“If people would just ask us, we’d show them ourselves what’s here,” Kramer said. The door’s padlocks are pocked with bullet holes from attempts to get inside. The Kramers have owned the site since 1969, when Mark’s father, Bob Kramer, bought the abandoned site for $2,500.Ī nearby second, smaller door also made of heavy steel was the entry for the site’s crew members. It stays closed except when Kramer drives the family’s trucks or combines into or out of the main bunker or coffin, which extends nearly 24 feet below ground.Įxcept for the ramp, the silo is nearly all underground, with only the large iron lid that covered the coffin visible above the surface. Today, all but one of the nine sites associated with Fairchild are privately owned.Īt the Kramer family silo (below, left), at the end of a sloping concrete ramp, a 16-inch-thick metal door measures 15 feet wide and 17 feet tall. The crews lived and worked in separate underground rooms connected to the coffin by long tunnels. Instead of storing missiles vertically, the nine Atlas E locations held a single missile in a horizontal room, called the coffin. The nine sites relied on crews of five airmen working 24-hour shifts, with three redundant communications systems connecting them to the Strategic Air Command. Air Force’s 567th Missile Squadron, assigned to Fairchild Air Force Base.Ĭonstructed at the time for more than $4 million each, the silos were designed to withstand a nearby nuclear bomb blast and deliver a hydrogen bomb to a distant target. The Kramers store farm equipment inside the facility (below, right), which was active from 1961 to 1965 as part of the U.S. It sits amid parched desert about a dozen miles from the family’s home near the community of Lamona in Lincoln County. Most people don’t even know the buried bunkers exist, said Mark Kramer, whose family owns one of the 20-acre sites. More than 50 years later, those nine underground Atlas sites are largely ignored except by curiosity-seekers and military history buffs. That patriotic fervor, historians say, was part of the Cold War-era mindset fueled by nuclear dread and national pride. Each missile was later armed with a 4-megaton nuclear bomb, ready to be launched.Įastern Washington communities – including Spokane, Deer Park and Davenport – greeted the weapons caravans like a victory parade. The trucks carried 82-foot-long Atlas E missiles that ended up parked inside heavily reinforced underground sites. Air Force, without any attempt at secrecy or stealth, hauled nine long-range ballistic missiles by truck from California to Eastern Washington.

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