Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Open Library
American Libraries
TV News
Understanding 9/11tv Titan Missile Museum CSPAN August 19, 2017 5:45pm-6:02pm EDT
5:45 pm
for as little money as possible. that one thing was to protect american lives liberty, and property from tyrants foreign and domestic. >> then new jersey residents and activists discuss the 1967 newark rebellion. >> there were 268 reports of sniper fire. no snipers were ever found. no evidence. no gun shells other than police gun shells. no footprints. no fingerprints. nothing was found. yet 26 people were killed. one policeman, one fireman. the rest citizens. all by the three police forces operating. this weekend american history tv
5:46 pm
is featuring highlights from the c-span cities tour with the support of our cable partners. >> the mission was peace through deterrence. our job was to project a credible threat, to be here every day demonstrating to the soviet union that even if they launched a surprise first strike against us, we would be able to ride that out and retaliate quickly and with enough force that we would devastate the soviet union even if they had
5:47 pm
launched their missiles first. we're at the titan missile museum in arizona about 25 miles south of downtown tucson and we're in the launch control center of the missile site. that's essentially the nerve center of the missile site itself. from here, using all of this equipment, the crew has a bird's eye view of the condition of the missile and of the missile site. they first have to receive a launch order telling them to execute their missile and what time they're going to do that. and in order for them to do that they're going to need two
5:48 pm
keys, two launch keys. one launch key for the crew commander and one for the deputy crew commander. the launch keys are secured in what was called the emergency war order safe to the crew. the ewo safe is secured by two padlocks, and these are combination padlocks and each lock longs to a specific officer on the crew so this is the crew commander's launch -- locked and this is the deputy crew commander's lock. only the officer who owns the lock knows the combination to the lock. and when we receive those locks when we qualify for crew duty, we set the combination. and then that combination is classified top secret because it's guarding top secret
5:49 pm
equipment. the placement of the keys is intentional and serves a purpose. it guarantees both officers have to act together in order to launch the missile because in order to launch the missiles, both keys have to be turned and held in the on position for five seconds and they have to be turned at the exact same moment in time.
5:50 pm
it takes about 30 minutes to reach its target, and when it does, that target is going to cease to exist. so this small elevator is what the crew and maintenance teams would use -- when the missile
5:51 pm
was operational, the stage one engine would have been mounted right here and the thrust chambers, it had two of them, would have been extending below these cutouts. and if you look to your left you'll see a large water spray nozzle. there's a ring of them that
5:52 pm
circles the launch duct. and when the launch sequence is initiated, when the launch sequence is initiated we start pumping. 160 gallons roughly a second of water into the concrete deflector at the bottom of the launch duct. so that when the stage one engine fires, the heat interacts with the water. creates steam. and the steam works together with the sound attenuation panels. they work together to dampen and absorb enough of the noise and vibration created created so that the missile will be able to safely launch.
5:53 pm
it's going to explode and never launch. and that was one of the huge challenges that the engineers overcame that enabled the titan ii to launch from within the launch duct. so this is level two of the launch duct.
5:54 pm
there's another 120 feet or so of the duct beneath us. that's the reentry vehicle and that's what carried the warhead on the titan ii, and it's the only part of the missile that's actually going to reach its target. the yield of the titan ii was nine megatons. that's the explosive equivalent of 9 million tons of tnt. enough destructive capability to decimate an area of 900 square miles. so if you were to drop the equivalent of a titan ii on the city of tucson, the city of
5:55 pm
tucson would cease to exist. and there were 54 missiles all together. 18 of them were based around tucson arizona. another 18 were based around wichita, kansas. and the final set of 18 were based around little rock arkansas. in 1978, the air force opened the field to women. it was previously closed to women because it's actually a
5:56 pm
combat position. and when the air force transitioned to the all volunteer force, they realized that they were not going to be able to man all of the titan ii sites. they were not going to have enough people. so the decision was made to open the career field to women. and i was in college at the university of virginia at the time inform reserve officer training, ootc. i was -- rotc. i was actually recruited for this in the very early days of the career field being open to women. i was actually a crew commander. i commanded a four-person titan ii missile combat crew here at the site when it was operational. i was stationed here from 1980 to 1984. when i first came back here after they opened the museum, it was 1998 and the museum had been open for about 12 years so the
5:57 pm
site had actually been off alert since 1982 and i happened to come back to tucson to live after i got out of the air force. an uncle visited me and he wanted to come here and i remember when we came through the access portal into the entrapment area with a tour group, the smell of the missile site hit me with an impact i did
5:58 pm
not expect. the first job i ever had was the most important job in my career. i started my career at the apex and everything that came after that is at least one level below because i will never have as much responsibility in my lifetime again as i had when i was a crew commander here. we have a twofold mission here at the missile museum museum. first it's to preserve and interpret the title missile national landmark site and to provide stewardship for the historic site. the second part of our mission is to provide a framework for the public and the discretion that the public is having about the future of nuclear weapons in the world. the generation that's coming up now, the young people that are
5:59 pm
in their 20s and 30s they're the people that are going to have to confront what the future of nuclear weapons is going to be around the world. and you can't do that just by reading about it. people really have no concept about nuclear weapons and about how they work and how expensive they are to maintain and about the destructive capability that they have and so what we do here is we provide a framework for people to think about those kinds of questions to get those kinds of answers so that they can make their own decisions about how they want to influence the future of nuclear weapons in the world and so i think that as
6:00 pm
a national historic landmark site, this facility is performing as an important role now as it did during the cold war when it was part of our front line defense.
6:01 pm
al i'm the director of the -- it is my pleasure this evening to introduce to you michael neiberg. michael is the newly appointed inaugural chair of war studies at the u.s. army war college in carlisle, pennsylvania. an internationally recognized historian of world war i and ii. he formerly served as the henry l.stinson chair of history at the u.s. army war
74 Views
IN COLLECTIONS
CSPAN3
Television Archive 
Television Archive News Search Service 
Uploaded by TV Archive on
