In case you are wondering, a 9 Mega-ton warhead, dropped on Los Angeles, would completely destroy everything in a 30 mile radius from the epicenter, depending on how the warhead was set to explode, either in an air burst or ground burst. An air burst would produce third-degree burns (blackened, charred flesh) at a distance of 30 miles. In effect, one of these things falls out of the sky and a major city would cease to exist.
As I toured the missile silo and launch room, I felt personally connected to this tragic piece of history. I was born in 1958 and grew up during the cold war. While I was too young to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the legacies of my formative years was the cold war rhetoric that led to dogmatic debacles like the increased United States involvement in the Viet Nam war. The "Duck and Cover" movies that seem so ridiculous now, mostly because they were ridiculous then, were part of the crazed thinking that marks that era. The logic that bred educational films for kids that taught us to duck under our desks in case of a nuclear attack was the same logic that had brought us the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction.
By the time the Titan II missiles were retired they were obsolete, eclipsed by missiles with names like Minuteman, Trident and my favorite, the Peacekeeper. But being obsolete did not make the Titan any less devastating. Even though not one of these missiles was ever launched in anger by either side, the effects of the cold war caused irreparable damage to both Russia and the United States, bankrupting the former, nearly bankrupting the later and expending the moral capital of both.
I spent a good bit of this evening researching the economic cost of the cold war. In the next entry, I will try to outline the enormous, unimaginable amount of money that were consumed by the obsession and madness of the cold war.
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