Standing Watch: Deer Park’s Atlas ICBM

By

Wally Lee Parker

I

… there were rumors …

            The rumors started in the summer of 1958 — rumors saying inquiries about large tracts of land around the municipal airport were being made — rumors saying government surveyors were crawling all over the Deer Park area, taking measurements and asking questions.

            Something big was going on.

            By summer's end the rumors were saying the military planned to build a multi-million dollar missile base close to Deer Park, with lots of new jobs for the locals.

            Deer Park and Clayton were ripe for rumors.  Just a year before, one of the area's major employers, the Clayton brick plant, had shut down.  Any rumor suggesting a chance for economic growth was worth grasping.

            Everyone in the country was nervous.  During the closing months of 1957, the entire nation had been shaken by three troubling events.  For several years the Navy's Vanguard satellite project had promised that the world's first "artificial moon" would be launched in 1958 — and would be American.  But in October of '57, and again in November, the Russians orbited satellites.  America's spirit was bruised again in early December when the much-publicized Vanguard rocket blew up during a test.  

Doctor Edward Teller, creator of the American hydrogen bomb, described this set of events as a "technological Pearl Harbor".  Doctor Teller wasn't just speaking of the damage to American pride.  The rockets that launched the Sputniks were military, and what was shot into orbit could be dropped back to earth.  Satellites or bombs, the Russian's could do either.  No place was safe.

            Unlike the average citizen, steeped in the myth of American technological superiority, not everyone was surprised by Russia's capabilities.  Farsighted scientific, military, and political leaders in Russia and America had understood since the close of World War II that topping a long-range rocket with a nuclear warhead would create the ultimate weapon.  Like the German V-2, once such a device began clawing its way out of the atmosphere, nothing on this Earth could stop it.  While Russian scientists, when speaking of massive "transatlantic rockets", were listened to by the Soviet version of the military/industrial complex, in America such visionaries were fighting an uphill battle.
            In 1946 the Air Force initiated an on-off relationship with a company called Consolidated-Vultee — contracting with them to study and develop systems for long-range rockets.  Over the years, Vultee came up with two exceptionally innovative concepts.

            First was the "steel balloon" design.  Intended to save weight, this design did away with the need for a nose to tail framework.  Rather it pressurized the rocket's vertically stacked fuel tanks — much like blowing up an inner tube — to make them rigid.

            Second was the stage-and-a-half design.  The rocket would lift-off with all its engines firing.  Then, part way through the powered portion of the flight, some of the rocket engines and their associated assemblies would shut down and jettison, again reducing weight.

            In 1951, the inner circles of government, stimulated by a growing suspicion that eventual conflict with a technologically advanced Soviet Union was probable, began to become serious about intercontinental ballistic missiles.  That seriousness was reinforced in 1953 when the Russians, less than a year after Americans exploded the world's first hydrogen device, exploded a hydrogen bomb of their own — a device that was actually more scientifically sophisticated, and usable as a rocket delivered weapon, then the research device the Americans had detonated.

            By 1954, a flood of classified reports regarding Russian capabilities and intent, finally forced the government to act.  The decision was made to build a workable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system as soon as possible.  Certainly before the end of the decade — the point at which those privy to that secret intelligence expected the Russians to have a deployable long range missile.

            Since the United States needed a workable system quickly, it was decided all the parts — rockets, warheads, launch systems, guidance systems, transport systems, and support systems — would have to be developed at the same time.  Often several companies, using different approaches, were contracted to solve the same problem.  The first fully developed solution would be fitted into the system, with development and improvements continuing even after the missile became operational.

            The last decade's worth of missile research needed to be pulled into one place.  As this was being done, many members of the original Consolidated-Vultee design team found themselves again working on the project — this time under their company's new name, Convair Astronautics.

            By 1955, the general appearance and overall performance expectations of the Atlas had been solidified.  All that was left was to build it, test it, and then keep reworking the system until it functioned as intended.

            In the summer of 1958, as a workable system began to emerge, the Army Corps of Engineers started looking for land to site missile bases — looking for land before the design of those bases had been finalized.  And one place they were looking was Deer Park.

            In the second week of January 1959, the Deer Park Tribune announced that the rumors that began in the summer of `58 were no longer rumors.  The Washington, D.C. office of congressman Walt Horan had called a press release in to the local newspaper saying the Air Force was indeed considering the local airport as a possible missile site.

            The plan called for three missile bases, with each base containing three missiles.  Tentative sites for those bases would be near the towns of Davenport, Deer Park, and in the Long Lake area — with Fairchild Air Force Base as the hub.

