Below is a link to an article written for the Titan II Veterans in 2024:
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/bunker-down-notes-cold-war-underground
Excerpt:
In 2012, historian Jon Wiener road-tripped across America to understand how, in the twenty years since it ended, the Cold War had faded almost completely from collective memory. Visiting a range of Cold War sites across the nation, including the Titan Missile Museum, Wiener discovered that public attempts to commemorate the conflict did so in decidedly conservative terms. It was primarily Republicans, Wiener writes in his resulting book, How We Forgot the Cold War, who had pushed to memorialize the Cold War, claiming the collapse of the Soviet Union as the moral and military triumph of the Reagan administration. But despite “immense efforts by conservatives to shape public memory,” he argues, “the public did not embrace a heroic story of the triumph of good over evil” that their Cold War monuments and museums offered. Republican-backed legislation to secure a National Cold War Museum had failed.
If there are any so-called victims of communism in Arkansas, they are surely outnumbered by those killed in that state by the country’s own nuclear arsenal.
In the twelve years since Wiener published his book, the Cold War has begun to feel less historically remote. The war in Ukraine has escalated tensions between Russia and NATO powers; Russia’s arsenal of battlefield nukes has put nuclear weapons in the news again; and America’s right-wing legislators, laying the groundwork for a new Cold War with China, have succeeded where their predecessors failed in spearheading new commemoration efforts. After Tom Cotton introduced a bill proposing the National Cold War Center in 2020, Rick Crawford, a Republican congressman also from Arkansas, extolled the museum in a press release for “remind[ing] us of the threat that communism poses.” But if there are any so-called victims of communism in Arkansas, they are surely outnumbered by those killed in that state by the country’s own nuclear arsenal. Though the Titan II has long since been decommissioned, many Titan vets believe the missile is killing them still.
Terry N.—who asked me not to use his last name, as he imagines that the military “can’t be too happy” with him for his efforts over the years—is the creator of the website Titan II Missile Veterans Health and Wellness, where he’s built a community of some 250 veterans and spouses who believe that their time working on the missile made them sick. He was only twenty-one years old when he started working on Titan II in 1975, and, perhaps like all guys that age, he wasn’t inclined to worry over his health. When his commanding officer would ask him to work a double shift—to spend forty-eight hours in the silo on alert—it wouldn’t have occurred to him to say no. Nor did it occur to him to think twice about why, exactly, he and the other guys were given a cooler full of bottled water to drive out to the missile bases, all of which had running water. While they drank from the bottles, they took water from the taps in the silos too, using it to make soup, or else drinking out of the eyewash station like it was a water fountain. “We were dumb,” Terry says, chuckling sadly.
In 1980, a year after his release from the Air Force, he collapsed. All the muscles in his body had begun to painfully and inexplicably spasm. For years—Terry was twenty-five when it began—these episodes would recur every few months. He sought help from Veterans Affairs but, as he recalls, was met with “glazed eyes from every VA doctor.” (The VA did not answer requests for comment.) He consulted oncologists, neurologists, and physical therapists to understand the source of the spasms, to no avail. Then, in 2003, his doctors discovered a small, calcified tumor in his lungs; in the subsequent years, he would be diagnosed with two more benign tumors in his hip and femur. Though he began to suspect that his condition resulted from toxic exposures during his years working on Titan II, “nobody could ever put it together,” he said. It wasn’t until he was referred to the VA’s War Related Illness and Injury Study Center in New Jersey that the “lights really went on.” There, the doctors acknowledged the possibility that his ill health was service related. While they offered emotional support, they had no medical solution.
Terry started his website around 2005. In 2013, he hired a lawyer and won a nearly twenty-year struggle to receive support from the VA for his illnesses. These days, he’s covered for most of them—his fibromyalgia, his depression, his tinnitus, his asthma—but not all. Since he won his appeal, he’s undergone surgery for a rare condition known as a spinal arachnoid web. His website is an attempt, in part, to assist other veterans in their struggles with the VA. He has posted documents he discovered in his research which, he believes, demonstrate the Air Force’s knowledge of, and culpability for, the illnesses that he and other Titan II vets have contracted in the years since their service. He’s also posted letters he’s received from other Titan II vets, as well as their widows. Most of them have been diagnosed with some form of cancer, or multiple cancers, along with muscular and immune problems.
