It's a small underground facility in the middle of nowhere in Kansas -- even assuming that you could get adequate power service and bandwidth to the property (which is unlikely), you're still trying to run a bunch of servers out of a tiny, damp, hot hole in the ground. Not ideal.
Every time I see people proposing to turn a former missile silo into a datacenter, I'd like to ask them to first do the budget on running a geographically diverse ring of singlemode fiber to the nearest mid size city...
Most of them are located in areas with little to no real telecommunications infrastructure.
I’ve done a couple of deep dives in a flooded silo for my Master Diver certification class. It was a very cool experience with crystal clear water as long as no one disturbed the sediment.
I wonder if your property's coordinates would remain in any old but still-commissioned targetting databases of adversarial nations. Like living under a big red X.
My grandfather was in the US army and participated in nuclear weapons testing throughout his later career. He said if war broke out with the Soviets that everyone should go sit on the roof and wait for the mushroom cloud to be sure not to survive.
I always wondered how much targeting of silos occurred. Or at least how they dealt with that.
MAD really seemed to require you unleash everything and generally if the others did you would be targeting a lot of empty silos in the middle of nowhere. At least those in the Midwest.
This was my first thought. If I had a dollar for every time I ran across a database that was horrifically out of date I'd be...getting paid less than I already am
What is the point of nuking something that is one of the only buildings specifically designed to withstand nuclear attacks? It seems kind of wasteful of weaponry to attack something that you cannot destroy. I would definitely take my chances in a nuclear silo in the event of such circumstances; if you are within 50 miles of anywhere that is hit with a modern nuclear weapon you are completely screwed unless you are underground in a structure designed to withstand the megaton winds and incredibly thermal radiance.
Your alternative is not to nuke it, and allow the missile there to destroy one of your cities (or maybe one of your own remote missile sites, but who knows?).
They won't withstand a direct hit. They're hardened but not against that. It would have to be inside a mountain like NORAD.
The plan was always to get them off the ground before most of the enemy missiles hit. And perhaps to withstand a nearby attack, as targeting tech in the 60s was not very accurate yet. But these days that won't work anymore.
All depends on what you would consider ‘livable’ conditions. Doesn’t look like it has had maintenance for a while now, but I’m sure you can move in tomorrow.
Lots of water pooling and etc. i wonder how much work it would take to fix it up.
I had a friend growing up who had a missile silo on the edge of their property.
Folks in the area never talked about them but everyone knew where they were. We would go look at it once in a while. Really eerie that out in this peaceful prairie was a horrific weapon just sleeping and waiting. Ready to go at all times. Pointed at folks on the other side of the planet nobody in the prairie knew or would likely ever meet.
After the Cold War they were decommissioning them. While driving out there I was waved down my an APC and some soldiers. I pulled over, they asked me to wait with them.
A couple convoys of more soldiers drove by, trucks, then a big convoy with a big white truck.
I asked “Was that the real thing?” The soldier said “They don’t bring us ALL out here unless it is.”
They thanked me for waiting and told me I could go after one more group when by.
These guys [1] did a series of videos on a similar one. They answer a lot of questions about what it takes, but the upshot is... probably not worth the trouble for 99% of folks.
If not a direct hit, more likely an extended entombment after the entrance stairwell collapses and blocks the blast door. Maybe that's the second reason missileers carried sidearms.
Even if some people know, are we sure if it was disseminated across all Classified channels up and down and then the people in charge of the lists updated them? :p
There are two bits of context you need to understand this.
First: Early nuclear missiles weren't very accurate - you don't have to be very accurate when your target is the size of Moscow. A missile silo is a much smaller target!
So AIUI missile silos were hardened to survive a nuclear bomb landing 500m away - but they wouldn't survive a direct hit.
Second: There was a theory, at one point in the cold war, that one side could launch a surprise attack that struck and disabled the other side's nuclear weapons. Or at least, disabled a large enough fraction that the counterattack was survivable.