            The peak of Dunns Mountain, located about eight miles west by southwest of Deer Park, was also to be purchased, presumably for some type of air defense or missile tracking device.  The actual function of this proposed mountaintop installation remained secret.

            Information obtained from a land surveyor suggested the Air Force was interested in a 250 acre tract, at least part of it overlaying a portion of the existing Deer Park airport.  But the town council had yet to be approached by anyone from the government with any official proposal — meaning that the council, like everyone else, was still in the dark.

            In the January article, the Tribune quoted Congressman Horan as saying the Atlas site would be "a big boost to the town of Deer Park".  While the hope of jobs created by a continuing military presence lifted spirits, the joke of the day was that the town would "boom" in more ways than one — since the missile base would surely become a Soviet target.

            Located about two miles east of downtown Deer Park, the airport had three paved runways laid out in a triangle, with the tips overlapping.  The west runway lay in a true north-south direction.  The other two slanted inward, to cross over each other to the east.

            It was this eastern portion of the triangle that raised a few eyebrows when, a month later, a "civilian" from the Army Corps of Engineers asked the city council to sign a "right of entry" so preliminary construction could begin at the airport.  It was then that the city council was shown a Corps of Engineers map, dated October, 1958, outlining a 20 acre block on top of the southeast/northeast runway intersection as the missile base proper, and another 250 surrounding acres as restricted military space.

            The town's mayor, Earl Mix, told the representative that he wasn't signing anything until the government explained its intention of ruining Deer Park's municipal airport by sitting the missile base on top of it.

            The council decided to act. Letters of protest went out to the Air Force Chief of Staff and every national and state legislator the council could think of.  The city's Chamber of Commerce did likewise.

            In the second week of March, to discuss the issue, the Air Force sent Colonel R. H. Farwell of the Ballistic Missile Division, and eight other Air Force officers, plus four men from the Army Corps of Engineers, into a meeting with Earl Mix and two city councilmen.  Apparently unimpressed by this display of "overwhelming force", Mayor Mix told the military that the city had two other nearby tracts of land — one 400 acres, another 600 — and would be willing to sell any part or all of those for a missile site.  But the airport was too important to the city to be negotiated away.

            The Air Force relented, and agreed to look at the other properties.

            When asked why the Air Force had its sights specifically on the airport, Colonel Farwell said the military was originally looking for a thousand acres of level land.  The land around Deer Park's airport was perfect for the military's needs.  As requirements solidified, the amount of land needed was reduced, and the original acreage was shrunk down to its center — the airport itself.  He went on to say that the airport's potential value to the city hadn't been taken into account during the plan's development.

            By mid April, the military had released its latest plan revisions.  The number of missiles per site had shrunk from three to one, while the number of sites in the Fairchild complex had expanded from three to nine.  Deer Park and Reardon remained as sites.  The Long Lake area was eliminated.  Added to the list of sites were Newman Lake, Sprague, Lemona, Davenport, Wilbur, Egypt, and Rockford — although the Rockford site itself would be just over the Idaho state line.

            Though unexplained at the time, what had prompted the changes in the Air Force's plans were recent advances in the missile's design.

            The typical Atlas D group consisted of three missiles around a single launch control center — just as indicated in Congressman Horan's original message to the Deer Park Tribune.  The Atlas D's onboard guidance system required ground tracking for flight corrections.  Any corrections were calculated by a launch center computer, then radioed to the missile.  The two problems with this system were its vulnerability to radio interference — natural and deliberate — and that the system could only handle one missile at a time — meaning a five minute minimum between launches.

            Designated Atlas E, the newest version of the missile possessed an advanced onboard computer and inertial guidance system, and was totally autonomous from the moment of launch.  The moment it lifted one inch skyward, it was independent of any ground communication — and, in fact, was incapable of receiving any.

            It was also becoming apparent that the base itself would be autonomous the moment it became operational.  Nothing like a traditional military post, it had little to offer the community in the way of jobs or business.  With that realization, the excitement began to fade.  Little further mention of the missile could be found on the front page of the community newspaper until the fall of 1960.

            Despite the calm, much was going on.  At a location about a mile east of the airport, construction began.  Enough earth was excavated to allow most everything to be built below surface grade.  Two main structures were laid out — a five thousand square foot launch control bunker, and about ten thousand square feet of bunker for the missile and related equipment.  There was also over a hundred feet of tunnel to connect the two. One hundred and thirty thousand cubic yards of concrete, and almost thirty thousand tons of steel went into the eighteen inch thick walls, ceilings, and reinforced doors and hatches.

