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Comment by dillondoyle | Hacker News Reader

Was the silo unmanned? Seems weird it was on their property. Not like the government is hurting for land up there.

I thought they were all pretty big complexes with people in a bunker connected to them 24/7

Silos (ie “launch facilities” (LFs)) themselves are uncrewed, except for maintenance. Launch control officers are stationed in an underground bunkers called “launch control centers” (LCCs), which are I think like 10 miles away. Each LCC controls 10 LFs.

it depends on the type of missle silo. for instance the TitanII where manned.

Fair. It looks like you could walk from the control center to the silos in the Titan complexes, which I think are the ones that most often for sale. My info was about the current Minutemen silos. I figured they were all the same.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.co0919.sheet/?sp=2

My info was about the current Minutemen silos. I figured they were all the same.

The older missiles were liquid fueled, unlike Minuteman. Which means kerosene added when placed on alert, LOX added just before launch. Probably much simpler to have people do that on-site than try to automate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM-65_Atlas#SM-65F_Atlas

And as to the (perhaps somewhat facetious) comment elsewhere in the thread that the Russkies might still have "2 nukes" pointed at this silo, there are currently 400 active Minuteman silos. I'm sure the Russians would rather target those than sites that were decommissioned in 1965.

Or, for Titan, much nastier things (while the current Titan space launch vehicles are fairly inoffensive solid-and-hydrogen, the Titan ICBMs and early launchers were hydrazine).

Er, or not. Just checked; while the Titan IV is no longer in use, it was hydrazine til the end, in 2005(!) I was thinking of the Delta family, which did go from UDMH to hydrogen.

But they are guarded by someone?

The Northern Tier was laid out that way. Their weren't people actively at each silo, but the security was intense, and people were not far away.

The air force has a quick reaction security force they dispatch via helicopters and hen there are regular patrols in trucks.

You can read a bit about them here https://minutemanmissile.com/missilesecurity.html

That's how the Northern Tier was laid out. The southern Tier was a combination system.

What made up the southern tier, and where was/is it?

The Southern Tier was built first. It was liquid fueled missiles with larger warheads, spanning from, if I recall correctly, Arkansas/Missouri to New Mexico. Those silos required hours of preparation to launch, as they had to be fueled first. They had the maintenance and launch control integrated in the facility.

Interesting! That makes sense. It would be a lot of staff given the number of missiles there were/are. Though money and men doesn't seem to be a barrier when it comes to doomsday defense.

I just read an OpEd in WSJ the author argued we need to build more weapons to keep up 1:1 with china. When we already have more than enough to be a deterrent.

As far as we could see it was just the silo and unmanned, but we visited it (rode out to a hull and looked at it from a distance) only a handful of times. We never dared approach it. So there could have been plenty we didn’t know.

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