[GrantS]

Coincidentally, I just toured the South Dakota minuteman launch control facility this week [1] and it was fascinating. The park ranger giving the tour was a veteran who manned the facility decades ago — amazing stories. You need to book tickets a few months in advance but well worth it if you’re in the area to visit Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, etc.

[1] Run by U.S. National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/mimi/

[darknavi]

There is a Titan II missile silo you can tour an hour out of Tucson, AZ. Also well worth it.

https://www.nps.gov/places/titanmissilemuseum.htm

[chromozonex]

Yep, I’d highly recommend this as well. We did this a year or two ago as well and it was wild how the underground facilities worked, how small they were, and how remote and nondescript they were. Highly recommend visiting these sites if you’re into history!

[underbooter]

A few months in advance? I've gone to another SD site multiple times and you don't even need a ticket.

[Onawa]

Literally one click away from link provided by OP: Delta-01 Tour Fee and Reservations Alert, Severity, information, Delta-01 Tour Fee and Reservations All Delta-01 Launch Control Facility Tours require advanced reservations. Reservations can be made up to 90 days in advance on-line or by phone at 605-717-7629. No SAME-DAY tours available during the summer season.

[cbsks]

You can visit anytime without reservations. For the ranger guided tour, reservations are required.

[firesteelrain]

Why do people seek to argue like this on this site? The guy isnt lying.

[matheusmoreira]

> amazing stories

Please share them!

[GrantS]

A few small things as I think of them:

-To practice for the moment of a real launch command, he would receive encoded messages every day that had to be manually decoded as quickly as possible — this decoding would be done independently by him and the second person on duty, and they would then compare to make sure they matched. In the case of a real launch, not only would the two people in the underground facility need to agree that the command was issued, but a second team in another facility would need to do the same.

-He was not allowed to know the targets of the missiles he would be launching, though these targets were fixed for each missile.

-It was almost assumed that if they were launching, they would have already been hit on the surface by a nuclear weapon (locations of the launch facilities were not secret, because they wouldn’t be a deterrent if they were secret). The two people underground are positioned in what looks like a shipping container suspended inside a submarine hull, all encased and locked behind one giant thick steel (?) door. If the elevator shaft had collapsed during an impact, they would be stuck inside to die. So they did include an escape hatch in the roof, but buried deep underground — this would involve the two men opening the escape hatch, letting a bunch of sand fall through, and then digging upward through 100-ish feet of ground over many days to get to a surface that was a wasteland. He was never really convinced that this would work, but the men had to believe that if they did their jobs, there would be some way to survive it.