            Perhaps this lack of news about the construction was deliberate.  After all, the finer details of the missiles and the nine bases surrounding Fairchild were a matter of military secrecy.

            The existence of the earlier version of the Atlas — the D model — was far from secret.  It was the largest rocket in the American arsenal, and was on its way to becoming the nation's primary satellite launch vehicle — used to shoot a growing array of hardware into space, as well as being modified to lift the Mercury astronauts into orbit.

            Much of the military's involvement with the D series was taking place at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, which was the training center for Atlas crews, and the location of the first successful all Air Force launch.

            Master Sergeant Paul Rodriques, USAF Ret. — now of Glendale, Arizona — recalls, "On January 20, 1960, my crew, Unit R01 (Ready Zero One) of the 576^th Strategic Missile Squadron launched the first operational Atlas D sent aloft by an all Air Force team.  Personnel from Convair Astronautics and North American Rocketdyne — the builders — had conducted launches before, but this time our team did everything.  We picked up the missile at the San Diego factory and followed through until the re-entry vehicle impacted its target in the Pacific Ocean.  In fact, both the Sector Commander and our Crew Commander had barred all contractors from the area during checkout and launch — just to make sure everyone understood this was all ours."

            "Of course, our crew also had the distinction of being the first Air Force unit to have an Atlas blow-up in the gantry."

            "A few months after our first launch, we were conducting a Dual Propellant Loading exercise.  With Convair Astronautics engineers on site, we were filling the missile's tanks with RP-1 — a highly refined form of kerosene — and liquid oxygen.  Apparently, some of the liquid oxygen spilled down through the channel used to direct the rocket exhaust away from the gantry.  The bottom of this flame spillway was paved with asphalt.  Liquid oxygen and petroleum products — the tar in the asphalt for example — don't react kindly to each other."

            "We had a television camera mounted on top of the launch control bunker.  I was in the bunker watching the missile on a monitor when the Atlas blew.  One second it was there, the next smoke."

            By August of 1960, most of the residents of the Deer Park and Clayton area spent at least a few minutes of their warm, summer nights watching the sky for the Echo communication satellite.  This 100-foot diameter aluminized balloon had been placed into low orbit as the target in a radio-wave bouncing experiment.  Since Echo was so easy to spot, it was the first artificial satellite the majority of Americans actually saw.

            It was also a reminder that technology had evaporated the wide oceans that had once isolated America from the old world.  And now Americans were beginning to view overhead objects, such as the contrails of high flying planes, with the same uneasiness Europeans had been feeling for decades.

            Within a half-dozen weeks of the Echo satellite launch, the town of Deer Park and the military were ready to butt heads again — this time over a highway turnoff.

II

… first encounter with the town’s citizens …

            Another tactical issue regarding the military’s decision to disperse nine Atlas missiles in a rough east/west oval around Fairchild Air Force Base was the problem of transporting a seventy-one foot long and sixteen-foot wide missile over agricultural roads designed for nothing bigger than milk trucks and thrashing machines.  One solution was to add certain unique features to the missile’s trailer.  The other was to rebuild any problem spots in the local road system.

            The Army Corp of Engineers decided one problem spot was the intersection between Crawford, Deer Park’s primary east/west street, and eastern Washington’s primary north/south route, Highway 395.  The Army’s answer was to contract with the Washington State Department of Highways to round the corner for northbound traffic turning east onto Crawford from the two-lane Interstate — the turn the missile transport from Fairchild would be making.  While this may have been ideal for the military, it raised ire with the locals who had to drive the route every day.

            By late September of 1960, an angry editorial in the Tribune defined the problem.  The redesign required motorists exiting the Highway from the north to turn significantly more than ninety degrees to negotiate the new curve.  Individuals caught unaware found themselves drifting into Crawford’s oncoming westbound lane.  Those aware found themselves slowing to a crawl before attempting the turn, and immediately becoming a hazard to the southbound traffic behind.

            Within a week of the editorial, a representative from the Washington State Highway Department went before the city council to explain.  He said the redesign had been to military requirements.  He suggested a proposal to ease the turn for southbound interstate traffic by widening Crawford even more might create a greater hazard by encouraging lane drift, which the complaints said was already occurring.  A subsequent Tribune article indicated the council found the arguments provided by the Highway Department representative weak.

            The first Deer Park test of the ground transport system was carried out in the second week of January, 1961, and reported by the Tribune under the headline “Dummy Missile Delivered to Local Site”.

