Missile silo for sale? No real estate magic can erase the nuclear history
Welcome to 1441 N. 260th Road, Lincoln, Kan., now rebranded as Rolling Hills Missile Silo, because nothing says 'pastoral charm' like 600 tons of 2-inch rebar wrapped around a void where a thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missile once waited.
The property listing for the decommissioned Atlas F missile silo doubles as a brainstorming list for entrepreneurs: 'party venue,' 'art gallery,' 'climate-controlled wine cellar,' 'mushroom farm' and 'the most insane Airbnb on the planet.' Also included: twin above-ground concrete pads, 75-ton blast doors and an escape hatch for that 'dramatic exit.' It's less home than Bond starter kit.
Reading the Zillow listing, one might ask: Why does such a structure exist at all? Why was this much steel and concrete poured into the prairie in the first place? The answers are well-documented but absent here.
Those questions appear to belong to a time when decisions were made with slide rules and fear. Now, the future is up for grabs. The property boasts a 'private driveway' and underground temperatures between 54 and 62 degrees Fahrenheit, described as 'nature's free HVAC.' At $520 per square foot, it is 'NOT your typical fixer upper' and is 'waiting for your vision.'
The listing hints only obliquely at the original military purpose by noting the property is 'a piece of Cold War history.' Of course, Atlas F silos were not just bunkers. They were built to enable the erasure of life at scale, not to shelter. The Atlas F program, deployed in the early 1960s, was part of the United States' first operational generation of ICBMs. Each missile site — 12 in Kansas alone — was designed to house and deliver a 4.5-megaton nuclear warhead to the other side of the world.
Unlike earlier Atlas models, the F variant was stored vertically underground and was elevated to the surface on a hydraulic elevator for fueling and launch, the latter of which required 10 vulnerable minutes. By 1965, the Atlas F system was retired, replaced by faster-launched Minuteman missiles.
None of this shows up in the real estate listing. There's no mention that the Atlas F warhead was more than 250 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. No hint of the terror that surrounded these sites — only the promise of limitless business opportunity. The ad seems to scream: Admire the feat of engineering! (But forget the existential terror it embodied.) Marvel at the blast doors! (But ignore how they recast unthinkable violence as routine.) Think of the Instagrammable photos! (But don't summon images of what nuclear bombs did to people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945.)
Prospective buyers must sign a waiver before entering. Though the missile is gone, the site presumably has remaining hazards: Perhaps a guest could fall down a shaft engineered to handle a nuclear detonation?
Beneath the novelty, however, lies a deeper truth: Missile silos are not neutral spaces for creative reuse. They are monuments to a moment in human history when extinction was first built into the architecture of national security doctrines. Their ability to be repurposed as luxury bunkers is not just bonkers; it's symptomatic of an inability to reckon honestly with inherited structures of violence. This is nostalgia without memory, and fetishism without context.
And it's not merely retrospective.
Today, the United States has an estimated 1,770 deployed nuclear warheads, of which 400 are land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. The logic that justified Atlas F — deterrence through the prospect of instant retaliatory destruction — remains embedded in U.S. strategic doctrine. Missile silos are not just Cold War relics. They are living artifacts of a strategy the United States and other nuclear-armed countries have yet to relinquish.
One could argue that repurposing these sites is better than letting them rot. Maybe so. But if we are going to inhabit these places again, if we are going to live in the shadow of their history, then we ought to bring the memory with us. We must carry forward not just the concrete, but the cold calculus — and the human cost.
Susan D'Agostino, a mathematician and science writer, was the nuclear risk editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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The Enola Gay dropped the bomb 1,900 feet over the city—unleashing an explosion of intense heat, light, and radiation that washed over the city in a fraction of a second. Photograph Courtesy U.S. Army, A.A.F. photo, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division This official U.S. Army photo shows the devastation in Hiroshima after the bomb. The explosion killed upwards of 80,000 people in a flash and thousands more would die in the subsequent days and months. Photograph Courtesy U.S. Army, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division That person likely died immediately, as the intense heat at the center of the blast would have been in excess of 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to swiftly kill anyone. But a shadowy imprint of their body was left scorched onto the stone steps. And this mark wasn't alone: The intensity of the bomb created so-called nuclear shadows throughout the area on the ground beneath the explosion, as if freezing the city in time. 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The same process created shadows of nails, ladders, and other objects on streets and buildings across the city. What Hiroshima's nuclear shadows reveal While most of the nuclear shadows depict inanimate objects, a few of them are believed to represent people who were killed. For example, the Yorozuyo Bridge, 910 meters from the hypocenter, appeared to bear shadows of people who may have been on their way to work or school when they were killed. (The shadows are no longer visible on the bridge, which was later rebuilt.) 'Almost everyone who was within a kilometer was killed,' says Robert Jacobs, emeritus professor of history at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and Hiroshima City University. The shadow of a handle on a gasometer located two kilometers away from the hypocenter of the explosion left an imprint behind. The angle of the nuclear shadows left behind allow scientists who arrived in Hiroshima after Japan's surrender to locate the hypocenter of the explosion. Photograph by AFP, Getty Images The explosion killed upwards of 80,000 people in a flash, and thousands more would die in the subsequent days and months. Among the victims were workers inside Sumitomo Bank. Fukushima notes that only 'three individuals are known to have escaped,' though 'one of them died a few days later.' These shadows also helped scientists solve one major question when they descended on Hiroshima in early September 1945, shortly after Japan's surrender, to study the weapon's effects. The angle of the shadows 'enabled observers to determine the direction toward the center of explosion,' allowing them to locate the bomb's hypocenter 'with considerable accuracy.' The legacy of Hiroshima's nuclear shadows Although we'll never know the stories of those who were killed in the bomb's hypocenter, their shadow endures. In 1971, Sumitomo Bank donated its steps to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, where the silhouette remains a haunting symbol of what happened 80 years ago. 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Photograph by Keystone-France, Gamma-Keystone/ Getty Images While walking through the ruined city minutes after the bombing, photographer Yoshito Matsushige encountered children who had evacuated their school just before the explosion. 'Having been directly exposed to the heat rays, they were covered with blisters, the size of balls, on their backs, their faces, their shoulders and their arms,' he later recalled. 'The blisters were starting to burst open and their skin hung down like rugs.' These scenes were so horrific that Matsushige couldn't bear to take any photographs. When he 'finally summoned up the courage to take one picture' and then another, he realized 'the view finder was clouded over with my tears.'
