Missile Silos Map: 23 Maps of ICBMs, Test Sites and Lost Bombs

Search MapIndex for missile silos and 150 maps come back, for nuclear test sites 210, and they are written from both sides of the fence. Peace activists gave each of 550 Minuteman sites a name like “Doomsday” or “Koyaanisqatsi”; a Russian mapper notes which Siberian silo is being rebuilt for the Sarmat, with the date of the satellite image. Others go there: a Dutch couple drove to the SS-4 bases of Belarus in July 2014 and met two scrap collectors living on one, a German-speaking cyclist booked a hotel in Semey and rode out to the crater of the first Soviet bomb. And some keep the record of what went wrong, from a dropped wrench socket in Arkansas to a bomb lost in the sea off Savannah.

1. Minuteman Silo Map: 550 Missiles With Protest Names

   In North Dakota the Minuteman silos are called “Bulimia”, “Sorry”, “Skunk”, “Wild Sunflowers” and “Missing from the 4H Neighborhood Roster”, and the launch control center at A1 is “Strip Mine”. This is a guide for peace activists to the land-based missiles still on alert, and it gives every one of 550 launch facilities and control centers in three fields, the High Plains around Cheyenne, Minot and Montana, a name in place of its code. Some honor or mock a person: “Gary Hart’s Missile”, “Dick Lamm’s Missile”, “George Schultz’s Missile”. Others carry a whole argument, like “Starving Children”, “Contaminated Forevermore” and, in the Colorado corner, “Koyaanisqatsi”. Every name sits on the exact coordinates of a silo in a wheat field.

   

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   550550 points

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   United States

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2. Nuclear Explosions Map: 935 US Tests by Name and Yield

   Aardvark, 40 kilotons. Abeytas, 20 to 200. Absinthe, a safety experiment. The 935 points here come from the Department of Energy’s list of US nuclear tests, and each gives the test’s name, how the device was emplaced (shaft, tunnel, crater) and why it was fired: weapons related, weapons effects, joint US-UK, Plowshare or Vela Uniform. Almost all of them crowd into the Nevada Test Site, where Boxcar reached 1.3 megatons and five Plowshare shots named Buggy-A to Buggy-E sit side by side. A few stray far away: Gasbuggy in New Mexico, Salmon in Mississippi, and Cannikin on Amchitka in the Aleutians, filed under “less than 5 Mt”.

   

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   935935 points

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   United States

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3. Abandoned Missile Silos Map: What Became of 1,634 Sites

   Titan I complex 568-C in Washington is “mostly flooded to chest height”, and a dive shop runs scuba tours into it for about $200. This map of 1,634 sites follows every American missile generation, Atlas, Titan I and II, Minuteman, Peacekeeper, by the years it stood on alert, and notes the afterlife where there is one: 725-B in Colorado is the graffiti-covered silo in every urban explorer’s photos, “99.99% likelihood”; at Atlas E 548-6 in Kansas a man who sells old missile sites lives in one and built ultralight aircraft in the missile bay; the Peacekeeper silos of Wyoming are “filled with cement or imploded”. A Russian and Soviet side adds R-36 silos, Ukrainian R-12 sites and Tsar Bomba on Novaya Zemlya, and in Nevada a yellow Sherman tank still marks the last atmospheric test, witnessed by John F. Kennedy.

   

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   1,6341,634 points

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   United StatesRussian FederationUkraineand 2 more

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4. Semipalatinsk Test Site Map: Craters, Holes and a Bike Tour

   Between two hotel bookings in Semey, one “gebucht, 28. - 29.8.”, lies a cycling route out to P-1, the point where the Soviet Union fired its first bomb on 29 August 1949 and two more surface tests in 1951 and 1953. The German mapper of these 260 points marked the test field of Opytnoye pole, where 116 tests were made, an instrumentation point north-east of P-1 (“verlassen”, abandoned, as of September 2018) and, across Balapan and Sary-Uzen, one borehole after another labelled “crater”, “contamination” or “contaminated crater”. Degelen mountain carries over 200 underground tests and a secret cleanup of plutonium residue that ran from 1996 to 2012. Back in town the map adds the anatomical museum of the medical university and the test-site museum, which can be visited by prior arrangement.