            The ‘dummy missile’ was a  skeletal framework used to check the critical alignments of the bunker’s missile erection equipment.  Covered in canvas for transport, it was delivered to the site on top of a standard Atlas trailer.  But the route chosen was what caught the eye.

            In the early 1950’s, Deer Park, like several other small, rural communities, had been bypassed during the rebuilding of Highway 395.  The old route diverged from the new interstate in a sweeping right hand curve about half a mile south of the military’s new Atlas friendly intersection.  It had been assumed that the military didn’t use this already curving bypass intersection to avoid negotiating a ninety degree turn in the restricted space of downtown Deer Park.  But the ninety degree turn was exactly the route the ‘dummy missile’ took.

            The local newspaper said the transport was able to negotiate the corner at Main and Crawford in “a short while”.  After this article, the missile base practically disappeared from the pages of the Tribune.

            Negotiating local roads was only the last transport problem for the Atlas.  Early on, the missile’s developers recognized that hauling large ICBMs long distances over public highways would be a logistical nightmare.  The answer was the Douglas C-133B Cargomaster heavy-lift aircraft — with cargo bay dimensions exceeding the length and width of the Atlas.

            Powered by four, seven thousand horsepower turboprop engines, the aircraft could lift 150,000 pounds — far more than the 36,000 pound combined weight of the empty rocket and its trailer.

            Designed to be pulled by a big-rig truck tractor, the tubular steel trailer measured just over seventy feet long.  Though a foot shorter than the missile, the fact that the missile’s engine nozzles overhung the rear of the trailer by forty inches allowed the missile’s body to fit comfortably on the trailer.  The trailer carried all the pressurizing equipment necessary to maintain the rigidity of the missile’s fuel-tank airframe.  It also contained the hydraulics necessary to stretch the missile should the pressure system and its backups fail.

            Four wheels on two axles carried the rear of the trailer.  These wheels could be steered when cornering or locked straight for highway travel.  Tillermen reclining in cabins suspended under both sides of the trailer bed, just forward of the rear wheels, could maneuver the rear of the twelve-foot wide trailer and its fifteen-foot wide cargo around tight corners.            Loaded on the trailer at Convair’s San Diego factory, each missile’s first trip was to Vandenberg AFB. The challenge for the transport crew was squeezing the missile and trailer into the Cargomaster.

            Jack Roberts, Professor of Industrial Engineering at Texas A & M recalls, “At the time I was an Airman 1^st Class and Missile Maintenance Technician assigned to the 548^th  Strategic Missile Squadron at Forbes AFB, Kansas.  We were sending one of our missiles back to Vandenberg for a test launch.  My recollection of the missile loading procedure comes from that operation.”

            “To feed the missile into the airplane’s cargo bay, we positioned the trailer behind the aircraft with the missile’s nose toward the plane and laid four sets of metal rails underneath the trailer and up the plane’s loading ramp — rails intended to guide the trailer’s castor wheels.”

            “We jacked up the rear of the trailer, unpinned the rear wheels, disconnected the brake lines and such, and rolled the wheel assembly away.  Since they protruded below the bottom of the trailer’s frame, we removed the tillerman’s cabins.  Then we lowered the trailer down with it’s rear-end castors dropping onto the outside set of rails.  The front castors were locked in their full-up position, and then the front of the trailer’s frame was lowered until the front castors dropped onto the inner set of rails.  All this was done to lower the height of the trailer.”

            “The heaviest part of the missile sat over the rear wheels of the trailer where the two outboard booster engines and their nacelles added another three feet to each side of the rocket’s ten foot core.  The fit was so tight we removed whatever protrusions we could.  We removed the booster nacelles from both sides of the rocket.  The nacelles were aerodynamic coverings for equipment extending beyond the normal skin of the missile.  We took off the dorsal steering rocket — the upper vernier protruding from the top of the recumbent tank section.  The second vernier engine — the one protruding from the bottom side of the rocket’s body — was always removed before lowering the missile onto the trailer.”

            “The trailer was then slowly cabled in using the airplane’s cargo winch.  As the missile inched forward, the castors rolled onto continuations of our temporary rails which had been permanently mounted into the cargo deck of the aircraft.”

            “Unloading the Atlas was a matter of reversing the procedure.”

            “I was the only person on the Cargomaster who knew how to operate the trailer’s pressure control system — or how to put the ‘bird’ in stretch if something went wrong.  I had more responsibility at that point than I had ever had before in my life.  Add to that the fact that this was the first time this west Texas farm kid had ever flown, and you can understand why I was scared to death.  Other then those things, both me and the missile did just fine.”

