Is featuring highlights from the cspan cities tour with the support of our cable partners. The mission was peace through deterrence. Our job was to project a credible threat, to be here every day demonstrating to the soviet union that even if they launched a surprise first strike against us, we would be able to ride that out and retaliate quickly and with enough force that we would devastate the soviet union even if they had launched their missiles first. Were at the Titan Missile museum in arizona about 25 miles south of Downtown Tucson and were in the Launch Control center of the missile site. Thats essentially the nerve center of the missile site itself. From here, using all of this equipment, the crew has a birds eye view of the condition of the missile and of the missile site. They first have to receive a launch order telling them to execute their missile and what time theyre going to do that. And in order for them to do that theyre going to need two keys, two launch keys. One launch key for the crew commander and one for the deputy crew commander. The launch keys are secured in what was called the emergency war order safe to the crew. The ewo safe is secured by two padlocks, and these are combination padlocks and each lock longs to a specific officer on the crew so this is the crew commanders launch locked and this is the deputy crew commanders lock. Only the officer who owns the lock knows the combination to the lock. And when we receive those locks when we qualify for crew duty, we set the combination. And then that combination is classified top secret because its guarding top secret equipment. The placement of the keys is intentional and serves a purpose. It guarantees both officers have to act together in order to launch the missile because in order to launch the missiles, both keys have to be turned and held in the on position for five seconds and they have to be turned at the exact same moment in time. It takes about 30 minutes to reach its target, and when it does, that target is going to cease to exist. So this small elevator is what the crew and maintenance teams would use when the missile was operational, the stage one engine would have been mounted right here and the thrust chambers, it had two of them, would have been extending below these cutouts. And if you look to your left youll see a large water spray nozzle. Theres a ring of them that circles the launch duct. And when the launch sequence is initiated, when the launch sequence is initiated we start pumping. 160 gallons roughly a second of water into the concrete deflector at the bottom of the launch duct. So that when the stage one engine fires, the heat interacts with the water. Creates steam. And the steam works together with the sound attenuation panels. They Work Together to dampen and absorb enough of the noise and vibration created created so that the missile will be able to safely launch. Its going to explode and never launch. And that was one of the huge challenges that the engineers overcame that enabled the titan ii to launch from within the launch duct. So this is level two of the launch duct. Theres another 120 feet or so of the duct beneath us. Thats the reentry vehicle and thats what carried the warhead on the titan ii, and its the only part of the missile thats actually going to reach its target. The yield of the titan ii was nine megatons. Thats the explosive equivalent of 9 million tons of tnt. Enough destructive capability to decimate an area of 900 square miles. So if you were to drop the equivalent of a titan ii on the city of tucson, the city of tucson would cease to exist. And there were 54 missiles all together. 18 of them were based around tucson arizona. Another 18 were based around wichita, kansas. And the final set of 18 were based around little rock arkansas. In 1978, the air force opened the field to women. It was previously closed to women because its actually a combat position. And when the air force transitioned to the all volunteer force, they realized that they were not going to be able to man all of the titan ii sites. They were not going to have enough people. So the decision was made to open the career field to women. And i was in college at the university of virginia at the time inform reserve officer training, ootc. I was rotc. I was actually recruited for this in the very early days of the career field being open to women. I was actually a crew commander. I commanded a fourperson titan ii missile combat crew here at the site when it was operational. I was stationed here from 1980 to 1984. When i first came back here after they opened the museum, it was 1998 and the museum had been open for about 12 years so the site had actually been off alert since 1982 and i happened to come back to tucson to live after i got out of the air force. An uncle visited me and he wanted to come here and i remember when we came through the access portal into the entrapment area with a tour group, the smell of the missile site hit me with an impact i did not expect. The first job i ever had was the most important job in my career. I started my career at the apex and everything that came after that is at least one level below because i will never have as much responsibility in my lifetime again as i had when i was a crew commander here. We have a Twofold Mission here at the Missile Museum museum. First its to preserve and interpret the title missile National Landmark site and to provide stewardship for the historic site. The second part of our mission is to provide a framework for the public and the discretion that the public is having about the future of Nuclear Weapons in the world. The generation thats coming up now, the young people that are in their 20s and 30s theyre the people that are going to have to confront what the future of Nuclear Weapons is going to be around the world. And you cant do that just by reading about it. People really have no concept about Nuclear Weapons and about how they work and how expensive they are to maintain and about the destructive capability that they have and so what we do here is we provide a framework for people to think about those kinds of questions to get those kinds of answers so that they can make their own decisions about how they want to influence the future of Nuclear Weapons in the world and so i think that as a National Historic landmark site, this facility is performing as an Important Role now as it did during the cold war when it was part of our front line defense. Al im the director of the it is my pleasure this evening to introduce to you michael neiberg. Michael is the newly appointed inaugural chair of war studies at the u. S. Army war college in carlisle, pennsylvania. An internationally recognized historian of world war i and ii. He formerly served as the henry l. Stinson chair of history at the u. S. Army war
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