As Thomas Novelly reported in a series of articles last year for Military.com, the Air Force has long overlooked evidence of cancer clusters among servicemen who work on missile bases. Recently, Danny Sebeck, an airman at Malmstrom Air Force Base, began gathering evidence that missileers, many of them as young as twenty-five, were contracting and dying from cancer at alarming rates. Sebeck himself had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2022. Though missileers had been appealing to the Air Force for decades to take their health claims seriously, Sebeck’s efforts proved more successful, and in recent years, the Air Force initiated its first health study of the missile community since 2005. This May, they published findings that PCBs—carcinogens banned in domestic manufacturing by the EPA since the 1970s—were present in seventy-one samples taken from active missile facilities and from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara, four of them at levels higher than the EPA threshold. The memo acknowledges that the Air Force is “unable to sample decommissioned sites for the Peacekeeper and Titan systems” but concludes that “PCB-containing components were likely used in those alert and control facilities.” (The Air Force Medical Service did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
To Terry, this finding was “a joke.” The memo doesn’t indicate whether the PCBs at decommissioned sites would have exceeded the EPA thresholds. The Air Force’s conclusions feel to him both like a statement of the obvious and a denial of the degree of danger to which he and other vets were exposed. The report also doesn’t mention any of the other hazardous chemicals—for instance, the pesticide Agent Orange, which was tested and manufactured in Arkansas—that Terry and other Titan II vets are convinced they handled during their service. Most of the vets I spoke to echoed Terry’s disappointment with the Air Force study, including Frank Gibson, who served on Titan II in Arizona in the 1980s. “It seems to me that they are saying what they think they need to say to acknowledge there were problems, but without taking any responsibility for the health problems that veterans have experienced as a result of exposure to those substances,” he wrote to me. The Air Force’s epidemiology review gathers data from 1976 through 2001, and they expect to have reviewed all the relevant data sets by next year. But Titan II vets are conscious of the fact that, for them, time is limited. “I’m a time bomb,” said Art Greenlee, who served on Titan II bases in Arkansas. “One of these things”—by which he meant either his prostate or his bladder cancer—“are going to kill me.”
By nature, war-related illnesses are hard to prove, and the etiology of cancer makes it especially so. It is, perhaps, the least spectacular way for a servicemember to die: over the course of months or years, countless doctors’ appointments, legal consultations, and skirmishes with the VA. Such suffering is implied but seldom shown in dramatic depictions of nuclear war. From The Day After to Oppenheimer, the image of the mushroom cloud has long served as a visual shorthand for the horrors of nuclear technology, as well as its most thrilling spectacle. Since the earliest days of the Cold War, as media scholars Ned O’Gorman and Kevin Hamilton have noted, the mushroom cloud has served as a metonym for state power. It proliferated throughout culture like a meme, spawning everything from women’s hairdos to the indelible imagery of Lyndon B. Johnson’s daisy ad during the 1964 presidential campaign. Today, it remains the Cold War’s most compelling filmic artifact. At the National Atomic Testing Museum in Nevada, visitors watch footage of nuclear explosions in an exhibit called the Ground Zero Theater. Presumably, the promise of the Trinity test is why so many Oppenheimer audiences shelled out to see a three-hour biopic in IMAX.
Yet this most enduring image of nuclear war is quite literally a bloodless one. The sublime horror of the mushroom cloud tells us nothing about the effect of nuclear technology on human bodies, nor does the culture of spectacle that remains the Cold War’s popular legacy. While the passing of time has ensured the safety of van-lifers filming content in old Titan sites, it’s done little for the health and safety of the vets who worked in them.