   

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   260198 points, 62 lines

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   Kazakhstan

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5. Soviet Missile Bases Map: Silos and Warheads in the Baltics

   At the warhead store of Barta in Latvia someone measured the radiation five times between 1996 and 2008, and each reading is in the note: 6, 7, 6, 7, 6. This Russian-language catalogue of 223 Soviet and Russian rocket forces sites starts on the Baltic coast, where R-12 and R-14 missiles stood until the 1980s, and gives each base its type (ground pads or silos), its project, the number of launchers, its regiment and division and what happened to it. The Tirza silo complex is “the best preserved in Latvia, not badly flooded”, Misa had a fuel leak in 1973, and Karmėlava in Lithuania was the last base of the R-12 when its division was disbanded in April 1990.

   

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   223217 points, 6 areas

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   Russian FederationKazakhstanLatviaand 6 more

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6. Titan II Silo Map: Where Arkansas's Missiles Went Wrong

   At complex 374-7 near Damascus, in September 1980, a worker dropped a wrench socket down the silo. It punctured a fuel tank, which exploded 8.5 hours later, blew off the “740-ton (!)” lid and threw the warhead 600 feet; it landed intact “except for some dents”. The 17 Titan II sites around Little Rock are noted with their units and fates, and the worst of them is Albion 373-4, where a welder accidentally ruptured and ignited a hydraulic line on 9 August 1965 and 53 men died in the fire. The missile was undamaged; 21 years later 400 people came to the unveiling of a granite monument. Of the Damascus explosion the mapper notes that the story is all over the web, but only one source gave its site designation.

   

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   1717 points

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   United States

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7. Jupiter Missile Map: The Lines From Italy to Moscow

   Blue lines run from Puglia and from western Turkey to Moscow, and from the Thor sites of eastern England across the North Sea to the Baltic. The map, made in Italian, places the Jupiter missile bases of 1960 to 1963, Gioia del Colle, Altamura, Laterza, Mottola, Irsina, and the five Turkish sites, and draws a line from each to its target. It adds the NATO troposcatter relay stations of Martina Franca and Pietraficcata that linked them, and on the other shore of the Black Sea a Soviet air base in Georgia, Belbek airport and a “secret submarine base” in Crimea.

   

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   5732 points, 25 lines

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   ItalyUnited KingdomRussian Federationand 15 more

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8. Nuclear Accidents Map: Lost Bombs, Tests and UFO Sightings

   On 5 February 1958 a B-47 collided with an F-86 and jettisoned a Mark 15 nuclear bomb into the sea off Savannah, Georgia, filed here as “Nuclear bomb lost”. This map puts the Tybee bomb into a dated chronology of 169 events that starts with a “battle in the sky” over Nuremberg in 1561 and mixes UFO sightings with the nuclear age: Trinity, Hiroshima, the B-36 that dropped a simulated atomic bomb near Princess Royal Island in 1950, Castle Bravo’s fallout over the Marshall Islands, Windscale, Kyshtym, and the “double flash” a Vela satellite saw near Prince Edward Island in 1979. One entry stands for the city that was spared: Kokura, the alternate target of 9 August 1945, overcast.

   

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   169159 points, 10 lines

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   United StatesAustraliaJapanand 32 more

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9. ICBM Silo Map: F.E. Warren's Missile Field, Site by Site

   On 10 January 1984 the Air Force parked an armored vehicle on the lid of silo H-10 because the missile seemed about to launch itself; the fault was in the launch control facility, and almost four years passed before a reporter found out. This map of 167 launch facilities and alert facilities across Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado gives each site its coordinates in degrees, minutes and seconds and a note from someone who drove past: C-4’s old driveway now hangs over a road cut, highway 71 forced D-3 to D-5 to new entrances, and just east of E-8 lies the brass survey disk where you can touch Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska at once. The nicknames come from the activists’ guide, among them I-5 “Jeannette Rankin” and L-8 “Caspar’s”.

   

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   167167 points

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   United States

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10. Nuclear Test Sites Map: Every Country That Tested

    Twenty-five places, sorted by country in Spanish, from the Trinity test of 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo to Punggye-ri, where North Korea tested in 2006, 2009, 2013, 2016 and 2017. France has Reggane and In Ekker in the Algerian Sahara, then Mururoa with 178 tests and Fangataufa with 14. Britain has the Montebello Islands, Maralinga, Malden and Kiritimati, where “the islanders were not evacuated”. The notes keep the numbers: 456 detonations at Semipalatinsk, 45 at Lop Nur, Castle Bravo “1,200 times more powerful” than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    

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    2525 points

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    United StatesKiribatiAustraliaand 9 more

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    1 other version

11. Abandoned Missile Base Map: A Road Trip Through Belarus

    “Basis 1 niet te bezoeken”: at Polotsk 2 the travellers drove up to the gate and turned around when the guard looked out suspiciously. This Dutch diary of July 2014 drives from the Netherlands through Poland and Lithuania to the abandoned Soviet missile bases of Belarus, and pins every base and every night between them. At Polotsk 1 they find two scrap collectors who live on the base, at Borkovichi two old men guarding it by bicycle in turns, and Kozyany is “the best preserved launch base so far”. The SS-5 silo base near Smorgon is “the highlight of the trip”. In between: wild camping by lakes, mosquitoes, and a hotel booked to watch the Netherlands play Costa Rica.

