![]() However, Site 6 became a private residence. Farmers use the silos as storage and for farming needs. One site is used by the federal government for noise testing. Since their decommission all of the silos have been purchased for private use. The missiles were removed from the sites in 1965 but for Atlas E IBM Site 6 that was not the end of the story. That would have changed the world as we know it." “Because, really, we were 15 minutes away from letting one of those missiles go. Dick Mellor an airman stationed at one of the missile sites was interview by the Spokesman-Review, “It’s kind of scary going into one of them now,” Mellor said. Each of the 9 missile sites is 18,000 square feet of underground concrete, built to withstand an atomic blast 50 times larger than Hiroshima.Īirmen were able to launch an Atlas E within 15 minutes of receiving the order to do so. Spokane was a priority nuclear target for the Soviet Union. Eastern Washington is pockmarked with empty missile silos, relics of the Cold War. Site 6 is located near the small farming towns of Davenport and Harrington, WA. Each Atlas E was outfitted with a 4-megaton nuclear warhead. In 1960, Fairchild Air Force Base’s 567th Strategic Missile Squadron went live with their Atlas E Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (IBM) sites. It is now the home of an internationally renowned UFO expert. ![]() "But that's how the Soviet generals believed war in Europe would go.A local tax auditor met a grisly fate in a nuclear missile silo in rural Washington State. "The idea itself was crazy," says Kiarszys. These hidden bases harboured an awesome destructive power that could have been deployed during a war in Europe. "For many years we have been told that there are no nuclear weapons in the territory of Poland," says Kiarszys. Local people in western Poland were aware that the Soviet military operated numerous facilities in their part of the country during the Cold War, but it was only after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 that Poles learned how some of these bases were used to store nuclear weapons. There are branded shoes from the West, for instance, and what could be Lego bricks – things that only a few people, such as Soviet officers with access to foreign currency, could buy under communist rule in the Eastern Bloc. Kiarszys says the waste is "completely different" from what you'd find in an ordinary Polish rubbish dump from the same era. Text on some of the items confirms their date and origin in the Soviet Union. (Read more: Garbology: How to spot patterns in people's waste.) At these isolated former bases, old pieces of uniform lie decaying in the leaf litter next to sweet wrappers, rubber ducks and toy telephones. Rubbish can tell you a lot about a person or community, a phenomenon called garbology. Kiarszys has seen photographic evidence confirming the presence of these families, but it was the ephemera and waste they left behind that revealed the most striking insights about how they lived while stationed there. "Commanding officers knew very well that, for their psychological health, it is very important to create an illusion of everyday peaceful life," says Grzegorz Kiarszys, an archaeologist at Szczecin University who has studied the ruins and rubbish piles at three long-abandoned Soviet nuclear weapons bases in north-western Poland.Įach of the three bases – Podborsko, Templewo and Brzeźnica Kolonia – was once home to around 140 people, mostly soldiers but also some officers whose immediate families were allowed to live there too. Their father laid out his uniform, the hammer and sickle button sparkling, while their mother sat down for a game of chess.īut they knew that beneath their feet, stored in utmost secrecy, were nuclear warheads, likely many times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The children brushed their teeth hurriedly after breakfast, then rushed outside to play soldiers with plastic pistols. At a Soviet military base deep in the Polish forest, miles from the nearest village, an officer's family was whiling away another Saturday morning.
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