            “As for what we did with all the stuff we took off the missile and its trailer — wheel assembly, tillerman’s cabins, nacelles — we may have winched them aboard the C-133 or sent them on another plane.  As soon as the bird was safely shoehorned into the Cargomaster, I was so overwhelmed by my own responsibilities that I didn’t notice anything else.”

            “The reason we were taking a missile to Vandenberg is a story cobbled out of the G. I. grapevine and a few official briefings.”

            “Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis the bureaucrats in Washington D. C. worried whether the missiles would have actually worked if President Kennedy had authorized the launch.”

            “To test this concern, Secretary of Defense McNamara ordered the serial numbers of all operational Atlas missiles dropped in a hat and one pulled.  The idea was to place a non-nuclear research warhead on this missile, change the guidance boards to rotate westward to a Pacific target instead of over the pole to Russia, and then send a no-notice launch order to whatever crew happened to be rotated to this particular missile at the decided time.  It would be the first test launch of an ICBM out of an actual operational bunker located somewhere within the continental United States.  That somewhere turned out to be Kansas.”

            “Needless to say, the politicians in Kansas and all the states to the west threw a fit.  After all, even if the rocket over-flew the western states perfectly, the booster section might come down somewhere short of the Pacific coast.”

            “The military modified the test, telling us to take the selected bird to Vandenberg where it would be launched by a Forbes crew.  Once there, the squadron crews were rotated to the Vandenberg launch complex just as they would have been at Forbes.  This went on for almost three months.  Then the crews were ordered to leave the missile and return home.”

            “Apparently the politicians got cold feet.  The anti-missile group worried that the missile might work perfectly.  The pro-missile group worried that it might fail miserably.  Neither side wanted to take the risk.”

            “Later on, a civilian crew from General Dynamics launched our bird.  We were told that the test warhead splashed down four hundred yards off target.  That was close enough after a six thousand mile flight, especially considering that the real warhead used on the Atlas E was the Mark IV.  We knew the Mark IV was a big warhead, but the exact yield was classified at the time.  We now know it produced a blast equivalent to three million, seven hundred and fifty thousand tons of TNT — nearly four megatons.  As I said, with a blast that big four hundred yards is close enough to any target. ”

            On December 6, 1960, a Cargomaster C-133B from Vandenberg dropped out of Fairchild’s cold winter sky carrying the first of the base’s compliment of Atlas missiles.  Then, on a bright spring day at the end of March, 1961, a ground convoy transporting Deer Park’s Atlas left Fairchild for its first encounter with the town’s citizens.

            Traveling down the highway in the center of a six or more vehicle convoy bracketed by trucks with “Caution Wide Load” signs, the rocket couldn’t be missed.  There wasn’t any pretence of secrecy to it.  If a person somehow mistook the canvas covered body of the rocket for a silage silo or fuel tank, the outline of those three giant rocket nozzles protruding in a horizontal line across the back would leave no doubt.  And the slow speeds necessary for moving any oversize object down a public highway, no more than forty miles an hour tops, certainly gave everyone plenty of time to gawk.

            “There were at least two Air Police vehicles in any highway convoy,” Jack Roberts said.  “Those men were armed with carbines and handguns.  An officer or NCO was in charge of the convoy, and usually had his own radio equipped command car.  Usually there was a maintenance vehicle carrying Missile Maintenance Technicians or Ballistic Missile Analyst Technicians, their tools and tech orders — just in case any work was needed on the missile or its trailer.  And normally we had some local cops as escorts.”

            “As for maneuvering the trailer itself, both tillerman positions were equipped with steering wheels, but no brakes.  The tillermen couldn’t see each other across the trailer. Communication between the tillermen, and between the tillermen and the driver was through a headset/microphone intercom system.  For outside communication, the truck driver had a shortwave radio.”

            “There were outside intercom plug-ins on the trailer so anyone walking alongside during tight maneuvers could voice communicate with the three men steering the rig.  Most of the time the outside crew used hand signals to communicate with the driver and tillermen.”

            Richard Hodges, a 1964 graduate of Deer Park High, recalls, “I don’t know how I got down to watch the missile negotiate the turn from Highway 395 onto Crawford Street, since I was suppose to be in school like everyone else.  But there I was, camera in hand.  I recall the State Patrol had to block traffic on 395 to give the transport team time to back the big rig across both lanes and try again.  It was something all the citizens that had gathered to watch were commenting about — how the government spent all that money to reshape the Crawford portion of the
intersection and widen Crawford’s Dragoon Creek bridge just a few yards further east, but still managed to not have enough room.”

