But they had been told that the weapon was only to be launched in retaliation for a Soviet strike, so if they were called upon to deploy it, they believed they were doing so to prevent large-scale American casualties. To alleviate any feelings of guilt, the crewmen were never told the programmed destination of their missile. He points out that for people of his generation, Nazi atrocities were fresh history and they feared the Soviets had equally sinister intentions. “I don’t think anyone on the crew ever felt we wouldn’t be able to do it if the time came,” he says.
Nuclear silo cost code#
“Uh oh,” he recalls thinking, “Here we go.” To his relief, he quickly learned it had been a false alarm-the code format had changed and Somerset hadn’t been briefed-but those few moments were the closest he came to a test of his willingness to launch a weapon that could wipe out an entire city. One day in late 1964, Somerset was at the missile control console when the hair stood up on the back of his neck-a war code had come through on the radio. Somerset was on a crew of five that worked 24-hour shifts-one day on, two off-inspecting and maintaining the systems and waiting for the signal they hoped would never come. government well over $200 million and two-and–a-half years of round-the-clock construction to erect-if erect is the right word for structures bored 180 feet into the earth. Completed in 1962, the 12 sites cost the U.S. The silo was one of a dozen within 100 miles of Plattsburgh Air Force Base. Within a few weeks of the end of the crisis, he was stationed at Plattsburgh Air Force Base in northeastern New York and assigned to an Atlas F missile silo in the sparsely populated Adirondack town of Lewis.įorty-five years later, long after the Cold War had ended, the Lewis missile silo brought these two unlikely men together. Air Force airman training to become a ballistic missile analyst technician, was well aware of the threat of nuclear war. Meanwhile, halfway across the globe, Richard Somerset, a 21-year-old U.S. was far enough away from us … to be amused by the goings-on, not afraid, as we didn’t really understand the scale and consequences.” He was 4 years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and, as a kid in Sydney, Australia, he says, "all the action in the U.S.
Mushroom clouds never figured into the nightmares of Alexander Michael.
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