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FOIA'd Documents Give Tour of Minuteman Missile National Historic Site (muckrock.com)
v3rgEz writes: In the 1990s, during our nuclear disarmament initiative, the Congress preserved two intercontinental ballistic missile silos as historic sites. The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site is one of them, and MuckRock used FOIA to take a tour of what's publicly on display, including a Domino's Themed Blast Door and probing questions guides are told to ask visitors, including, 'Could you turn they key?'
The summary is really poor, ANYONE can go on the tour without invoking the FOIA - I did so a few years ago, and saw all the same things.
If you read the article, it's just about how they used the FOIA to get the script for the tour, which while interesting is not exactly a Snowden level revelation.
By the way, for whoever wrote the original article do you really not know why they would worry about oil from hands? Over time touches can easily corrode metal and paint, and at this point there is very little budget to keep up repairs to the site so they want to minimize how much they have to do touchups. Yes the facility is designed to withstand a nuclear blast, but the grand canyon was full of many hard rocks before thousands of years of slow erosion created a mighty chasm...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hang on, before you start the 10% debating and and 90% trolling about whether you would kill millions to save hundreds of millions let me get my popcorn first
how could you save hundreds of millions? any nuclear salvo would be met by a return salvo. you could kill hundreds of millions and have your hundreds of millions die anyway. winning?
And zero wars between countries that have nuclear weapons. No-one dares risk escalation. The Cold War is called such precisely because there was no actual direct fighting involved - just lots of being prepared to fight, and a few proxy wars.
ONE MAN COULD turn both keys in the activation sequence - which was NOT supposed to be do-able. During periodic testing of the control room -to- silo control links, a single man was left to activate the keys to test the wiring systems. The 2 consoles were 8 - 10 (or so) feet apart, and designed to REQUIRE 2 men to activate the firing sequence at the same time. Using 2 nails and a length of sting, the ingenious control house tech put one nail above the second key control, the second nail through the head of the key, tied the string to the second nail (key-head nail) and ran the string across the top nail and over to the second key station. BINGO! He could turn BOTH keys simultaneously - one by hand, the other by pulling on the string. When observed (caught) doing this testing, he was told to never discuss it, and the repercussions went like a silent tidal wave all the way to the top. I still don't know how this was resolved - but I imagine the key consoles were outfitted with additional locks that required pushing an actuator button or something, requiring 2 hands to activate.
redneck geek