Means out within the Kansas prairie, 140 toes beneath floor, a concrete-lined relic of Chilly Struggle annihilation has acquired a literal — and metaphorical — coat of “contemporary paint all through.” It’s not being preserved as a museum or memorial. It’s being offered on Zillow.
Welcome to 1441 N. 260th Highway, Lincoln, Kan., now rebranded as Rolling Hills Missile Silo, as a result of nothing says “pastoral allure” 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 listing 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 had 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 to your imaginative and prescient.”
The itemizing hints solely obliquely on the authentic navy objective by noting the property is “a chunk of Chilly Struggle historical past.” In fact, Atlas F silos weren’t simply bunkers. They had 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 the US’ first operational technology of ICBMs. Every missile web site — 12 in Kansas alone — was designed to deal with and ship a 4.5-megaton nuclear warhead to the opposite aspect of the world.
In contrast to earlier Atlas fashions, the F variant was saved vertically underground and was elevated to the floor on a hydraulic elevator for fueling and launch, the latter of which required 10 weak minutes. By 1965, the Atlas F system was retired, changed by faster-launched Minuteman missiles.
None of this exhibits up in the true property itemizing. There’s no point out that the Atlas F warhead was greater than 250 instances extra highly effective than the atomic bomb that the US 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 positioning presumably has remaining hazards: Maybe a visitor might fall down a shaft engineered to deal with a nuclear detonation?
Beneath the novelty, nonetheless, lies a deeper reality: Missile silos are usually 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 lack of ability to reckon actually with inherited buildings of violence. That is nostalgia with out reminiscence, and fetishism with out context.
And it’s not merely retrospective.
At the moment, the US 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 on the spot retaliatory destruction — stays embedded in U.S. strategic doctrine. Missile silos are usually not simply Chilly Struggle relics. They’re dwelling artifacts of a method the US and different nuclear-armed international locations have but to relinquish.
One might 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 stay within the shadow of their historical past, then we must deliver the reminiscence with us. We should carry ahead not simply the concrete, however the chilly calculus — and the human price.
Susan D’Agostino, a mathematician and science author, was the nuclear danger editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
