In the 1950s, the United States designed and built two competing offensive nuclear missile systems, Atlas and Titan. Here’s what these Cold War relics look like today, inside and out.
history under ground
Military
Atlas & Titan Nuclear Missile Bases
Buckeye Ordnance Works
South Point, OH
Buckeye Ordnance Works was built in 1943. Between 1946 and the 1990s, various chemical companies have used the plant. Now it is a small wasteland.
Duluth Armory
Duluth, MN
This armory was built in 1915 for the 3rd Regiment of the Minnesota National Guard. During the World Wars, it was a place where troops would train and muster, and where equipment was stored. Occasionally, […]
Fort de la Chartreuse
Liège, Belgium
The Dutch began building this fort in 1818. The Belgians used it as a barracks. The Germans used it as a prison for the Belgians. The Americans used it as a hospital for the Allied Forces. It was abandoned in the 1980s.
Fort Snelling’s Upper Bluff
St. Paul, MN
Fort Snelling was first sold off in 1858, long after Minnesota had lost its status as a frontier state, but the Civil War and conflicts between settlers and the Dakota renewed the need for a […]
Gopher Ordnance Works
Rosemount, MN
It died when a nuke went off–and it looks like it. Nobody perished with it, though, and there is no radioactivity… just smokestacks and dead-end roads. This withered war plant has seen better days, but who doesn’t find the post-apocalyptic aesthetic a little intriguing?
INAAP: Indiana Army Ammunition Plant
Charlestown, IN
This is War City, a 10,000-acre bomb that leveled a swath of Indiana to sow the seed of a World War Two powder plant. Now it sits as, arguably, the largest abandonment in North America, with thousands of structures and miles of abandoned roads and sidewalks connecting them all. This place was so huge that I had to spend two days there, squatting overnight, just to see a fraction of its ruins.
Kingsbury Ordnance Works
Kingsbury, IN
In 1940, 250 families in rural Indiana were told by the U.S. War Department to move out–something was coming. KOP was one of the largest ammunition factories through World War II, and a few buildings still stand today.
Minnesota’s Nuclear Missile Bases
During the Cold War, the Twin Cities were protected by a ring of defensive nuclear missile bases. By 1972, they had all been closed and their stories began to diverge.
Naval Ammunition Depot
Hastings, NE
This ammunition factory in the middle of the country produced 70% of the munitions for the US Navy at one time and employed 10,000 people. It closed in 1966.
Sunflower Ordnance Works
DeSoto, KS
What can be done if you want to cover thousands of acres peppered with abandonments? Swap that 20mpg for a proper 10-speed, chuck it over the barbed wire, then take off with a camera on your back. There’s nothing like biking through the abandoned military-industrial complex, so do you think you can keep up?