How a Missile Silo Became the Most Difficult Interior Decorating Job Ever
How a Missile Silo Became the Most Difficult Interior Decorating Job Ever
Mushroom clouds never figured into the nightmares of Alexander Michael. He was 4 years old during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and, as a kid in Sydney, Australia, he says, “all the action in the U.S. was far enough away from us … to be amused by the goings-on, not afraid, as we didn’t really understand the scale and consequences.”
Meanwhile, halfway across the globe, Richard Somerset, a 21-year-old U.S. Air Force airman training to become a ballistic missile analyst technician, was well aware of the threat of nuclear war. Two months after the crisis ended, he was stationed at Plattsburgh Air Force Base in northeastern New York and assigned to an Atlas F missile silo in the sparsely populated Adirondack town of Lewis.
Forty-five years later, long after the Cold War had ended, the Lewis missile silo brought these two unlikely men together.