4 ms·
The one featured in Zillow ad wouldn't require this much work. It's basically dry, though god only knows what the bottom of the silo itself looks like.
by Aloha 5y ago
The one featured in Zillow ad wouldn't require this much work.
It's basically dry, though god only knows what the bottom of the silo itself looks like.
- dcdc123 5y agoThey don’t have any pics inside the main silo, just in the upper control room and the entry to the silo. It could be full of water.
- kuroguro 5y agoFree swimming pool included!
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoNo, No. Algae-farm for fuel and food. Yummie!
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoWelcome to the Kombucha Pit!
- Neil44 5y agoI understand they're usually filled with rubble or concrete as part of decomissioning. Entrances to the office bit are usuall bulldozed.
- angstrom 5y agoUpshot: Probably still has 2 nukes pointed at it. Better to have a front row seat than be a “survivor”.
- greesil 5y agoThat should be in the listing. Pros: immediate painless surprise death in case of nuclear war. Cons: damp, bit of a fixer upper.
- imglorp 5y agoIf not a direct hit, more likely an extended entombment after the entrance stairwell collapses and blocks the blast door. Maybe that's the second reason missileers carried sidearms.
- Aloha 5y agoRussia knows the sites were decommissioned, so it wouldn't waste a missile on it.
- Iolaum 5y agoEven if some people know, are we sure if it was disseminated across all Classified channels up and down and then the people in charge of the lists updated them? :p
- crawl_soever 5y agoIt also means they could be the one who purchases it!
- jonathankoren 5y agoDoubt it. Decommissioning silos is transparent as part of treaty verifications. I imagine getting it operational again would take years of very obvious work.
- kortilla 5y agoWhy would Russia or whoever waste two nukes on a silo purported to be nuke proof in the middle of nowhere?
- michaelt 5y agoThere are two bits of context you need to understand this. First: Early nuclear missiles weren't very accurate - you don't have to be very accurate when your target is the size of Moscow. A missile silo is a much smaller target! So AIUI missile silos were hardened to survive a nuclear bomb landing 500m away - but they wouldn't survive a direct hit. Second: There was a theory, at one point in the cold war, that one side could launch a surprise attack that struck and disabled the other side's nuclear weapons. Or at least, disabled a large enough fraction that the counterattack was survivable. This was seen as winning. Or as close to winning as you can get, in a nuclear war. And it was seen as relatively more ethical than targeting cities. The jargon for this is "counterforce" or "disarming" strike [1] and it was part of the rationale for having a ridiculous number of bombs - if you have enough bombs to destroy the world 10 times over, you can destroy the world even if 90% of your bombs have been destroyed in a surprise attack. Later in the cold war other technologies were developed - high precision guidance, submarine launched missiles, and missiles with multiple warheads. Between them they made a disarming strike seem unlikely to work. But on the other hand there are still an awful lot of missiles around and they gotta be targeted somewhere. If you'd already sent a dozen at the pentagon and a dozen at the white house, why not send some of the remainder at a few nuclear silos? Of course, you might well say this all seems pretty unlikely. A nuclear war? In this day and age? But people who think that probably aren't in the market for a disused nuclear bunker, except as a historical curiosity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterforce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterforce
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoStill better to point them at NZ, to get the capitalistic overlords hiding there :-)
- the-dude 5y agoIsn't HN amazing. Last week I learned about Countervalue : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countervalue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countervalue
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoWhy would that be? Don't you think "they" have better uses for their spare nukes? And intelligence agencies updating the list of target objects?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoProbably not but it still beats any large city that likely has about a dozen or more with their name on it.
- more_corn 5y agoFunny that this is a selling point. “How are you preparing for the end?” “I’m prepared to go out in the first wave, you?”
- julian_sark 5y agoOne might be tempted to think "oh, it's concrete, I'll hose it down". But after recently reading up on it a bit, some of the missiles had extremely harmful propellants, and if that leaked (which chances are it did), that'd basically be a hazmat site.
- tyingq 5y agoIt reads like Atlas missiles used kerosene and liquid oxygen. Nothing like hydrazine, etc.
- rhombocombus 5y agoThe APU on atlas missiles used ethylene oxide to fuel the turbine, you don't need hydrazine to get toxic aerospace chemical exposure. I would also bet all the money in my pocket those structures are chock full of asbestos and lead.
- larrywright 5y agoSomebody on Twitter mentioned that there is likely a lot of asbestos, and other environmental issues that the buyer would be responsible for remediating. I don’t know enough to know if that’s correct or not but it seems reasonable.