![]() “That’s a pretty screwed up way of looking at the world.” Now an Air Force major and deputy director of staff with the 100th Air Refueling Wing, based at the Royal Air Force’s Mildenhall Base, in England, Gatlin was struck by the similarity of Domino’s delivery time and that of his missiles. “You’re sitting there waiting for the message you hope never comes,” says Tony Gatlin, who painted the Domino’s homage as a young deputy flight commander at Delta One in 1989. ![]() Like the garish and cheeky illustrations etched across the noses of World War II aircraft, these images in launch control centers across the United States testify to the bravado of the men (and, from the mid-1980s onward, women) of what has been called “America’s Underground Air Force.” But they also reflect the sometimes surreal pressures faced by two-person missile crews on 24-hour duty alerts, waiting for a call to turn their missile launch keys and perhaps end civilization as we know it. Welcome to the mordant, jingoistic and occasionally crude - but rarely before seen world - of “blast-door art.” Play Slideshow > The massive blast door was designed to ensure that the underground launch control center survived a nuclear attack. For almost three decades, the house was the “Delta One” Launch Control Facility (LCF) for ten Minuteman missiles armed with nuclear warheads. At the bottom, a massive, eight-ton steel-and-concrete door is painted the red, white and blue image of a Domino’s Pizza box, with a slightly altered phrasing of the chain’s familiar promise: “World-wide Delivery in 30 Minutes or Less Or Your Next One is Free.” But in this case the “Next One” is a Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Since the first Minuteman launches from Cape Canaveral in 1961, nearly every missile has generated a perfect ring of smoke.Photograph by Robert Lyon, courtesy of Daniel Friese At the back of what looks like an enclosed porch of an unpretentious ranch house near Wall, South Dakota, a steel-runged ladder leads down a 30-foot concrete access shaft. Those 1960s-vintage missiles carried 1.2-megaton warheads (equivalent to one-third the explosive force of all bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs). The historic site operated by the National Park Service was formed from the last remnants of Minuteman IIs dismantled after the strategic arms limitation treaty (START) in 1991. Grouped in clusters of 10, each silo is at least three miles from the next. Within five years of the first Minuteman launch in 1961, more than 1,000 silos had been dug into remote corners of the West, including Wyoming, the Dakotas and Montana. ![]() “Vandenberg AFB is right on the Pacific Coast, so it is windy.” Wisps of smoke from Vandenberg launches float downrange like haunted hula hoops. “Smoke rings can be different shapes and sizes due to wind factors,” says Tise. Sometimes the Minuteman pierces its center like a bull’s-eye, but more often the ring drifts away from the line of flight to linger like a halo. The ring can rise hundreds of feet, and the missile usually doesn’t climb past its own ring until several seconds into the flight. “It’s just like someone puffing smoke from a cigar,” explains David Tise, a park ranger at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in South Dakota. ![]()
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