be the one who purchases it!
Doubt it. Decommissioning silos is transparent as part of treaty verifications.
I imagine getting it operational again would take years of very obvious work.
I imagine getting it operational again would take years of very obvious work.
Why would Russia or whoever waste two nukes on a silo purported to be nuke proof in the middle of nowhere?
There are two bits of context you need to understand this.
First: Early nuclear missiles weren't very accurate - you don't have to be very accurate when your target is the size of Moscow. A missile silo is a much smaller target!
So AIUI missile silos were hardened to survive a nuclear bomb landing 500m away - but they wouldn't survive a direct hit.
Second: There was a theory, at one point in the cold war, that one side could launch a surprise attack that struck and disabled the other side's nuclear weapons. Or at least, disabled a large enough fraction that the counterattack was survivable.
This was seen as winning. Or as close to winning as you can get, in a nuclear war. And it was seen as relatively more ethical than targeting cities.
The jargon for this is "counterforce" or "disarming" strike [1] and it was part of the rationale for having a ridiculous number of bombs - if you have enough bombs to destroy the world 10 times over, you can destroy the world even if 90% of your bombs have been destroyed in a surprise attack.
Later in the cold war other technologies were developed - high precision guidance, submarine launched missiles, and missiles with multiple warheads. Between them they made a disarming strike seem unlikely to work. But on the other hand there are still an awful lot of missiles around and they gotta be targeted somewhere. If you'd already sent a dozen at the pentagon and a dozen at the white house, why not send some of the remainder at a few nuclear silos?
Of course, you might well say this all seems pretty unlikely. A nuclear war? In this day and age? But people who think that probably aren't in the market for a disused nuclear bunker, except as a historical curiosity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterforce
First: Early nuclear missiles weren't very accurate - you don't have to be very accurate when your target is the size of Moscow. A missile silo is a much smaller target!
So AIUI missile silos were hardened to survive a nuclear bomb landing 500m away - but they wouldn't survive a direct hit.
Second: There was a theory, at one point in the cold war, that one side could launch a surprise attack that struck and disabled the other side's nuclear weapons. Or at least, disabled a large enough fraction that the counterattack was survivable.
This was seen as winning. Or as close to winning as you can get, in a nuclear war. And it was seen as relatively more ethical than targeting cities.
The jargon for this is "counterforce" or "disarming" strike [1] and it was part of the rationale for having a ridiculous number of bombs - if you have enough bombs to destroy the world 10 times over, you can destroy the world even if 90% of your bombs have been destroyed in a surprise attack.
Later in the cold war other technologies were developed - high precision guidance, submarine launched missiles, and missiles with multiple warheads. Between them they made a disarming strike seem unlikely to work. But on the other hand there are still an awful lot of missiles around and they gotta be targeted somewhere. If you'd already sent a dozen at the pentagon and a dozen at the white house, why not send some of the remainder at a few nuclear silos?
Of course, you might well say this all seems pretty unlikely. A nuclear war? In this day and age? But people who think that probably aren't in the market for a disused nuclear bunker, except as a historical curiosity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterforce
Another bit of context - some responses on the internet weren't intended to be entirely literal in their nature.
Isn't HN amazing. Last week I learned about Countervalue : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countervalue
I always forget that we're "Apes in trousers"[1] until I read comments like this.
1. I just read this term in Lessons of History (Durrant)
1. I just read this term in Lessons of History (Durrant)
Still better to point them at NZ, to get the capitalistic overlords hiding there :-)
Why would that be? Don't you think "they" have better uses for their spare nukes?
And intelligence agencies updating the list of target objects?
Funny that this is a selling point. “How are you preparing for the end?”
“I’m prepared to go out in the first wave, you?”
Probably not but it still beats any large city that likely has about a dozen or more with their name on it.
One might be tempted to think "oh, it's concrete, I'll hose it down". But after recently reading up on it a bit, some of the missiles had extremely harmful propellants, and if that leaked (which chances are it did), that'd basically be a hazmat site.
It reads like Atlas missiles used kerosene and liquid oxygen. Nothing like hydrazine, etc.
The APU on atlas missiles used ethylene oxide to fuel the turbine, you don't need hydrazine to get toxic aerospace chemical exposure. I would also bet all the money in my pocket those structures are chock full of asbestos and lead.
They don’t have any pics inside the main silo, just in the upper control room and the entry to the silo. It could be full of water.
I understand they're usually filled with rubble or concrete as part of decomissioning. Entrances to the office bit are usuall bulldozed.
Free swimming pool included!
No, No. Algae-farm for fuel and food. Yummie!
Welcome to the Kombucha Pit!
Somebody on Twitter mentioned that there is likely a lot of asbestos, and other environmental issues that the buyer would be responsible for remediating. I don’t know enough to know if that’s correct or not but it seems reasonable.
It's basically dry, though god only knows what the bottom of the silo itself looks like.