Atlas E  on transporter - Fairchild Air Force Base - 1965

            “On the other hand, after spending my working life as a mechanical engineer, I can appreciate how making something work on paper is only the beginning of any job.”

            Having negotiated the turn, the transport team had a straight shot for the next four miles.  That would take them through the center of Deer Park, and due east, straight to the turn off now called Missile Site Road.  While the missileers may have been breathing a sigh of relief, believing that the worse hazards of the thirty some mile journey from Fairchild were behind, there was one more unanticipated danger ahead — the students of Consolidated School District 414.

            An announcement was made at the local high school that the Atlas missile would be parked in front of the Crawford Street middle school (the former high school, and now city hall) for several hours, and that we were free to leave the building during assigned study halls to inspect the rocket.  In fact, all the district’s students would have a chance to see the rocket — this included students bussed down from the old Clayton grade school.

            For me it was much more than a chance to dump study hall.  Both science and science fiction had long been an interest of mine, and the Atlas seemed a blending of both.  I would have to say the sight of uncloaked missile was exotic, but not particularly impressive.  By that I mean it was a shell with little else to see.  I understood its potential — that well demonstrated by its use in the space program.  Still, with the rocket lying mute on the trailer, little could be seen to explain the mechanics of that potential.

            Such mechanics were shrouded beneath stainless steel or fiberglass.  Inserts even hid the interiors of the engine throats.  The missile’s inner workings remained a mystery.

            I can vaguely recall a few fatigue-clad airmen keeping watch.  The one notable thing was that most didn’t seem much older than the high school students.  The only firearm visible was the single service revolver on the hip of Deer Park’s sole, full-time police officer.  Other than that, I can’t recall any brass or flash.

            A good collection of students from primary to high school milled around the missile, when, all of a sudden, the airmen, chief of police, teachers, everyone, began yelling for us to get out of the street. With voices lowered to a serious growl, the men walked down the curb and brushed the students onto the sidewalk.

            Within seconds, the street was clear.  The engine on the truck tractor bellowed.  And the missile whipped away to the east.

            “What just happened?” I asked.  “They were supposed to be here for another hour.”

            The answer came back, “Some idiot threw a rock at the missile.”

            Joseph ‘Buddy’ Farris, now an Encephalographic Technologist at Holy Family Hospital in Spokane, recalled the incident.  “I was in the fourth grade, Mrs. Noble’s class, when we marched up to see the rocket.  After the bunch of us had been herded up on the sidewalk and the rocket taken away, I saw that Mister Hegre, my grade school principal, had a second-grader pinned against a tree and was reading him the riot act.”

            “Asking around, the version I heard said these two second graders got to daring each other as to whether they could throw a rock all the way over the missile.”

            Since the missile, reclining on its trailer, towered thirteen and a half feet above the street, the challenge was obvious.

            Joe continued, “Apparently, the answer was no, since the rock bounced off.  Their defense was that it wasn’t the missile they were aiming at.  That defense didn’t seem to make much difference to the Air Force.”

            Bob Lemley, now retired, was a Ballistic Missile Analyst Technician with Fairchild’s 567^th Strategic Missile Squadron, and served as a launch crew member at most of the local missile sites.  Bob said, “A good size rock could have dented the thin stainless steel skin of the Atlas.  Since little kids throw little rocks, your Deer Park rock was probably too small to constitute a threat.  But what throwing a rock or even threatening to throw a rock would most certainly have done was make the officer in charge of transporting the rocket as mad as hell.  And I would suspect that that’s exactly what happened.”

III

… intended for site ‘C’ ...

Leaving the eastern limits of Deer Park, Crawford Street becomes the Deer Park-Milan Road.  This road runs straight east for the next three miles.  The land around the airport and missile site is formed from relatively flat laying deposits of sandy-silts eroded from the surrounding granite hills.  Small groves of pine stand among these dry, open fields.  Sporadic formations of stunted apple trees … survivors from the disastrous Arcadian Orchard experiment of the early nineteen hundreds … dot the area.             Just as the road begins to twist and drop away into the relative lushness of the Bear Creek drainage, Missile Site Road joins from the north.  A mile up this road is the fenced perimeter of the missile site.

Entrance Sign - Deer Park Complex

            All nine of Fairchild’s Atlas E sites were built to the same blueprint.  With the below grade portions of the bunkers identical, crews had no trouble adapting as they rotated between installations.

            All nine installations were also laid out to the same compass orientation.

            Referred to as a semi-hardened coffin bunker, the site’s below ground structures were designed to withstand a one megaton blast as close as a mile and a half.   A detonation closer than this could potentially have put the site out of commission.

