Illustration by Earl Larrabee

Sahuarita, Arizona is more than just a little desert town with a hard-to-pronounce name. It is also the home of the nation's only publicly accessible Cold War-era Titan II Missile. And because nothing says "vacation destination" like an atomic warhead, missile site 571-7 has been marketing itself to tourists as the Titan Missile Museum since it opened its doors to the public in 1986. Today, as the advertisements claim, I'm going to "feel the chill of the Cold War" for myself.

The museum is about 25 miles south of Tucson, just a quick drive down I-19. In Sahuarita, I turn onto Duval Mine Road and park by a sign warning "PELIGRO – RADACION DE ALTA FREQUENCIA." (DANGER – HIGH-FREQUENCY RADIATION) I pray my car doesn't melt as I walk up the path toward the big blue building labeled "The Count Ferdinand von Galen Titan Missile Museum Education and Research Center."

Inside the strangely named and dimly lit building, I pay $8.50 to the elderly woman behind the gift-shop counter as she tells me it will be about an hour until I can go on a tour of the missile silo, since the next two timeslots are completely full. This gives me some time to do a little people-watching, and to check out the exhibits in the lobby.

The crowd is evenly split between aging veterans (who share war stories as they mill about) and the baby boomer set (with annoyed-looking teenagers who think they're far too cool for family vacations). A few younger couples are here as well, all wearing T-shirts splashed with American flags. It's rampant patriotism in T-shirt form.

I make my way through the crowd of visiting patriots to the "Origins of Rockets and the Cold War" timeline along the lobby wall. It begins innocently with the first liquid propellant rocket being launched from "Aunt Effie's cabbage patch," but quickly progresses to a time when Aunt Effie gives way to atomic bombs, international hostility, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the newfound ability to destroy entire countries with a single nuclear missile. Well then.

As I'm looking at the Cold War-era trinkets in the glass display cases – canned water, gas masks, an old issue of "Time" magazine that promises to reveal "How You Can Survive Fallout!" – my tour group is finally called into the "briefing room." Inside, a short video plays, giving us a three-minute history of the Cold War, followed by some footage of test explosions. Once the video is finished, a volunteer hands out plastic safety helmets to the group – mine is blue – and leads us out to the above-ground "top-side" section of the museum.

The top-side patch of desert is 3.5 nondescript acres, surrounded by a chain-link and barbed-wire fence. Here we meet our tour guide, whose personalized safety helmet introduces him as "Snuffy." Snuffy, who once worked in the missile compound as a crew commander, welcomes us to site 571-7, the sole remaining Titan II Intercontinental Ballistic Missile complex. As he leads us along the paved path that wanders between the exhibits, he talks about each one – the fuel tank, the engine, an eye-and-body wash station – giving us technical details about the machinery, trajectory paths and nuclear explosions.

Eventually we're led to a viewing platform where we're invited to peer down into the silo. The missile lies just underneath the glass, all 103 feet of it. The head of the beast is right there, the warhead with its cone-shaped heat shield and re-entry vehicle topping the missile itself, the thing we've all ventured out here to see. Snuffy explains that the missile was rendered inoperable in 1986, its fuel removed and holes cut into essential parts. Still, it's an imposing sight.

We're led down a metal staircase into the depths of the missile silo, which reaches 146 feet underground. The walls of the surreal underground walkway don't touch the floor and everything inside is spring-mounted, giving the underground maze enough "wiggle room" to protect it from anything except a direct hit. Once we've crowded into the missile control center, Snuffy tells us about life in the silo and about the now-antiquated computers. The room is dark and dingy, with the green-gray color of the walls adding to the eerie atmosphere.

After we're told that missiles like this one were used "only to stop wars, never to start," and the mantra "peace through deterrence" is repeated several times, it's time to prove our dedication to peace by performing a simulated missile launch. Snuffy selects a member of the tour group – not me, unfortunately – to sit at the control panel. He walks us through the steps of a missile launch, imitates the ringing of a telephone, barks commands, and pretends to punch secret codes into the computers, until finally the old woman sitting at the control panel gets the go-ahead to turn the key.

"Well, now we just shot off a missile," Snuffy says.

Next we walk back up the stairs to the top-side part of the museum, pausing along the way to look at the missile through Plexiglas windows. Once we're above ground, Snuffy congratulates us on passing the "official Missile Museum fitness test" and bids us farewell. "If you like us, talk about us. If you don't, just keep your mouth shut."

As I re-enter the building I find myself in the museum gift shop, which is stocked with T-shirts, souvenir cookbooks and teddy bears emblazoned with the Missile Museum logo. Before I leave, a treasure in the corner of a display case that I didn't notice before catches my eye. It's an autographed portrait of LeVar Burton as Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge from the movie "Star Trek: First Contact," a portion of which was shot on location at the museum. The picture makes me laugh for the first time in what has thus far been a fairly somber day, and is the perfect sci-fi ending to a perfectly strange day at the Titan Missile Museum.