the Atomic West
Currently on a road trip, exploring the downwind communities and costly attempts at military-industrial cleanup at the Hanford Reach. In lieu of a blog post on this trip (which will come later), I will post something else from the vast personal archive of nuclear-related history I gathered as part of my graduate studies on the ill-fated MX Missile.
One of my hopes for this blog is that it can come to serve as a useful place for me to catalog and share some of my MX research, and maybe eventually kickstart it into something more than a graduate thesis. So, with that, behold the "MX Map" that illustrates how the Rube Goldberg machine of mutually assured destruction would have been constructed in the basin and range country of Utah and Nevada.
By way of a legend, those weirdly shaped things connected by squiggly lines are proposed bases for one of the largest missiles in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. This was problematic for so, SO many reasons. I promise to dig into in future posts.
Spoiler: this was a bad idea.