            In nuclear terms, neither the size nor proximity of such a detonation was particularly great.  The military was well aware of the coffin bunker’s vulnerability.  As the Atlas E’s sites were being brought into operation, construction had already begun on the next generation of Atlas ICBM’s, the hardened-silo based Atlas F series. 

            Silos were superior to the Atlas E’s coffin bunkers in two respects.  First, they were buried deeper, and could withstand a much greater shock.  Secondly, the silo missiles were already standing upright.  If launch commands were received, the missile would first be fueled, then the silo uncapped and the missile elevated aboveground and fired.  With the coffin bunkers, the overhead blast door had to be retracted first, then the missile elevated from its reclining position, fueled, and fired.  Prior to launch, the E series missiles were exposed above ground for a much longer period than the F series.

            On the other hand, the missiles housed in bunkers were not as prone to blowing up during fueling as the silo versions.  Perhaps this was because the launch bay, open to the sky during fueling, allowed explosive fumes a greater chance to dissipate.  Or perhaps this was because it was physically harder to carry out maintenance procedures in the deep, cramped confines of a silo.

            Two buildings made up the buried bunker portion of the Deer Park site.  First, the launch operations building.  This 54 by 90 foot building housed the launch control center, communications center, two offices, a mess hall, ready room, battery room, storage room, and power plant.  Only equipment towers and the escape hatch extend above ground.

            “The bunkers didn’t have a mess hall in the truest sense,” former maintenance missileer Jack Roberts recalled.  “It was really just a kitchen, not much larger than you would find in a civilian home.  The only difference was that we had two refrigerators so we’d have enough room to keep the foil-pack meals — the military’s interpretation of TV dinners.  There wasn’t much smell in the kitchen, since all we did was heat up those foil packs.  Those were consumed quickly and the remains cleared away quickly.  And the mess hall was just a table in the kitchen large enough to seat six people.  It could get noisy with conversation if you had a crowd in there, which wasn’t often.  Usually the kitchen was a quiet area.”

            “The launch control room sounded just like a busy office, except for an occasional alarm.”

            “The ready room area was always kept dark and quiet in case someone needed to catch some shut-eye — particularly the guards, since they worked in well defined shifts.”

            “Two things most noticed about the power room; first, the noise was deafening, so you didn’t go in there without hearing protection, secondly, it smelled of diesel.  It did have a good ventilation system, so the smell didn’t become overwhelming, or drift into the rest of the building.”

            “About the sound in the power room,” Jim Geoghegan, a Missile Analyst Technician who worked mostly at the Reardan complex — site 9 — added, “you had to yell to be heard above the noise and through the ear protection.  You could hear that sound throughout the site.  Close by it was loud, then in the Launch and Service Building it was just a background hum or murmur.”

            A hundred and twenty foot long and eight foot diameter corrugated metal tunnel ran due south from the southeast corner of the launch operations building to the northwest corner of the Launch and Service Building — the missile’s bunker.

            This much larger building was also surrounded by eighteen inch reinforced concrete walls and ceiling.  Only the launch bay hatch was exposed above ground — leaving very little for any nuclear blast generated shockwave, except one arriving from above, to strike.  This building was designed and equipped to receive, store, monitor, erect, load with fuel, and launch the missile.

            The building was divided into three segments.

            Running full length down the center was the bay in which the missile reclined.  20 feet wide, 20 feet high, and 110 feet long, this section was covered by a nearly full-length hatch, the missile erection door, designed to slide to the side — to the west.

            About this 40 by 105 foot hatch, Jack Roberts recalls, “The overhead door was a steel I-beam framework, about twice as wide as the hatch opening, over which a reinforced concrete cap was poured.”

            “To open, this door had to be raised about six inches on rollers sitting atop hydraulic cylinders.  Once the cylinders elevated, an electric motor and gearbox arrangement pulled the door across the rollers to the side.  During routine maintenance procedures, opening this 400 ton cap took about thirty minutes — mostly for the jacking.  During simulated wartime procedures it only took a few seconds.”

            “When there wasn’t any urgency, electric powered hydraulic pumps were used to feed oil into the jacks.  But during a countdown, we needed that door off now.  We couldn’t raise the missile to a standing position until the door was clear.  And we couldn’t start fueling until the missile was standing upright.”     

