What better way to follow our slightly bizarre morning touring a US military base than to visit a decommissioned cold war nuclear missile launch site?
The Titan Missile Museum 
is an underground facility around 15 miles south of Tucson housing a 103ft Titan II missile which used to contain a 9 megaton nuclear missile aimed at Russia. We were taken on a guided tour of various underground rooms and corridors including the control room and the missile silo which still contains an inert Titan missile.
There were 18 of these missile sites located around the Tucson area and each one was manned in 24 hour shifts and ready to launch a missile within 58 seconds that had a range of over 5000 miles and could hit a target within 1 mile, which seems incredible even now, let alone in 1963 when it was built.
Being able to tour an actual cold war nuclear missile launch site was a privilege in itself, but being shown round by Steve, an ex-employee at one of these sites and taken through the launch sequence in the control room was pretty special. Steve uses a walking stick these days and can’t take the stairs, but his enthusiasm for the site was matched only by our fascination. I asked him if the job was scary, he replied “No, but it could get quite tedious”.
As you can probably tell, we’ve been pretty excited by our last couple of trips .Our last few days visiting meteor craters, airplane graveyards and cold war missile sites have been great fun. It really does seem that the weirder this holiday gets the more interesting it gets, which is good because after visiting Tombstone tomorrow we’re off to Roswell!