    

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    4141 points

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    BelarusPolandLithuaniaand 1 more

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12. Atlas Missile Silo Map: Coffins, a School and a Car Lot

    Site 579-1 near Roswell was destroyed by an explosion during a propellant loading exercise on 1 June 1963, 579-5 on 13 February 1964 and 579-2 on 9 March 1964, each note ending “Warhead not on missile”. This map of 111 Atlas sites across the country, by squadron and site number, keeps such notes short. Most Kansas sites carry the single word “Coffin”, one “Coffin. House.”, 548-9 “School” and 551-1 in Nebraska “Car lot”. Nebraska’s 549-A belongs to the university, is leased for ranching and storage, and served the National Guard for military police dog training; 549-C has been demolished down to its access roads.

    

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    111111 points

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13. Russian ICBM Silo Map: The Uzhur Division and the Sarmat

    Silo 12С of the 302nd regiment held an R-36M2 Voevoda, the missile NATO calls Satan; by 18 November 2023 it was being prepared for the new Sarmat, and the note links the reports. This Russian-language map of the Uzhur missile division in Krasnoyarsk Krai, 91 objects, lays out its regiments silo by silo: the ten Voevoda silos of the 735th regiment with “10 x 500/800 (MIRV)”, the command posts and radio transmitter bunkers, the warhead handling base and a silo training mock-up for the Sarmat. The division’s history runs in one line, from the first R-36 in 1966 to today.

    

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    9183 points, 7 lines, 1 area

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    Russian Federation

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14. Broken Arrow Map: A Short History of Nuclear Folly

    Seventeen pins drawn from Rudolph Herzog’s book “A Short History of Nuclear Folly”, and half of them are labelled BROKEN ARROW: ACCIDENT SITE. Mars Bluff, South Carolina, where a B-47 dropped an unarmed bomb whose high explosive went off on impact in 1958; Goldsboro, where a B-52 broke up with two bombs in 1961; Palomares, where “two bombs blew up, and one dropped into the sea”; Thule, with four H-bombs; and the sunken submarines Scorpion and K-129. Test sites fill the rest, from dirty-bomb trials at Maly on Lake Ladoga to Amchitka. The pin for Emu Field in South Australia has strayed to Pennsylvania.

    

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    1717 points

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    United StatesRussian FederationBraziland 3 more

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15. Pershing Missile Map: Germany's Euromissile Sites

    On 2 November 1982 a convoy of twelve vehicles, three of them carrying Pershing missiles, lost its way onto a road falling 12 percent into Walprechtsweier, and a transporter rammed parked cars and houses. This German-language map of 42 places follows the Pershing in West Germany, American and West German units alike, through its quick reaction alert sites and storage areas. On the Waldheide near Heilbronn a Pershing II stage caught fire and exploded during assembly on 11 January 1985, killing three soldiers; Mutlangen became the focal point of the peace movement; the alert site at Kleingartach, once a Nike site, is a landfill today.

    

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    4242 points

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    Germany

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    OpenStreetMap uMap

16. China Missile Silos Map: Hami, Yumen and Ordos

    Three polygons in the deserts of northern China outline the silo fields of Hami, Yumen and Ordos, with “finished and still being built” silos, each sourced to the open-source analysts who mapped them from 2021. The Russian-language map calls itself suspected sites and estimates: 246 points with DF-41 silo positions at Hami, a presumed DF-16 silo at the Jiuquan test centre, launch pads, warhead stores, factories, design bureaus, submarines and 17 nuclear power units, each with its coordinates written out and a link to check it.

    

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    246243 points, 3 areas

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    China

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17. Titan Missile Silo Map: Museum, Church and Nursery

    571-7 south of Tucson is the Titan Missile Museum, and the others around it have moved on: 570-6 is “Now Acadia Nursery”, 570-9 a church, 571-6 and Arkansas’s 373-6 houses. At 571-4 the “underground components are visible as fill dirt has been removed”, and 570-3 lies in Ironwood Forest National Monument with interpretive displays. The 36 Titan II sites of Arizona and Arkansas come with a Flickr album for many of them, and complex 374-7 has a single line: “19 September 1980 Broken Arrow incident”.

