The bedroom with its bunkbeds is fairly spacious, the curved wall a reminder of where you are.

The main level is the Launch Control Center, with banks of early computers and enough dials, readouts and warning lights to double as a sci-fi B-movie set.

This part of the facility is about the size of a small house. Only a handful of men lived and worked here. We take the shorter corridor to the left. To the right, a long way away, is the silo itself. Sickly-green paint covers steel decking and hydraulic dampeners. The main corridor is something out of a movie. The Titan II silos weren't designed to survive a direct strike, but it was hoped they'd make it through a near-hit. Once out of the heat, the familiar smell of a military facility greets my nose: steel, concrete, and as Yvonne informs me, hydraulic fluid.ДЄt the base of the stairs, massive steel doors secure the facility from any sort of attack. We step back out into the sun and head over to a small hatch and stairway, the only access to the underground complex. The director of the museum, Yvonne Morris guides me on a tour herself (as she does once a month on the Director's Tour). I get to bypass the usual safety briefing, having been here before and getting special access for CNET. First stop is the visitor's center, with its memorabilia and gift shop. The Titan II itself looms within.Д«ut I'm not quite there yet. This remains partially and permanently open, a glass sunroof keeping out the elements, letting visitors peer down into the silo from above. Ground-level radar emitters and receivers, retractable antennas and then the massive reinforced concrete roof over the missile itself.

Beyond the parking lot and visitor's center, the surface portion of the facility is still largely how it would have looked in its heyday. Most have been decommissioned and destroyed, although some 400 of the smaller Minuteman III missile silos are still in use. The Titan Missile Museum is one of the only nuclear missile silos open to the public, and the only one from the Titan program. Over 100 feet (31.4m) tall, 10 feet (3m) wide, and capable of delivering a 9-megaton nuclear bomb anywhere within 9,900 miles (16,000km), it functioned as a nuclear deterrent, and in a different role, launched the men of the Gemini program into space.ДЄctually, it's still there. Near where I'm standing, on this hillside south of Tucson, is a 150-foot-deep (46m) silo that once housed one of the most destructive forces ever created: a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile. I'm glad I'll be spending the next few hours deep underground. It's 8:30 in the morning and already the Arizona sun is punishing the asphalt, shrubs and any living creature stupid enough to stand under it.

Titan missile silo