The Cold War vanishes, replaced with natural fibers, rustic wood, rattan, rugs, tapestries, and stained glass. "Down here it's a little more pleasant," Ed says as he opens a simple wood door with a tiny knocker.īeyond - is a warm cocoon of good vibes and New Age ambience. It leads to the other half of the Peden home, the former launch control center, which is where Ed and Dianna live.
Jutting north from the launch bay is a 120-foot-long tunnel of steel and concrete. "Yes! Skateboarders!" he cries, beaming like a pleased schoolteacher - which is what he was when he bought this place - "You captured that concept quickly!" We suggest to Ed that it would make a good skate park, and his eyes light up. It directed the launch inferno from the missile down to a hillside exhaust port. "It makes an excellent shop," Ed tells us, "but it caused me to collect far too much useless junk."Ī large square hole in the floor leads to a gently sloping "flame pit" the size of a freeway tunnel. To the south is the vast missile launch bay, now empty, with its 18-inch-thick concrete walls, three-foot-thick concrete floors, and balky garage door. The Pedens now call their place "Subterra Castle," and it looks nothing like the abandoned hellhole Ed bought in 1982. Ed first toured his future home in a canoe. The sheet rock had melted onto the floor." It had dissolved because the entire complex was flooded with up to nine feet of water. The fact that they are able to live here is amazing."The gunk I hauled out of here in wheelbarrows was incredible," Ed tells us. "The history alone is overwhelming," said Polly Figueroa. Several former Atlas sites have been converted into private homes by buyers interested in something different to live in. In 1965, the billion-dollar Atlas-F missile program was replaced by more dependable, less expensive Minuteman missiles. One of America’s deterrents were the Atlas missile sites in Nebraska.
The Cuban nuclear crisis was averted when the Soviet Union backed down and dismantled its missile sites. Because you aren’t going to live after it.” "If I were you, if you heard there was warheads coming our way. "The launch crews did not know if we were going to have to go to war," Duffy said.ĭuffy called home to tell his family what to do if the Soviets launched nuclear missiles. military on high alert after learning Russia was building nuclear launch sites on Cuba. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and placed the U.S. "Most of the whole time I was here I was in a missile silo," Duffy said. The Atlas-F nuclear missile could be ready for launch in 15 minutes.Įighty-year-old Dan Duffy of Lincoln was a technician on one of the Air Force launch crews that manned the Atlas sites at the height of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The steel framework within the silo equals the height of an 18 story building and weighed about 1,500 tons. Through three more blast doors is the massive Atlas silo itself, now mostly filled with water. They have, really, I mean, all the basics that you would need." "So they've got hot and cold running water, and they've got an electric furnace as well as a wood burning stove. "They've got two wells to fill up four 500 gallon water tanks," Mike Figueroa said. The doors open into the two-story living area that used to be the missile site’s command and control center. At the thickest point it looks like it’s probably close to a foot.," Mike Figueroa said. Thirty-feet underground we pass through the first of five steel doors built to protect the Air Force launch team from nuclear attack.
Some of the hottest times in the Cold War." "Lincoln had some of the first missile silos ever built in the United States. "Basically when Atlas missiles came along it was this brand new science that the Air Force really took and ran with to supplement their bomber force," Branting said.īranting says the former Lincoln Air Force Base commanded 12 Atlas Missile sites in Nebraska. Cold War historian Rob Branting, a native of Lincoln, is supervisor of North Dakota’s Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Historic Site.
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