Today, I visited the Titan Missile Museum outside Tucson, Arizona, and got to see the Titan II missile silo there. It got me thinking-- how much do we know about Cold War-era Soviet missile silo design? I’m curious how the design and the launch procedure compared to the US one.
Isn’t that place cool? I visited there last fall. Some Russian guys were on the tour with me. I can’t tell people’s ages by looking at them, but they might have been old enough that a missile at this site was once aimed at their country while they were alive. The site was decommissioned in 1982, so I’m old enough to remember when a missile from the Soviet counterpart of this site was aimed at my country. I wonder what visiting that site was like for them.
We probably know quite a bit about Soviet silo design, since on-site inspection was part of the SALT/START treaties, IIRC. We would have had experts crawling all over the silos. Especially during the build-down and such that followed the fall of the USSR.
Soviet missile silos employed a cold launch procedure which permitted rapid reloading, the same would later be used in the US MX Missile system, though not in the Titan.
I wonder if there is any equivalent in Russia to the Titan Missile Museum, where tourists can go see one of these old missile silos.
You mean like this place?
http://englishrussia.com/2009/06/03/russian-nuclear-silo/