This was seen as winning. Or as close to winning as you can get, in a nuclear war. And it was seen as relatively more ethical than targeting cities.
The jargon for this is "counterforce" or "disarming" strike [1] and it was part of the rationale for having a ridiculous number of bombs - if you have enough bombs to destroy the world 10 times over, you can destroy the world even if 90% of your bombs have been destroyed in a surprise attack.
Later in the cold war other technologies were developed - high precision guidance, submarine launched missiles, and missiles with multiple warheads. Between them they made a disarming strike seem unlikely to work. But on the other hand there are still an awful lot of missiles around and they gotta be targeted somewhere. If you'd already sent a dozen at the pentagon and a dozen at the white house, why not send some of the remainder at a few nuclear silos?
Of course, you might well say this all seems pretty unlikely. A nuclear war? In this day and age? But people who think that probably aren't in the market for a disused nuclear bunker, except as a historical curiosity.
One might be tempted to think "oh, it's concrete, I'll hose it down". But after recently reading up on it a bit, some of the missiles had extremely harmful propellants, and if that leaked (which chances are it did), that'd basically be a hazmat site.
The APU on atlas missiles used ethylene oxide to fuel the turbine, you don't need hydrazine to get toxic aerospace chemical exposure. I would also bet all the money in my pocket those structures are chock full of asbestos and lead.
Somebody on Twitter mentioned that there is likely a lot of asbestos, and other environmental issues that the buyer would be responsible for remediating. I don’t know enough to know if that’s correct or not but it seems reasonable.
Scary to think in retrospect that the presence of this silo might have made y'all a direct target during the Cold War should things have actually turned hot. (Assuming the counter intelligence and reconnaissance determined there was a silo present.)
I'd also worry (not much, but just enough to be creeped out and never want to buy one of these) that there may be some system that is still programmed with old silos as targets. If things heat up again, or if there is some error, that property might be a target.
Have you ever heard the term "nuclear sponge"? Projections for a nuclear war is that like half of the midwest gets nuked to smithereens in order to hit the silos; it probably doesn't matter much if one is in your backyard or a hundred miles down the road.
During the Cold War, we had 1050 holes in the ground, spread across Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, and the Dakotas. It was exactly that, an impossible sponge to soak up the Soviet capability. And that's just the Northern Tier Missile field.
> I'd also worry (not much, but just enough to be creeped out and never want to buy one of these) that there may be some system that is still programmed with old silos as targets. If things heat up again, or if there is some error, that property might be a target.
At that point I think you'd also want to ask yourself whether surviving a nuclear war would really be the preferable outcome.
Is there an actual reason why you think it might not be preferable to survive? You can always change your mind if it turns out that it was the wrong choice, right?
Highly doubtful. If anything you would be free to become the twisted, savage raider you've always wanted to become, roving the lands for scrap and caps.
I grew up in an area absolutely covered in targets (Mather AFB, McClellan AFB, Travis AFB, various Army depots, and the California state Capitol.) I figured I was radioactive vapor if things got that far, so I didn’t obsess over it.
I grew up in Naperville, IL, and one of my teachers told us that we were goners in a nuclear war because we were halfway between Fermilab and Argonne National Lab. We also had a missile silo in our town, although it had been decommissioned and turned into a park by the 90s. Probably would have caught a nuke, just in case.
The Genie was a rocket, not a missile. Missiles are guided. A nuclear bomb you can just generally boresight more or less in the direction of a bomber formation and let fly, or so went the theory.
Eerie was living in Topeka in the early 80s when “the day after” was released. For those not familiar with the movie or Kansas, Topeka is just west of Lawrence where the movie was set. Seeing the birds fly from familiar looking land freaked me out.
I was in elementary school at the time. This movie scared the living shit out of every single person I know. Nuclear war didn’t feel hypothetical or fake back then, it felt like a real thing that adults were worried might actually happen.
