Last week I happened to be on a vacation in Tucson and stopped by a rather unique museum. Those of you who are long-time readers will recognize this as a feature, not a bug (see my work on the St. Louis Aquarium,  NSA’s museum, UX museum design, and the Lincoln presidential library). I went to the site of the last Titan Missile silo.

Titans were first created to launch a massive retaliatory strike back in the 1960s. Each missile contained a single 9 megaton warhead, perhaps the biggest bomb ever deployed. (By way of comparison, the original blast over Hiroshima was 15 kilotons.) They were designed to be launched within a minute or so after receiving the go-code. Three locations were picked, each field containing 17 silos that were essentially self-contained underground environments consisting of a dormitory, a control center and the silo itself. In the mid-1980s, all of the other silos were completely decommissioned and made inoperable.

The museum contains the last remaining silo that has a missile in it (minus propulsion and the warhead of course). If you take the tour you spend about an hour underground seeing it up close as well as witnessing a simulated launch sequence with some of the original control gear.

Now, I thought I knew a lot about nuclear missiles, but I found the experience both fascinating and chilling, especially as we seem to be talking about them more often these days. One fact that I learned is that the Titan collection would be launched entirely when the order was given: that meant that all 54 of them would be airborne at once. Whether life on Earth could survive that combined blast isn’t clear, it reminded me of the “Doomsday Machine” that was popularized in the 1960s — of course, that machine was automated. To launch each missile required two human operations to go through a sequence of authentication steps (double-keyed locks, one-time passcodes and the like) to verify things. The movies represent this sequence in spirit. In reality – at least in our simulation – is very involved with multiple steps, which makes sense.

One of the reasons the Titan was decommissioned was the era of a single big bomb per missile evolved into having one rocket with multiple smaller warheads, which is what the vast majority of the world’s some 12,000 weapons look like today. Another point in Titan’s disfavor is that it doesn’t make sense to have much in the way of land-based weaponry, since they are essentially sitting ducks for the enemy to target. Most of today’s weaponry is mobile, based in subs or on planes, such as the UK or France.

But whether you count by warheads or rockets requires a lot more nuance. China, for example, has a huge stockpile, but fewer weapons that are ready to launch. And I would argue that another aspect that doesn’t get much discussion is the world’s 400-plus nuclear power plants that are scattered around 30-some countries. While these plants are doing something useful – producing electricity – they are also sitting ducks for enemy targets. Russia has specialized in this arena, sadly. About a year ago, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was targeted by Russian drones that punched a hole in its protective roof. Some have said it was an accident, and Russia denies they fired anything, both not very credible statements.

As you might remember, the damaged reactor was encased in a huge building with several layers of steel and concrete, designed to keep the escaping radiation inside and away from humans. To my way of thinking, this was the second time a nuclear strike was used in warfare. The first was an earlier Russian missile fired at Ukraine’s nuclear power station. Why no one is making a bigger deal out of these events is curious.

After my friend and I did the Titan tour, we decided to watch Dr. Strangelove to see how accurate their depiction of nuclear warfare was. While the exact details differed, the movie has held up well over the years, and I would recommend you screen it too.