![]() When the site was an active missile base, this room “floated” on massive springs. The room is essentially a concrete bubble suspended from the large column in its center. Townsley’s living space is about 1,100 square feet and completely round. They are impressive in their size and precision, taking little more than a gentle shove to swing open. Having the functioning doors was a big selling point for Bruce. The doors curve inward to offset the vacuum effect of a blast – keeping everything inside from being sucked out.Īs an added safety feature, the white “latticed” debris door is hung to keep whatever an explosion carries into the tunnels from making it to the control room.Īll four of the doors are still fully functional – a small miracle, considering that a number of blast doors from other Atlas F sites have since buckled under their weight. The stairway ends at a set of 6,000-pound blast doors designed to keep occupants safe during a nuclear attack. ![]() “I took out a loan against my truck to have a bracket built to be able to open the door,” said Townsley. It took a bunch of local volunteers and a rented crane, but he finally cracked it open. Townsley has managed to get one of these massive doors up and running. They cover the 185-foot hole in the ground where a missile armed with a nuclear warhead used to be. Buildings and parking lots have been removed and this escape hatch has been capped in thick concrete.īut not everything is out of order: In the background sit the two giant overhead silo doors. Most working parts have been decommissioned. military scrambled to build missile silos and stock them with nuclear weapons.Ībove ground, Bruce Townsley’s place bears little resemblance to the busy site it was in the early '60s. It wasn’t uncommon for motorists to pass these weapons of mass destruction on America’s interstates in the early 1960s, as the U.S. A missile heads down the ICBM highway in central Texas on it’s way to a silo. By 1999 he had moved in to the 2,200 sq ft. More than 30 years after it was deactivated, Townsley bought the property in 1997 for $99,000. Here, a missile was stored vertically in an underground silo and the attached living quarters for the missiliers were more modest. Instead, with Peden’s help, Townsley went with this Atlas F site. ![]() “Build a house inside a bunker? Too much room.” “What the hell am I going to do?” asks Townsley. ![]()
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