On the west coast of Oahu, inland from Waianae and Maili, is some sort of installation that I presume is military and which seems to consist of some sort of hardened shelters or bunkers or I don’t know what. They don’t look like what I imagine underground missle silos to look like, as they seem to be raised oval bumps of different sizes with an access road cutting through each one. There are also numerous sheds/buildings. All of these bumps and sheds/buildings are arranged in straight lines.
They are arrayed all over the slope of the hills there, from an elevation of about 88 feet to 688 feet, covering an area of several square miles.
What sort of installation am I looking at? Thanks.
It’s the Naval Magazine Pearl Harbor, formerly known as Naval Magazine Lualualei. The bunkers are used for ammunition and explosives storage, including nuclear weapons.
Just an aside, I don’t think that site in particular is where any Nukes are stored. If there are any nukes in Hawaii, they are probably at Naval Magazine Pearl Harbor - West Loch.
Note: I understand it is the official stance of the United States Navy to neither confirm nor deny the presence of Nuclear weapons at any location. I am NOT an employee of the United States Navy, nor am I speaking from any personal experience with Nuclear Weapons in Hawaii.
I was under the impression (years ago) that West Loch had a small “ready store” of gravity bombs and Tomahawk warheads and there were more at Lualualei. I could be wrong, it’s happened before
And the reason they are divided up into many small storage facilities is for safety. If something causes one of them to catch fire or explode, only that one location is damaged/destroyed. They are separated far enough that (in theory) an explosion in one will not set off other nearby ones.
I don’t know anything about how nuclear weapons are stored or deployed, but it seems that from a common sense point of view you wouldn’t want to store them outside. That has to be less secure than an indoor facility and unless the huts are climate controled, the variations in temperature couldn’t be a good thing for the initiators - or whatever you call the conventional explosives. I honestly couldn’t even see the govt depotting (is that a word?) weapons grade material there, but wtf do I know.
Any materials that are explosive would not be permanently kept in huts, they would be in those earth-mounds (and t-bonham’s post indicates why-if anything were to detonate, the bunkers keep other explosives in other bunkers secure). Earth makes a pretty good insulator and keeps temperatures fairly consistent year round.
We are pretty sure they kept them in Hawaii in the past, due to number of online sources indicating so. We truly do not know if they keep them there now. Anyone that could definitely tell us that will not be coming on the board to let us know.
Nuclear weapons are often stored disassembled. They are in a few parts, that have to be put together before you have a functioning weapon. This is a safety measure, and it makes upkeep easier (different parts of the weapon deteriorate at different rates).
But this also gives them a PR ‘out’ regarding weapons. Some countries (like Japan, particularly) prohibit any nuclear weapons in any military bases on Japanese territory. And the US military can tell Japan honestly that they have no nuclear weapons there (just parts – that could be assembled into a working weapon in about 15 minutes – but no actual nuclear weapons).