I was terrified of this movie when I was a little kid. Circa 10 years old. Just seeing the trailer (on NBC?) scared me. Never watched it, even to this day. There was one other movie of this ilk. I remember in the trailer for one or the other, there being a scene with a woman protester, shouting with a British accent, "You cannot win a nuclear war!"
That other movie is Threads (1984), the scene you describe is in the trailer and the full movie is available at archive.org (https://archive.org/details/threads_202007)
Agreed I was growing up in Charleston, SC at the time. Big Polaris base there at the time. We told we were pretty much ash when (not if) WWIII kicked off.
I grew up in Germany in the cold war, around 80 km west of the iron curtain. Prime target for nukes from both sides as it would be the place where Nato and Warshaw Pact would collide. In fact there were even nuclear "landmines" near bridges or other tactical points for making areas impassable by soviet tanks.
During the 80s I was fully aware that - if WW3 would have broken out, even in a limited way - it would have meant game over for me. You'll learn just not to worry about that.
"Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser (I think it was) contains a report about the USA being extremely hesitant and taking ages to reprogram the missiles. So yeah, I'd not be surprised either.
Also, that's a great (audio) book on the general subject.
Sounds like the beginning of several zombie movies from the 80s. Only a few minutes after driving past, a canister would roll off the truck bed. Kids would later find it.
There was a movie in the 80s about two guys who grew up in a fallout shelter with nothing to watch but Humphrey Bogart movies, emerged years later as noir style detectives, and had to fend off mutants from launching the last nuclear missile on earth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The solider I talked to could just be lying or maybe not even know himself.
This was post cold war when the agreements to stand down ICBMs were rolling out and they were disarming and imploding silos (Russians came to observe even). So I think it was plausible that they were moving things. But yeah I have no way to know, a drill, real deal, it would look the same to me.
That reminds me of the contest on Jeopardy recently whose story was about how he toured a missile silo once and realized that his wingspan was so long that he could actually turn both keys at once. He said the tour guide didn't seem to care.
In the early 2000s, there was a massive DEA bust involving a decomissioned missile silo turned into an LSD lab (which was apparently responsible for manufacturing 90% of the LSD on the market at the time). Other levels of the facility were turned into a massive party/tripping space - it's a fascinating story.
The man responsible (William Pickard) served quite some time in federal prison but was finally released sometime last year.
I'm sure there's no shortage of creative uses for a property like this.
In Germany a formwr bunker was used to host a illegal data center which run a significant part of the dark net. In the end, however, the police raided it and they forgot to lock the place and they had a excel list with all the passwords.
I really dislike the term "illegal data center", which was coined by Germany's yellow press. The data center was perfectly legal (as in: they were allowed to operate a business involving hosting of servers there, and everyone knew they did). What was illegal was some of the business done on its servers - and the fact that the operator did not cooperate with law enforcement.
What does “yellow press” mean in this context? I know the usage of the word “yellow” means “cowardly,” but I suspect there is some other connotation/well-known phrase
> Yellow journalism and yellow press are American terms for journalism and associated newspapers that present little or no legitimate, well-researched news while instead using eye-catching headlines for increased sales. Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. By extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.
For those who aren’t aware, the national demand for lysergic acid diethylamide in pure form would comfortably fit in the bottom third of a standard test tube. It has a ridiculously low titer. Few drugs have active doses measured in micrograms.
Pre-COVID there was a couple in Connecticut who transformed their entire house into a sex dungeon and were getting $1500 a night renting it on Airbnb. I bet you could do at least ten times that with a missile silo of sin. No worries about cops or nosey neighbors. Cleanup would be really icky though (shudder).
There's a whole market of doomsday preppers who would absolutely buy in at whatever price you set it. Luxury condos in old silos are a thing. And the cost of excavating, building, and reinforcing the structure is far more than the cost to refurbish the inside of it.
Larpers would pay big bucks to run around a place like this shooting paintballs or airsoft at each other.
