A truck disappears into the horizon in northeastern Montana along the now defunct Pinetree radar line. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
A radar facility mid-demolition on the Canadian border in northwestern North Dakota. The radar site was once a regional hub of the Pinetree Line, the southernmost line of early warning radar stations charged with watching for a Soviet air attack coming over the north pole. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
At the height of the Cold War, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted that the Soviets were manufacturing nuclear missiles “like sausages.” His bravado underscored early strategic posturing that turned on the assumption that more was better.
The Kennedy administration responded in kind, referring to the perceived shortage of American nukes as a runner would imagine trying to pass the leader of a race. As the analogy goes, the United States needed to put down more footsteps, faster. President John F. Kennedy sought to bridge what was referred to as the “missile gap” by stepping up production, funding concurrent missile programs, thereby kicking the arms race into full gear. Reflecting later on Kennedy’s assertion that the United States had finally exceeded Russian missile production by twofold, Khrushchev dryly responded: “We’re satisfied to be able to finish off the United States first time round. Once is quite enough. What good does it do to annihilate a country twice? We’re not a bloodthirsty people.”
Bloodthirsty or not, the scale of Cold War brinkmanship quickly reached peak absurdity. By the mid ’80s, the two superpowers possessed a combined sum of more than 70,000 nuclear warheads, a number sufficient to put 357 warheads, each with yields far exceeding that of the Hiroshima bomb, onto every capital city of every country on the entire globe. New missile systems came online every few years, phasing out old technologies almost as fast as they could be created. In the case of the sites for the Titan I missiles, one of the first ICBMs, some launch facilities were decommissioned mere months after being opened.
Khrushchyovka apartments in the abandoned secret Soviet city of Skrunda-1 at twilight. Skrunda-1 served as the home for thousands of soldiers who worked on the Soviets’ outward-facing radar, charged with watching for incoming U.S. missiles. It was operational for 35 years. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
One of the two launch console desks used to control the firing of a Titan I nuclear missile sits in a long-abandoned site on the Colorado plains. Four stories of soil cover the engineered concrete above the location of this picture. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
Stones plucked and set in place barely cover the entrance portal to an abandoned Soviet missile silo outside of Jelgava, Latvia. During its operation, the underground complex contained four intermediate-range nuclear missiles poised to launch against European targets. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
Three stories below ground in an abandoned Soviet missile silo outside of Jelgava, Latvia. Handprints above each door mark the location where previous explorers teetered to hold their balance on the concrete beam rising above the water that seeped in and filled the low spots of the silo complex. The floor and pipes were removed long ago by salvagers, leaving only the concrete skeleton. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
An irrigation canal cuts a claw mark in the loamy soil of a tree farm that now runs through the perimeter of a destroyed Soviet nuclear missile silo complex in Latvia. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
A bunker sits in the wreckage of a military support town in Jelgava, Latvia. Many Soviet sites were serviced by small military installations that were attached to the missile and radar positions. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
This rapid-fire upgrade in technologies combined with both nations’ relentless manufacture of missiles left a quiet mark across the remote parts of each country. Early-generation nuclear missile silos were left to rust and quietly collapse, marking the map like a secret Braille. To the uninitiated, defunct Cold War sites give little outward indication of their former purpose. Many of these facilities were designed to be obscure, showing only a small surface footprint that barely hinted at the extent of what was hidden just below the earth’s surface. Aside from former missileers and a small, passionate network of urban explorers, these long-ago vacated sites remain largely unknown, scattered across the globe in varying states of decay.
In recent years, I have become one of these enthusiasts. My fascination with the implements of the Cold War is far from technical. The mechanics of their destructive potential is wasted on me. Instead, I see these things as part of a global semiotics, a secret language in which we collectively and unconsciously speak to one another. These places, defunct missile silos, collapsing early warning radar stations, and the infrastructure that was built to support them, are words in a sentence that expresses our priorities, our fears and our willingness to engage those fears on a primal level.
The vast human capital expended to plow the ground of the useless, things which ultimately served no purpose other than to disintegrate back into the obscurity from which they came, is to elect one path at the expense of another. The simple fact that these sites have fallen so far off the map is, in my opinion, not a matter of human progress but, rather, willful ignorance of our own folly. We — all of us to an individual across the breadth of nationalities and on every side of this issue — have lacked the simple imagination to point out the madness herein and to realize another possible world. In the seven decades during which we have possessed nuclear weapons, we have never once had a moment where we were satisfied with the destructive powers at our fingertips. Our pursuits have been only to perfect the quality of the Armageddon we aimed to create.
It is foolish, and we are poorer for the things you are looking at in these pictures.
Lambaste, Latvia. This repurposed bunker was once designed to house second-strike nuclear missiles that would be reloaded into nearby silos after the launch of their original contents. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
A yellow door marks the missile entrance to an Atlas-E nuclear missile site on the plains of southern Wyoming. Unlike modern silos, early Atlas missiles were housed horizontally. The roof was then slid away, and the missile was erected in a vertical position for launch. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
A now-sealed entrance portal to a Titan I nuclear missile site sits on the eastern plains of Colorado. During its operation, an elevator would have risen through the cement portal, and then descended, delivering airmen to their work in the underground missile site. Eighteen missiles were kept at six sites in a network around Denver. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
A Titan I nuclear missile silo in Colorado. The Titan I missile silos were among the first nuclear missile silos to be constructed. And they remain, by far, one of the most extensive and ambitious pieces of nuclear architecture to-date. Each site held three ICBMs, each contained in a 16-story silo and connected to a network of underground support and operations structures. Once launched, a Titan I missile could reach Moscow in about 30 minutes. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
A restored silo door at the Plokstine missile base in Lithuania. The base once housed four Soviet-era Dvina nuclear missiles, each of which could deliver a warhead with about 128 times the yield as that which was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, to Western Europe. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
A derelict radome sits five stories above the forest floor outside Moscow. During its operation, the radome was used to track incoming missiles so that they could be intercepted by other missiles that were once kept in nearby underground silos. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
Footings for a long-ago removed radome stand near the Canadian border in northeastern Montana. This site was once part of the Pinetree Line, one of three lines of radar intended to detect Soviet bombers flying over the north pole. (Matt Slaby/Luceo)
This work is featured in an exhibition in Denver at the Redline Gallery. The closing reception is Wednesday. And you can see more of Slaby’s work over on his Instagram feed, @mattslaby.
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