Manner out within the Kansas prairie, 140 ft under floor, a concrete-lined relic of Chilly Struggle annihilation has acquired a literal — and metaphorical — coat of “recent paint all through.” It’s not being preserved as a museum or memorial. It’s being sold on Zillow.
Welcome to 1441 N. 260th Street, Lincoln, Kan., now rebranded as Rolling Hills Missile Silo, as a result of nothing says “pastoral appeal” like 600 tons of 2-inch rebar wrapped round a void the place a thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missile as soon as waited.
The property itemizing for the decommissioned Atlas F missile silo doubles as a brainstorming checklist for entrepreneurs: “celebration venue,” “artwork gallery,” “climate-controlled wine cellar,” “mushroom farm” and “essentially the most insane Airbnb on the planet.” Additionally included: twin above-ground concrete pads, 75-ton blast doorways and an escape hatch for that “dramatic exit.” It’s much less house than Bond starter package.
Studying the Zillow itemizing, one may ask: Why does such a construction exist in any respect? Why was this a lot metal and concrete poured into the prairie within the first place? The solutions are well-documented however absent right here.
These questions seem to belong to a time when selections have been made with slide guidelines and worry. Now, the longer term is up for grabs. The property boasts a “non-public driveway” and underground temperatures between 54 and 62 levels Fahrenheit, described as “nature’s free HVAC.” At $520 per sq. foot, it’s “NOT your typical fixer higher” and is “ready in your imaginative and prescient.”
The itemizing hints solely obliquely on the unique navy objective by noting the property is “a chunk of Chilly Struggle historical past.” In fact, Atlas F silos weren’t simply bunkers. They have been constructed to allow the erasure of life at scale, to not shelter. The Atlas F program, deployed within the early Nineteen Sixties, was a part of america’ first operational era of ICBMs. Every missile web site — 12 in Kansas alone — was designed to accommodate and ship a 4.5-megaton nuclear warhead to the opposite aspect of the world.
Not like earlier Atlas fashions, the F variant was stored vertically underground and was elevated to the floor on a hydraulic elevator for fueling and launch, the latter of which required 10 vulnerable minutes. By 1965, the Atlas F system was retired, changed by faster-launched Minuteman missiles.
None of this reveals up in the actual property itemizing. There’s no point out that the Atlas F warhead was more than 250 times extra highly effective than the atomic bomb that america dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. No trace of the fear that surrounded these websites — solely the promise of limitless enterprise alternative. The advert appears to scream: Admire the feat of engineering! (However neglect the existential terror it embodied.) Marvel on the blast doorways! (However ignore how they recast unthinkable violence as routine.) Consider the Instagrammable images! (However don’t summon photographs of what nuclear bombs did to folks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945.)
Potential patrons should signal a waiver earlier than coming into. Although the missile is gone, the location presumably has remaining hazards: Maybe a visitor may fall down a shaft engineered to deal with a nuclear detonation?
Beneath the novelty, nonetheless, lies a deeper fact: Missile silos usually are not impartial areas for inventive reuse. They’re monuments to a second in human historical past when extinction was first constructed into the structure of nationwide safety doctrines. Their potential to be repurposed as luxurious bunkers isn’t just bonkers; it’s symptomatic of an incapability to reckon truthfully with inherited buildings of violence. That is nostalgia with out reminiscence, and fetishism with out context.
And it’s not merely retrospective.
In the present day, america has an estimated 1,770 deployed nuclear warheads, of which 400 are land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. The logic that justified Atlas F — deterrence by the prospect of prompt retaliatory destruction — stays embedded in U.S. strategic doctrine. Missile silos usually are not simply Chilly Struggle relics. They’re residing artifacts of a technique america and different nuclear-armed nations have but to relinquish.
One may argue that repurposing these websites is best than letting them rot. Perhaps so. But when we’re going to inhabit these locations once more, if we’re going to reside within the shadow of their historical past, then we should deliver the reminiscence with us. We should carry ahead not simply the concrete, however the chilly calculus — and the human value.
Susan D’Agostino, a mathematician and science author, was the nuclear threat editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
