The Titan II was the largest operational land-based nuclear missile America ever deployed. Standing in an eight-level silo, the missile carried a W53 warhead with a yield of 9 megatons - 9,000 kilotons, or roughly 600 times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The complex was built to survive anything short of a direct nuclear strike: steel-reinforced concrete walls reaching several feet thick, 3-ton blast doors sealing each section, and a labyrinth of cableways connecting the launch control center to the silo. Level 8, nearly 100 feet underground, housed the propellant pumps that would send the missile screaming toward its target in minutes. The crew who manned this facility knew their orders came from the National Command Authority, but the specific targets remained unknown to them - programmed into the guidance computer by Strategic Air Command headquarters.

The launch console could hold three pre-programmed targets. To change which one the missile would strike, the crew commander simply pressed a button - Target One, Two, or Three. At the moment this site was deactivated, it was set to Target Two, designated for ground burst. That designation suggests the target was something hardened and valuable enough to require the full force of a 9-megaton explosion delivered directly to the surface rather than detonated in the air above a city. A Soviet missile base, perhaps, or a command bunker. The classification has never been lifted. The target remains unknown, frozen in the records of a conflict that defined half a century.

Site 571-7 became operational in 1963, one of 54 Titan II silos scattered across the American heartland - 18 around McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas, 18 near Little Rock AFB in Arkansas, and 18 near Davis-Monthan AFB outside Tucson. In 1981, President Reagan announced the decommissioning of all Titan II missiles as part of a weapon systems modernization program. By 1984, every operational silo had been demolished - all except this one. Under a US-USSR agreement, the silo doors were permanently blocked from opening more than halfway, and a prominent hole was cut through the dummy reentry vehicle to prove the weapon was inert. In 1994, the site was declared a National Historic Landmark, the only place in the country where visitors can view an entirely preserved ICBM.

Today, visitors descend through the same blast doors that once sealed crews inside during alerts. The control room remains intact, launch keys still in their cabinet, consoles arranged exactly as they were when crews stood 24-hour watches waiting for orders that mercifully never came. The "Beyond the Blast Doors" tour takes visitors through the cableways to Level 7, where they can stand directly beneath the missile and look up at the empty reentry vehicle where a 9-megaton warhead once waited. The top-to-bottom tour, limited to six people and lasting up to five hours, reveals every level of the facility, from the diesel generators to the propellant pumps at the bottom of the silo. The museum's mission is to place the Titan II within the context of its era - a time when mutually assured destruction kept an uneasy peace.

The site found an unexpected second life in 1996 when filmmakers chose it as a filming location for Star Trek: First Contact. In the movie, the Titan II missile became the launch vehicle for the Phoenix, humanity's first warp-capable spacecraft - the vessel that catches the attention of passing Vulcans and launches first contact with an alien civilization. It was a fitting transformation: a weapon designed to end the world becoming, in fiction, the vehicle that opens it to the stars. Restored Titan II engines sit on the museum grounds, along with fuel storage hardstands and a reentry vehicle. What was once one of the most classified facilities in America now welcomes tourists who want to understand how close the world came to using what waited in these silos.