Set it up so the above ground barracks has some nice PC/Consoles to play with in the evenings, some hot pockets and Mt. Dew for breakfast and let them larp all day with their buddies for $300/person/day.
$400 and you'll throw in a free tetanus injection.
That place looks like an OH&S nightmare. You just need one fat kid to fall down the main shaft and things get real quick.
Yeah, this seems to be the main issue with this, fixing it up to be in compliance with a myriad of either business/residential regulations seems like it would be both a giant headache and a giant cost.
Radon is produced naturally underground in areas near uranium deposits. Most of the time they are in such small amounts that they can be ignored, but Kansas has a lot of Radon, (https://kansasradonprogram.org/county-map). Having such a deep set building would allow more of it to seep in and settle, and it is doubtful that there is any form of radon mitigation system built into the building.
You might get lucky, the 4 ft of concrete might make a nigh impenetrable barrier, but the only way to know would be to test it.
It may only have been up on Zillow this time for 4 days, but the streetview shows a real estate sign, so this isn't the first time they've attempted to sell, or it's a resale.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 28.1 ms ] threadMost of them are located in areas with little to no real telecommunications infrastructure.
I can't be the only one that thinks it's inevitable based on the anecdotes.
MAD really seemed to require you unleash everything and generally if the others did you would be targeting a lot of empty silos in the middle of nowhere. At least those in the Midwest.
They interviewed the American and Russians (they get to watch) folks at the site.
Young reporter once asked how the Russians could be sure what silo it is if they’re escorted by Americans the whole time.
The American commander paused and said “My Russian counterpart here probably knows this location as well as I do.”
The Russian who previously only used a translator burst out in a smile and belly laugh.
https://californiathroughmylens.com/san-vicente-mountain-par...
The plan was always to get them off the ground before most of the enemy missiles hit. And perhaps to withstand a nearby attack, as targeting tech in the 60s was not very accurate yet. But these days that won't work anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nike_missile_sites#Uni...
These people seem to specialize silos
https://www.missilebases.com/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/atlas-missile-silo-home
seriously, though I expect the rebar to be compromised by moisture intrusion
Also, I’m certain I’ve seen this for sale before, though I think the price has increased.
I had a friend growing up who had a missile silo on the edge of their property.
Folks in the area never talked about them but everyone knew where they were. We would go look at it once in a while. Really eerie that out in this peaceful prairie was a horrific weapon just sleeping and waiting. Ready to go at all times. Pointed at folks on the other side of the planet nobody in the prairie knew or would likely ever meet.
After the Cold War they were decommissioning them. While driving out there I was waved down my an APC and some soldiers. I pulled over, they asked me to wait with them.
A couple convoys of more soldiers drove by, trucks, then a big convoy with a big white truck.
I asked “Was that the real thing?” The soldier said “They don’t bring us ALL out here unless it is.”
They thanked me for waiting and told me I could go after one more group when by.
[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-KKIb8rvtMQnKZOfxShrcAH5...
It's basically dry, though god only knows what the bottom of the silo itself looks like.
I imagine getting it operational again would take years of very obvious work.
First: Early nuclear missiles weren't very accurate - you don't have to be very accurate when your target is the size of Moscow. A missile silo is a much smaller target!
So AIUI missile silos were hardened to survive a nuclear bomb landing 500m away - but they wouldn't survive a direct hit.
Second: There was a theory, at one point in the cold war, that one side could launch a surprise attack that struck and disabled the other side's nuclear weapons. Or at least, disabled a large enough fraction that the counterattack was survivable.
This was seen as winning. Or as close to winning as you can get, in a nuclear war. And it was seen as relatively more ethical than targeting cities.
The jargon for this is "counterforce" or "disarming" strike [1] and it was part of the rationale for having a ridiculous number of bombs - if you have enough bombs to destroy the world 10 times over, you can destroy the world even if 90% of your bombs have been destroyed in a surprise attack.
