Susan D’Agostino
Way out in the Kansas prairie, 140 feet below ground, a concrete-lined relic of Cold War annihilation has received a literal — and metaphorical — coat of “fresh paint throughout.” It’s not being preserved as a museum or memorial. It’s being sold on Zillow.
Welcome to 1441 N. 260th Road, Lincoln, Kansas, now rebranded as Rolling Hills Missile Silo, because nothing says “pastoral charm” like 600 tons of 2-inch rebar wrapped around a void where a thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missile once waited.
The property listing for the decommissioned Atlas F missile silo doubles as a brainstorming list for entrepreneurs: “party venue,” “art gallery,” “climate-controlled wine cellar,” “mushroom farm” and “the most insane Airbnb on the planet.” Also included: twin above-ground concrete pads, 75-ton blast doors and an escape hatch for that “dramatic exit.” It’s less home than Bond starter kit.
Reading the Zillow listing, one might ask: Why does such a structure exist at all? Why was this much steel and concrete poured into the prairie in the first place? The answers are well-documented but absent here.
Those questions appear to belong to a time when decisions were made with slide rules and fear. Now, the future is up for grabs. The property boasts a “private driveway” and underground temperatures between 54 and 62 degrees Fahrenheit, described as “nature’s free HVAC.” At $520 per square foot, it is “NOT your typical fixer upper” and is “waiting for your vision.”
The listing hints only obliquely at the original military purpose by noting the property is “a piece of Cold War history.” Of course, Atlas F silos were not just bunkers. They were built to enable the erasure of life at scale, not to shelter. The Atlas F program, deployed in the early 1960s, was part of the United States’ first operational generation of ICBMs. Each missile site — 12 in Kansas alone— was designed to house and deliver a 4.5-megaton nuclear warhead to the other side of the world.
Unlike earlier Atlas models, the F variant was stored vertically underground and was elevated to the surface on a hydraulic elevator for fueling and launch, the latter of which required 10 vulnerable minutes. By 1965, the Atlas F system was retired, replaced by faster-launched Minuteman missiles.
None of this shows up in the real estate listing. There’s no mention that the Atlas F warhead was more than 250 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. No hint of the terror that surrounded these sites — only the promise of limitless business opportunity. The ad seems to scream: Admire the feat of engineering! (But forget the existential terror it embodied.) Marvel at the blast doors! (But ignore how they recast unthinkable violence as routine.) Think of the Instagrammable photos! (But don’t summon images of what nuclear bombs did to people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945.)
Prospective buyers must sign a waiver before entering. Though the missile is gone, the site presumably has remaining hazards: Perhaps a guest could fall down a shaft engineered to handle a nuclear detonation?
Beneath the novelty, however, lies a deeper truth: Missile silos are not neutral spaces for creative reuse. They are monuments to a moment in human history when extinction was first built into the architecture of national security doctrines. Their ability to be repurposed as luxury bunkers is not just bonkers; it’s symptomatic of an inability to reckon honestly with inherited structures of violence. This is nostalgia without memory, and fetishism without context.
And it’s not merely retrospective.
Today, the United States has an estimated 1,770 deployed nuclear warheads, of which 400 are land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. The logic that justified Atlas F — deterrence through the prospect of instant retaliatory destruction — remains embedded in U.S. strategic doctrine. Missile silos are not just Cold War relics. They are living artifacts of a strategy the United States and other nuclear-armed countries have yet to relinquish.
One could argue that repurposing these sites is better than letting them rot. Maybe so. But if we are going to inhabit these places again, if we are going to live in the shadow of their history, then we ought to bring the memory with us. We must carry forward not just the concrete, but the cold calculus — and the human cost.
Susan D’Agostino, a mathematician and science writer, was the nuclear risk editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