“To speed the process we used accumulators to supply hydraulic pressure to the jacks.  An accumulator is a cylinder with a piston in it.  On one side of this piston is hydraulic oil.  High pressure nitrogen is released against the other side of the piston, forcing the hydraulic oil out of the cylinder and into the lines running to the overhead jacks — literally slamming the jacking cylinders up.”             “400 tons of concrete and steel jumps 6 inches.  It sounded like a cannon going off.  You could feel the shock.”             “At the same time, high pressure gas begins to flow, blast gates begin to slam shut, valves begin to cycle, the overhead door begins to slide to the side, missile erection motors kicked in, and within seconds the bird starts to stand up.”             “In the Launch and Service Building, countdowns were extremely noisy.  Scared the hell out of me the first time I experienced it.’             “There was just too much wear and tear on the equipment to use the rapid open sequence every time we needed the overhead door off.  Besides, recharging the nitrogen used to drive the accumulators was both time consuming and expensive.”

Looking down into the open launch bay. Note that the overhead door retracts to the left - to the west. Also note that a portion of the body of the missile appears to be painted white. This is actually the liquid oxygen tank covered in a thick, ice-like layer of condensation frost. The white plume is caused when chilled oxygen, boiling out of the LOX tank, condenses atmospheric moisture into fog.

            Before the door could be raised on its hydraulic jacks, the hold down latches used to hook the underside of the door firmly to the launch bay had to be released.

            “The latches were just large pieces of angle iron mounted on hinges high up on the missile bay walls,” Roberts said.  “To lock, they were rotated by hydraulic cylinders so that they overlapped the edges of the overhead door’s perimeter beam.”

            The necessity of latching down a 400-ton door may be difficult to grasp, but so is the actual power of a nuclear explosion.  A nuclear airburst of either sufficient size or proximity to the missile site would create a horrendous down pressure.  This would immediately be followed by a nearly as horrendous vacuum-generated updraft that could potentially suck the 400-ton door up — at the least displacing it enough to disable the slide mechanism so the bay couldn’t be opened, or, at worse, ripping the door completely away, and exposing the missile.

            Getting the missile into and out of the launch bay was a matter of backing its trailer down a paved access ramp located on the north side of the building — a ramp that dropped from ground level to the bunker’s floor.  At the bottom of the ramp was a 20 foot wide, 18 foot high blast door leading into the launch bay.  To gain entrance, this 47 ton, foot and a half thick, fabricated steel door had to be cranked opened.

            Missileer Dick Mellor recalls, “The blast door slid sideways into a pocket in the wall behind the logic units.  The door was hung on rollers, and was moved by a chain drive and hand crank.  It took some six hundred turns to slide the door all the way back.  We never figured out why they hadn’t installed a motor to do that.  Maybe Airmen were cheaper.”

            On the east side of the launch and service building, protected from the missile bay by a blast wall and blast door, was the liquid oxygen room.  This room, 18 feet wide, 72 feet long, and averaging 10 feet in height, contained all the equipment needed for handling the super cold oxidizer for the rocket fuel.

            “The LOX room, being farthest away from everything, was quiet,” Jack Roberts noted.  “And, because the valves and other fixtures protruding into the room from the end of the buried liquid oxygen tank were covered with ice, it was always chilly.”

            The mechanical and electrical equipment room was situated west of the missile bay.  This area, the largest at 45 feet by 104 feet, contained the various panels of electronic equipment needed for monitoring the condition of the missile, and storing the flight data that would be fed into the missile’s computer before launch.  It also contained the gas charging equipment needed to drive the accumulators lifting the giant overhead door, as well as the equipment needed for handling the modified kerosene rocket propellant.

            Jack said, “The logic units — primitive computers — as well as a lot of other electronic equipment had to be cooled, so there was always the sound of the air-conditioning system’s blowers.  There was a machine hum, part of that from the 400 cycle generator we had running all the time.  And then there was a smell, some say of ozone, rising from all the hot electronic devices.”

            Sergeant Paul Rodrigues reminisced, “Over a period of eighteen years I was associated with the Atlas D, E, and F series missiles, and with the Titan II ICBMs.  All the bunkers and silos had a similar odor.  They had an acrid, metallic smell you could taste.  Warm electronics, rubber, and hydraulic fluid — always hydraulic fluid.  And diesel fuel.”

            “I know the last remaining Titan II silo, now a Green Valley, Arizona, tourist attraction, still smells as it did when active in the 1960’s.  I’ve been told that those odors still linger in many of the converted sites.  In fact, the first remark former missileers often make when visiting those sites is that they still smell the same.”

            A blast wall and blast door also protected this room from events, intended or otherwise, that might occur inside the launch bay portion of the Launch and Service Building.

            Ins