Underground Fortresses

In Raynesford, Mont. (pop. 62), a cowboy can saunter out of the Mint Bar, ride two miles over rolling, dun-colored country, and watch hard-hatted construction workers pouring concrete around a Minuteman launch silo 89 feet deep. North of Little Rock, Ark., where the Ouachita Mountains slope toward the Mississippi, motorists on U.S. Route 67 can see trailers, cars and cranes clustered around huge wounds that have been gouged in the earth for Titan II missiles. Flying south on Western Airlines Flight 51 near Cheyenne, Wyo., passengers can look down and see the jeweled galaxy of lights around an Atlas complex that has already been accepted as operational by the Strategic Air Command.

From New York to California, in a total of 18 states, the U.S. is hard at work on the biggest, most complex and crucial military construction program in its peacetime history: the installation of attackproof, underground launching sites for the nation's Atlas, Titan and Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles. By the time this system is completed in 1963 it will have cost $7 billion, and scores of nuclear-armed missiles will be poised to strike, with the flick of a switch, at the enemy heartland.

Coast-to-Coast Crew. Such is the size of the program that it is impossible to hide the sites from public view; the Air Force, which is in charge of the operation, is therefore depending for security on dispersal and the massive impregnability of the installations themselves. In all, some 20,000 workmen are digging out about 37.5 million cu. yds. of earth, replacing it with 1,600,000 tons of steel, 2,700,000 tons of concrete, and hundreds of miles of electrical ganglia. In Montana alone, 150 Minuteman silos will be dispersed over a 20,000-sq.-mi area, nearly twice the size of Maryland. They have been designed to withstand any nuclear blast short of a direct hit on their steel and concrete doors. From generators to toilets, everything that goes into an underground complex is shockproof or shock-mounted on rubber. The floors and walls of each complex do not join; instead, they are linked with a foot-wide rubber collar that absorbs shock and keeps the walls intact.

The control center for the vast building project is at Inglewood, Calif., deputy headquarters for the Air Force Systems Command. Boss of the coast-to-coast construction crew is Lieut. General Howell M. Estes Jr., 46, a tough, taciturn veteran of the Strategic Air Command. Estes and his ballistic systems division commander, Major General Thomas P. Gerrity, 47, another SAC veteran, start work at 6:30 a.m., finish at 7 p.m., log 65 hours a week on the job, and expect their staff to do the same. Since the program began in 1956, Estes and his men have discovered that keeping pace with the construction problems that arise at 20 sublocations around the U.S. is a warsized logistical task. To meet the challenge, Estes has adopted PERT (for Program Evaluation and Review Technique), which was devised by the Navy to speed the Polaris missile program. With PERT, each and every phase of construction is detailed and updated on a phalanx of charts. At Lowry Air Force Base near Denver, which oversees 18 missile sites in Colorado, there are no fewer than 231 charts, with a twelve-man staff working on round-the-clock shifts to keep them current.

"If You're It." Most of the Problems arise from the "concurrency" concept, under which the silo complexes are being built. To get the job completed as quickly as possible, the Army Corps of Engineers--which supervises actual construction for the Air Force--puts as many as five contractors to work on a project at the same time. Their work must dovetail perfectly, with tolerances to the disappearing point. If one contractor does not place an electrical junction box precisely right on a silo wall, it will not link with the cable being laid concurrently by another crew. If a silo is out of round by half an inch, the steel crib on which a missile rests will not fit correctly. Says a project engineer: "Our assembly line stretches from San Diego, Calif., to Plattsburgh, N.Y., and when everything comes together at the proper time, the fit has to be exact, sometimes down to a thousandth of an inch. It's a more difficult design and construction challenge than building the missiles themselves."

To cope with their problems, Estes and Gerrity have tapped some of the Air Force's brightest colonels for the project. In air combat lingo, enemy airplanes are dubbed "bandits"; today at Inglewood, the term applies to unsolved construction problems. Every bandit that appears is handed to one of Estes' colonels. That officer is known as the "it" colonel--and he stays "it" until he finds a solution, which had better not be very long. Says one colonel: "If you're 'it' and you've been 'it' for a few days, you'd better watch out." His job may be no more demanding than calling an air express agent at 3 a.m. to trace a high-priority package. But it may also be chasing down a truly dangerous bandit. Example: finding out what happened in the collapse a fortnight ago of a 58-ton silo door at a Titan complex near Denver, which killed five men, indicated that the design of the huge doors may be faulty.

Purrs of Power. Typical among the missile installations is Complex 2-A, 725th Strategic Missile Squadron, near Lowry Air Force Base. The complex lies on an abandoned World War II practice bombing range. The land is lonely and peaceful, with the snow-tipped Rockies looming 30 miles away. The only external evidence of an underground fortress is an entrance portal, the ground-level doors over three Titan I silos, and silos containing 100-ft.-long radio antennas that rise along with the missiles and guide them on their way. At the concreted entrance tower, 13 steps spiral downward to a portal and a blastproof revolving door. Behind the door, 69 steps drop underground to a cool, yellow-painted steel tunnel 1,687 ft. long and lined with cables, pipes and tanks for water, diesel fuel and liquid oxygen.

From the tunnel, smaller passageways slide off to the missile silos, each 165 ft. deep and 40 ft. in diameter. Other tunnels lead to the antenna silo, and to a circular power house 70 ft. below ground where four generators purr out power enough for a city of 5,000 people.

A Grim Reminder. Brains of the labyrinthine complex is a two-story control center, where the ten-man crew will work and live. The green-walled, fluorescent-lighted upper floor is crammed with consoles, television monitors and countdown timers. For each Titan there is a switch marked with multiple target designations. If the occasion ever comes, the crew will receive a coded target message from SAC headquarters at Omaha, flip switches accordingly. The missile will be fueled automatically, the surface doors opened, the Titan raised a foot a second to ground level and fired within minutes.

Construction at Complex 2-A is now completed, and its Titans are being readied. Around the U.S., as other work progresses, 50 other missiles will be in place by year's end. By 1963, several Minuteman silos will be completed daily; an impressive arsenal of about 200 missiles will be primed and ready. Safely underground and protected against counterfire, they will serve as a grim reminder that the U.S. is well able to strike back against aggression of whatever magnitude. In the long run, that ability may be the deterrent that will keep the silo doors closed.

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