    

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    3636 points

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    United States

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18. Nuclear Explosions Map Kazakhstan: Tunnels, Lakes and Space

    Four nuclear rockets of Project K exploded in space above Karaganda, and a fifth above Kyzylorda, which “also hosts the Baikonur Cosmodrome, uninvolved in nuclear testing”. This map of 17 places covers every kind of Soviet explosion in Kazakhstan: Degelen mountain, “bored with a hundred or so test tunnels” that were sealed again to keep out metal thieves; Balapan, where the Chagan cratering test made a lake; a series of explosions in salt domes to explore storing natural gas; seismic probes with names like Meridian 3 and Region 5. One entry records the US mission that later set off explosions in unused boreholes to calibrate test-ban sensors.

    

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    1717 points

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    KazakhstanRussian Federation

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19. Ukraine Missile Base Map: Call Signs of the Rocket Forces

    The 664th missile regiment at Okhtyrka had the call sign “Kora”, and “this regiment was in Cuba in 1962”. This map of 74 former Strategic Rocket Forces sites in Ukraine notes each unit’s number and radio name, “Galstuk” (tie), “Integral”, “Korabelny”, and what it is now: abandoned, or like technical base 5977 at Lebedyn, a plant making “Leol” oils. Around the Pervomaisk division it maps the helicopter squadron that searched the ground for fallen rocket stages and warheads, the fuel store and the air defence positions around the division’s headquarters, and at Pobuzke the museum where the silo has been filled with concrete but “everything here is real”.

    

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    7432 points, 42 areas

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    Ukraine

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20. Cuban Missile Crisis Map: America's ICBMs in October 1962

    Near West Point and Tekamah in Nebraska stood single Blue Scout Junior communications rockets, each there “to broadcast an EAM to nuclear forces”, an emergency action message. This map freezes the American arsenal in October 1962, 143 launchers that were operational at the time of the Cuban crisis: three-missile Atlas D groups above ground at Offutt, Atlas E and F silos, Titan I complexes of three silos and a control center, sorted by strategic aerospace wing and region, from 24 in Nebraska and South Dakota to 22 in California, Washington and Idaho.

    

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    143143 points

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    United States

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21. Soviet Missile Launch Pads Map: Vogelsang and Fürstenberg

    Soviet R-5M and R-12 missiles once stood in the Brandenburg forest north of Berlin, and this map leads you to what is left of their pads. Each of the 25 points is practical: a trailhead with “small unofficial parking bay”, a road “NOT car-accessible”, a wooden bridge and a partly prepared nature trail to the four R-12 pads at Vogelsang. Pad 3 at Fürstenberg has “nothing left”, pad 4 is “not explored”, and one point marks Objekt 4001, the Lychen-2 depot for the nuclear warheads.

    

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    2521 points, 3 lines, 1 area

    Countries

    Germany

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22. Atomic New Mexico Map: Nagatani's Nuclear Enchantment

    Japanese Children’s Day carp banners fly over the uranium tailings of the Jackpile mine at Paguate on the Laguna Pueblo reservation, and a Wolf Kachina looks over the United Nuclear tailings spill on the Rio Puerco. The photographer Patrick Nagatani pictured these scenes in New Mexico’s atomic landscape, and this map of 36 places puts each picture back on the ground: the Trinity marker on the Jornada del Muerto, the ground zeros of Operation Gnome near Carlsbad and Project Gasbuggy in Carson National Forest, the EMP simulator called the Trestle at Kirtland, and the Bradbury Science Museum’s “Effects of Nuclear Weapons”.

    

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    3636 points

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    United States

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23. Nuclear Weapons Map: Where America's Arsenal Stood in 2018

    Two extremely low frequency transmitters, at Clam Lake in Wisconsin and Republic in Michigan, once talked to submarines hundreds of feet under the ocean. They are among the 62 facilities on this 2018 map of the US nuclear arsenal at work: bomber and fighter bases at home and in Europe, the ICBM wings, the naval bases, the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Y-12 at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos’s plutonium facility at Technical Area 55, Cheyenne Mountain and the Delta-01 launch control center in South Dakota, 31 feet underground and reached by an elevator, where tours are limited to six people at a time because the capsule is so small.

    

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    6262 points

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    United StatesUnited KingdomItalyand 7 more

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