Hands On The Button Squadron Recounts Work Inside Missile Bunkers
The console to launch a nuclear bomb squats between a wood stove and a riding lawn mower in the cold of Dick Mellor’s workshop on the West Plains.
It is green, stocky and covered with lights, dials and stubby black buttons, one of which - if pushed in earnest - signaled the end of the world.
“This was the key,” Mellor said of the device. “The center of the whole shooting match right here. Everything was tied to it.”
From this console an 83-foot-tall Atlas E missile could be summoned from a concrete coffin and sent over the frozen cap of the world to blow a gigantic hole in Soviet air defenses or turn a Russian city to ash.
“This is the last console in existence,” Mellor said. “It’s a piece of history.”
In the early 1960s, nine Atlas missiles crouched around the Spokane area as part of America’s Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union.
It was a time of bomb shelters, civil-defense sirens and dread over nuclear war. People carried survival kits in their car trunks with water, medicine, food and sometimes a pistol. In schools, chalkboards squeaked with lessons on how to survive after The Bomb. Fairchild Air Force Base rumbled with the constant traffic of nuclear-laden B-52 bombers.
The Russians - the Reds - seemed powerful and menacing. And so, America built bombs - lots.
The Atlas missiles were among the first intercontinental ballistic missiles in the world. They were part of the United States’ triad of bombers, missiles and submarines ready to fight. In 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth thanks to an Atlas rocket.
But no such national glory would come to the nine missiles sheltered in concrete bunkers around Spokane and the spare stored at Fairchild.
They were expensive, complicated, lethal weapons that everyone hoped would never be used.
From 1961 to 1965, roughly 600 men labored in the underground bunkers to keep the missiles taut for war. They were members of the 567th Strategic Missile Squadron - the best in the Air Force at what they did. Their job was to keep a complicated, temperamental and labor-intensive weapon system running while the United States could build something cheaper and more reliable - the Minuteman.
Next week in Spokane, the squadron holds its first reunion since much of the Atlas missile program was declassified in the last few years. Members have only met twice before in the 34 years since the Air Force disbanded them.
“They were elite men, really first-rate and extremely intelligent,” said Lancelot Wright, a retired naval officer and historian who has spent more than 10 years studying the Atlas.
“These men would have pushed the button,” Wright said. “They were true patriots. Every one I’ve met had a real firm resolve to execute an attack.”
At the time, intercontinental rockets were a strange new technology.
“It was huge, the biggest thing I ever saw,” said Michael Powell, a mechanic on an Atlas crew, who now lives in Blanchard, Idaho. “It was just an awesome thing. I just couldn’t visualize how it could fly so far.”
The Atlas missiles were flown to Geiger Field, then trucked to Fairchild and finally taken to their concrete-hardened missile sites. There was no hiding the giants as they were trucked through Worley, Idaho; Davenport, Reardan, Spokane and other towns. Crowds turned out to gawk at the weapons, shiny as new knives.
“It was awfully heady,” said Mellor, another Atlas crew technician. “This was the leading edge of space travel and everything else.”
The missiles were stored on their sides under sliding, 400-ton concrete blast doors and raised vertical for launch. Five-man crews worked 24-hour shifts to keep the weapons ready.
“It was the best job I ever had,” said Powell, 67. “It was a challenge. Working on the Atlas really kept your mind going.”
Powell and Mellor were technicians. The pilots on the crews saw things a little differently. Taken from their jobs in the air, they now worked underground, many as crew commanders.
“It seemed like you did a lot of sitting around. You were waiting for something that hopefully would never happen. And it didn’t,” said Ray Streich, an Atlas crew commander and pilot. “In airplanes you got in and went someplace. In missile sites nothing moves.”
The crews started their days at Fairchild around 7 a.m. In a big room with blackboards, they were briefed on world events, site changes and weather in the Soviet Union.
In Air Force-blue station wagons or white trucks - whatever the base motor pool could spare - they drove to the gated and fenced sites for their 24-hour shift. There were passwords and security cameras and an armed guard above ground.
As part of the site’s defense, the five of them could only enter one at a time through a set of steel doors. Inside there was the constant sound of diesel generators rumbling to provide power. The noise never ceased.
Except for a faint, metallic smell of hot electronics and a whiff of diesel from the generators, the place was sterile, clean concrete. The crew’s uniforms were as white as a new ceramic.
Two officers carried .38-caliber pistols and stopwatches, which were used to time the phases of a countdown drill that would tick by on the launch console. The other three crewmen worked around the wires, the pipes and the incredible pressures of liquid oxygen used as a propellant for the missile.
No one was ever supposed to be alone in the site. A crew member found alone would have been assumed to be a saboteur. It took two people to launch a missile.
The Atlases needed 15 minutes to get into the air. They carried 6.75-megaton warheads - the equivalent of 6.75 million tons of TNT. A single warhead could repeat the bombing of Hiroshima 340 times.
“I thought for a while: `What am I doing? Is this really for me?”’ Powell said.
“But when you are that age you want a challenge. I don’t think any of us really understood the destruction those things could do. Or we didn’t want to think about it, I guess. It wasn’t brought up very much.”
The whole object was to never have a nuclear war, said Robert Mullin, another crew commander who now lives in Spokane.
“What you really did afterwards was not given too much thought,” he said.
“We made plans for our dependents, but it would mean nothing because there would be nothing left,” Mellor said. “As a result, I’m glad it’s over.”
In his workshop, Mellor has worried some life back into the launch console. The control board can glow green and amber, but that is about all.
“That is the button right there,” Mellor said, pointing to the stub that started a launch sequence, a button for the end of the world.
“But I haven’t hooked it up because I don’t want to scare the hell out of everybody.”
PREVIEW Members of the 567th Strategic Missile Squadron will hold a reunion next week in Spokane.