Subject
TT-17 Weapons in steel vaults
From
Date
Body
EDNOTE. I offer the following comment & quote to Akiko's first note reproduced
below.
62.04-05: painted surfaces of steel made to resemble the mottling of the
adjacent rocks!: Steel camouflage or mimicry? A rocks-in-the-mountains
motif.
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EDNOTE. Yes, this is certainly a prime instance of the "rock/mountain/avalanche
motif." I assume VN is referring here to the US Titan missile bases that were
stashed in mountain vaults and tunnels in Colorado and elsewhere during the
Cold War. In this case, making a parallel between the explosive power of words
of love and lethal missiles. One of these underground silos is now a tourist
exhibit. A description follows:
I find deterrent forces of a more earthbound variety an hour south of Tucson, at
the former Air Force launch complex 571-7, once operated by the Strategic Air
Command. It is the only place in the country where a tourist can view a fully
preserved ICBM silo, once the home of a 33,000-pound Titan II missile (the
largest the U.S. ever built) with a range of 9000 miles and able to carry a
nine-megaton warhead. With its coterie of polite elderly women volunteers, the
site might easily be mistaken for a provincial historical society museum (Dr.
Strangelove slept here!), were it not entirely underground. ....
With its echoing metal tunnels, banks of gray metal computers, closetfulls of
white rocket-fuel-handler suits, and submarine-like vault doors, the Titan site
is a steely mausoleum of America's nuclear past, as well as a fantastic vision
of an alternate future in which not only defense installations are located
underground, but factories and housing as well. The thermonuclear
strategist Herman Kahn proposed a kind of evacuation nation, a permanent civil
defense footing in which it was "perfectly conceivable . . . that the U.S.
might have to evacuate two or three times every decade."
From Tom Vanderbilt "Desert of Dreams."
below.
62.04-05: painted surfaces of steel made to resemble the mottling of the
adjacent rocks!: Steel camouflage or mimicry? A rocks-in-the-mountains
motif.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
EDNOTE. Yes, this is certainly a prime instance of the "rock/mountain/avalanche
motif." I assume VN is referring here to the US Titan missile bases that were
stashed in mountain vaults and tunnels in Colorado and elsewhere during the
Cold War. In this case, making a parallel between the explosive power of words
of love and lethal missiles. One of these underground silos is now a tourist
exhibit. A description follows:
I find deterrent forces of a more earthbound variety an hour south of Tucson, at
the former Air Force launch complex 571-7, once operated by the Strategic Air
Command. It is the only place in the country where a tourist can view a fully
preserved ICBM silo, once the home of a 33,000-pound Titan II missile (the
largest the U.S. ever built) with a range of 9000 miles and able to carry a
nine-megaton warhead. With its coterie of polite elderly women volunteers, the
site might easily be mistaken for a provincial historical society museum (Dr.
Strangelove slept here!), were it not entirely underground. ....
With its echoing metal tunnels, banks of gray metal computers, closetfulls of
white rocket-fuel-handler suits, and submarine-like vault doors, the Titan site
is a steely mausoleum of America's nuclear past, as well as a fantastic vision
of an alternate future in which not only defense installations are located
underground, but factories and housing as well. The thermonuclear
strategist Herman Kahn proposed a kind of evacuation nation, a permanent civil
defense footing in which it was "perfectly conceivable . . . that the U.S.
might have to evacuate two or three times every decade."
From Tom Vanderbilt "Desert of Dreams."