{"id":209,"date":"2011-07-03T00:00:19","date_gmt":"2011-07-02T14:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/?p=209"},"modified":"2011-07-05T05:18:34","modified_gmt":"2011-07-04T19:18:34","slug":"arizona-2-july","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/?p=209","title":{"rendered":"Arizona – 2 July"},"content":{"rendered":"

We started the holiday weekend with a good old, as American as apple pie, missile silo tour.<\/p>\n

Right near here – in fact, we pass it most days on the way to and from work – is the only still-intact Titan II missile silo. There were 54 of these things buried in American soil for around 20 years of the Cold War – a true, concrete and steel implementation of the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction. Well, a concrete and steel and nuclear warhead implementation, really. I certainly have a sense of “this rock keeps away tigers” around the whole concept of MAD. Sure there’s no proof it didn’t work, but from a tour of that place it’s pretty obvious that it could have gone disastrously wrong. Take for instance the example of the guy who, one day in 1980, dropped a three pound socket and caused an explosion that destroyed a whole silo, including most of the missile (fortunately not the warhead). If the wrong eyes had been watching, and mistaken that for a launch…<\/p>\n

All that said, there’s no denying that it is an impressive piece of engineering.<\/p>\n

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Looking down through the silo doors.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

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The control center. Sorry this panorama is a bit rubbish, I was rushed. Note the frankly ridiculously large shock isolation spring in the background.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Vibration-isolated hallway between the control room and the silo proper.<\/p><\/div>\n

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This is a real Titan-II missile, but was previously used for training purposes and thus never had a warhead or fuel.<\/p><\/div><\/center><\/p>\n

With the taste of that experience washed away by a 44oz (1.3L) cup of Dr Pepper, we spent most of the rest of the day wandering improbably large chain stores, punctuated only by a frankly outstanding lunch at Cafe Poca Cosa<\/a>. Sorry I didn’t take a photo of this one (I’ve been saving some food photos up for a single blog post later on), but I will definitely be back there before we leave.<\/p>\n

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Yes, that says 79 cents<\/p><\/div><\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We started the holiday weekend with a good old, as American as apple pie, missile silo tour. Right near here – in fact, we pass it most days on the way to and from work – is the only still-intact Titan II missile silo. There were 54 of these things buried in American soil for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":218,"href":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions\/218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.neonwinter.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}