We visited family over the weekend, driving almost six hours to Warrensburg-Knob Noster, Mo. A half-dozen or so in-laws were there, for the retirement ceremony of a 25-year airman, a stepbrother-in-law. His last deployment was to Whiteman Air Force Base. The career began in fuels and ended in the branch’s financing branch, ensuring personnel and bills got paid. His work in accounting for discrepancies then closing them earned him commendations for stretching taxpayer dollars.
Monday morning he led us — yes, Brick passed the background security check — to Oscar 1:
From 1964 to 1993, Whiteman AFB’s Oscar-01 served as command center for 10 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. … Oscar stood out, however, as it was the only such operational site actually located on a base.”
It is the fulltime job of one officer to give tours of it, and he lives in its quarters with his family. You say Air Force, and you think pilots and crew, and ground support. Just as important are fuel loaders and testers, accountants, and tour leaders (“Right this way, Congressman.” “Look, nyet nukes, Mr. Ambassador”). My dad served in World War II and Korea in the Army Quartermaster Corps — issuing and maintaining uniforms and linens — in India, Afghanistan and the Pentagon. Khakis and sheets.
The tour guide’s apartment was not part of the tour. A front room held perhaps 20 theater seats (they were armless, because the Cold War is over). Down a short hall was the security area with views of the gate, straight out of the 1960s. From there a freight elevator took us down 45 feet to the command center.
No missiles, no silos anywhere anymore. All are dismantled and destroyed, and filled, imploded or flooded, respectively, due to Soviet-U.S. treaties. Oscar is left, for tours. Details are available on the World Wide Web.
When the tour was offered to we guests of the master sergeant, I jumped for it. This is Cold War history. Having completed my Air Force tour of about two hours — including the PX — I can tell you that this underground capsule — with one half mechanical and the other half holding all those buttons and dials, plus a toilet — I can say it did not feel claustrophobic, just sad.
The mutually assured destruction gambit worked. If it hadn’t, the fellows stationed here would have been buried alive. They were deep enough to survive a direct hit, theoretically, with a few weeks of air, water and food to wait out the worst of the toxic atmosphere, we were told. But likely there would have been too much gravel and rubble, fused into a glassy mass by the heat, to have let them scrape their way to the doors and past them.
The curator had my father-in-law and me sit in the two commander chairs and directed us in how to retrieve our orders then mock-launch nuclear warheads from buried silos throughout central Missouri. The two commanders had keys to turn simultaneously, to get the bomb codes then to electronically fire them. The operation was designed to not be done alone. Evidently, government for decades was more worried about a maniac than a conspiracy. All this as seen in Fail-Safe, Dr. Strangelove and so I’m told WarGames. Thus at the many-ton door leading into the command half of the capsule was a merry painting of the Muppet Oscar the Grouch and in serious stenciled block letters:
No Lone Zone
Two Man Concept Mandatory”
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