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 “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 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.”
“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.” 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 Installing and removing missiles from each launch complex was an ongoing procedure during the operational life of the Atlas E program. With a missile on station at all of Fairchild’s nine sites, and one in reserve at the air base, a rotation was begun so one missile could be brought in for major servicing about every thirty days, and yet never leave a launch complex without a missile for more than a few hours. As the first Atlas intended for “Site C” was being rushed away from its encounter with Deer Park’s rock throwing student, the complex’s launch bay door would have already been cranked to the side, and the missile erection hatch unlatched, jacked, and retracted in preparation. On arrival at the site, the transport trailer was backed down the access ramp into the launch bay. Guide rails in the floor of the launch bay, mating with guide castors on the trailer, positioned the moving trailer in exact relation to the overhanging erection and launch boom. For the final alignment, a hydraulic cylinder from the launch boom was connected to the trailer to move it forward or back in fractions of inches, as needed. The launcher was a boom style ladder-beam, anchored to the floor in the far south end of the launch bay, and hinged to pivot from its base. It was designed to lay down over the missile while the missile was still on the transport trailer. When attached to the missile, it would lift enough to clear the departing trailer. Once the trailer was clear, the boom lowered to its normal, resting position, with the missile slung beneath. The reason for opening the overhead hatch —the launch boom needed to be partially elevated to clear the incoming missile. The launcher framework attached to the missile at three points. At the warhead end, the north end, was a ring device that swung down from the tip of the boom and snugged itself around the reinforced nose of the missile, snugged just below the point where the re-entry vehicle — the warhead — would later be attached. This nose-clamp ring was hinged so the encompassing circle could be broken open and swung away from the erect missile prior to launch. If the missile’s tank section, for any reason, began to lose pressure and deflate, two hydraulic stretch struts were snapped into place between the nose ring and launcher frame. A few strokes on the pump handles would put the missile into enough mechanical stretch to prevent collapse. Two locking clamps fixed into the launch frame held the base of the missile. Two more clamps, located on the floor of the bay, clamped onto the missile once it stood erect. All four of these clamps unlatched prior to launch — as soon as both propellant tanks were full. An entire ICBM hanging from one tubular steel ladder-beam seems like a flimsy arrangement, but the missile itself only weighted about 18,000 pounds. And most of that weight was carried at the pivot end of the launcher — in the missile’s engines and mechanics. The warhead, when attached, added another three thousand pounds to the nose. But by far the greatest mass was only added after the Atlas had been raised upright — when the liquid oxygen and rocket fuel was loaded. Next the missile would be prepared. Tested and retested. Everything brought to specifications. The warhead installed. The guidance system tuned. And the missile’s status upgraded to operational. Then, beneath this shallow skin of concrete and earth, young men would begin standing watch. Young men trained, sworn, and determined, if ordered, to send their ordinance skyward. On that spring day in 1961, little did these young men know that during their tour of duty the world would stand a breath away from the worst mass extinction since the end of the age of the dinosaurs.
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