Later in the cold war other technologies were developed - high precision guidance, submarine launched missiles, and missiles with multiple warheads. Between them they made a disarming strike seem unlikely to work. But on the other hand there are still an awful lot of missiles around and they gotta be targeted somewhere. If you'd already sent a dozen at the pentagon and a dozen at the white house, why not send some of the remainder at a few nuclear silos?
Of course, you might well say this all seems pretty unlikely. A nuclear war? In this day and age? But people who think that probably aren't in the market for a disused nuclear bunker, except as a historical curiosity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterforce
1. I just read this term in Lessons of History (Durrant)
I'd also worry (not much, but just enough to be creeped out and never want to buy one of these) that there may be some system that is still programmed with old silos as targets. If things heat up again, or if there is some error, that property might be a target.
At that point I think you'd also want to ask yourself whether surviving a nuclear war would really be the preferable outcome.
I really don't see the problem
Of course being 1960s technology, the missiles’ inaccuracy and lack of numbers, was offset by having nuclear warheads.
The plan was to set a nuke off above your own city, to try to destroy/deflect another nuke, or an entire bomber squadron. SMH
Or the time we dropped nukes down a couple gas wells to experiment with Nuclear Fracking.
The house I grew up in was right next to a Nike base outside of Philadelphia.
For those in the Bay Area, there's a Nike base that offers tours a few days a week in Golden Gate Recreational Area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
Pretty incredible. Thanks for sharing!
During the 80s I was fully aware that - if WW3 would have broken out, even in a limited way - it would have meant game over for me. You'll learn just not to worry about that.
Turns out that "success" involved "most of germany dead by NATO nukes" didn't bring positive attention.
Wait, were these ever actually deployed?! They were certainly studied, but I didn't think they ever made it into the ground.
Also, that's a great (audio) book on the general subject.
And so it goes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_Dreams
I thought they were all pretty big complexes with people in a bunker connected to them 24/7
https://www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.co0919.sheet/?sp=2
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.
You can read a bit about them here https://minutemanmissile.com/missilesecurity.html
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.
Maybe. Sowing confusion about the whereabouts of your warheads can be useful, and that was extensively considered.
See for example https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk3/1981/8116/811604.pdf, discussing the never implemented “multiple protective shelters” concept.
That even discusses how that can be done when treaties require inspections to be able to count your missiles.
I ‘corrected’ that ugly .PDF part without checking whether it broke the URL.
This was post cold war when the agreements to stand down ICBMs were rolling out and they were disarming and imploding silos (Russians came to observe even). So I think it was plausible that they were moving things. But yeah I have no way to know, a drill, real deal, it would look the same to me.
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/45816677
Looks like the sort of place a crypto-bro would blow a few million on.
Would you take free land in rural America?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30138545
[0] https://youtu.be/8-T_uhQ0iE4
The man responsible (William Pickard) served quite some time in federal prison but was finally released sometime last year.
I'm sure there's no shortage of creative uses for a property like this.
https://historydaily.org/skinner-pickard-1990s-lsd-lab-built...
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/2-Bay-Area-Men-Busted...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard
Edit: My mistake, it was about another duo who also made LSD. I'm pretty sure the silo is mentioned in passing.
The Sunshine Makers Official Trailer 1 (2017) - Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsvElED0-O0
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/the-cold-war-b...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
12 minute clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7qliVpGEk0&vl=en
Set it up so the above ground barracks has some nice PC/Consoles to play with in the evenings, some hot pockets and Mt. Dew for breakfast and let them larp all day with their buddies for $300/person/day.
You might get lucky, the 4 ft of concrete might make a nigh impenetrable barrier, but the only way to know would be to test it.
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/46711243
IMO it's priced about $350K too high.
https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/45816677
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-KKIb8rvtMQnKZOfxShr...
Honestly, this place is going to need a lot of shiplap.