No Lone Zone - Life in a disused nuclear missile silo
Visiting Ed Peden in his 20th Century Castle
Four hours into the visit there's a glimpse of something else, but until then the love is all you get.
"We raised the flag in your honour!" Ed Peden calls out before we even get out of the car. And there it is, flapping in the blue sky over the grassy hills of Kansas.
The flag is a purple rectangle surrounding a picture of the Earth, "because no nation's flag is purple." At the base of the pole there are two gentle, ageing men - long grey hair, shirts tucked into their jeans – who wave in greeting.
We're a long way from anywhere. So far that those shallow hills that fill the landscape in all directions may as well be the waves of an ocean. But it's best not to think about that too much, because… well… because you never know what happens when you think about things too much.
We're at the site of an early-1960s Atlas nuclear missile launchpad. No Atlas E missile was ever launched from here (in fact, no Atlas was ever launched at all, though a couple were recycled for NASA missions), but one lived here for four years in the early 60s, waiting to be fired at Russians who lived in some unimaginable place deep over the bend of the horizon.
But then it became another place. Ed bought it from the government in the 1980s, and spent 25 years turning it into a castle, with all the appropriate features. There are heavy doors, cavernous spaces, dim underground tunnels, and turreted towers that seem to be the tails of rockets whose noses have been forced into the earth. There's even an immense cast-iron chandelier, of the kind that might, if dropped at the opportune moment, finally finish off a vampire.
It turned out there was a market for it. For more than three decades, Ed and his wife Dianna bought and sold disused nuclear war facilities, a business that apparently gave Ed some spare time. He was also an amateur aviator, and turned the 11,000-square-foot silo into a workshop to build gliders. On one wall, there are spectacular close-up aerial photos of him gliding over the landscape, taken a quarter-century ago for a magazine that apparently had enough money to hire a photographer to ride a helicopter. He looks at the picture, and that day's wind suddenly blows back into his mind. "That thing endangered the craft."
This is the space that Ed haunts, along with George, a younger-but-not-much-younger man who moved in a few years ago. Now these two grey divorcees keep each other company in the ocean of Kansan grass, and raise their Earth flag so that visitors can make out their message from afar.
"A place of war that is now a place of love," says Ed unselfconsciously. He's tall, but stooped, and his hair is still long. He must have been in his 20s when the tons of concrete were poured into these hills, and now he's ended up in the middle of it, locked in the safest home in Kansas.
It's a special place, but you don't notice it at all until you're virtually on top of it. The 32-acre ring-fenced space is low and flat, and nothing is visible from the long, isolated drive that leads up to it except for an unremarkable cluster of trees. The only features that mark Ed's place out are the metallic embellishments, and they could easily be mistaken for mysterious agricultural protuberances, of which there are plenty in these fields. The rest you only see when you're at the gate: The wire fence with a sign bearing the faux-Latin name of the place – "Subterra Castle" – as well as a drawing of what looks suspiciously like the Disney logo.
Inside the compound, there is little to notice but two flat-topped mounds bisected by the gravel driveway. One of these hides the silo and launchpad, with its obsolete exhaust funnel, a concrete chute designed to channel tons of flaming kerosene round a bend to spew into the air. It would've made a small, very brief concrete volcano. The other structure here was once the launch-control centre, now a two-storey underground apartment. The only visible part of this is the part Ed built overground: A wooden structure whose windows are large enough to make it seem like a greenhouse, and whose interior is all sofas, blankets, and stained glass.
Ed gives us the tour: Here's the big space where the 80-foot rocket once lay with its 4-megaton tip. Fading aerial photos of the venerable white weapon hang crookedly on the wall, next to an old warning, a spraypainted stencil: "No Lone Zone." The rule was that no one was ever allowed to be alone with a nuclear warhead.
"There's 1.75 million cubic yards of concrete in this structure," Ed tells us.
"I can't imagine how much that is," I say.Â
"It's a lot of concrete," he assures me.
Then there's the 47-ton "drive-in" door, a steel portcullis that can still, thanks to a tortured metal giant groaning in the walls, slowly grind open.
Nuclear war used to be a primitive procedure, involving physics and navigational equipment that medieval folk would have recognized. Once the call to war had arrived, it would take the team here half an hour to hoist the missile onto its base and aim it at the sky. Ed points at the ceiling, which turns out to be colossal trapdoor that would have rolled back so that the Atlas had room to erect. "It's actually a space-shot, into near-space. This thing was just hurled toward Moscow," says Ed. "Not terribly accurate in the early 1960s."
Ed points at a seat behind another console.
"This is what they used to point the rocket. They used the stars, like the old navigators."
"You mean, like, with a sextant?"
"Yup," says Ed.
I feel the need to offer consolation: "Well, I guess Moscow's a big place." The warhead was 32 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, so I suppose even a miss would've been close enough.
---
But why would a high-school teacher buy this place in the late 1980s in the US, one of the most prosperous societies there has ever been? "Well, I had two young girls. And I was always aware that humanity has never really built a weapon that just went unused," he says, favouring the last syllable with its own drawl. "And I knew that this structure was very special. I felt really blessed that I could be in possession of such a structure."
If the world did end, I realize, it would be a while before Ed noticed. Would this be an advantage? But then, if the world did end, it might be a while before anyone noticed. Now that we live with a constant creeping dread, you could envy Ed, a man of the first generation to grow up with a nuclear gun to its head. At least if you saw the mushrooms clouds on the horizon you'd know that it had happened. But now? How broken would the system have to be before you realized? What would the signs be? Cancelled football matches? People going shopping in masks? Empty supermarket shelves? Broken cash machines? These things would feel just like more jabs of dread fed to us via the internet all the time anyway. Somebody killed somebody. Something blew up. Something might blow up. Invisible death creeping closer. Maybe it would be a relief to see a giant super-heated cloud over the city skyline, or a swarm of living corpses awoken by a virus. Then at least you'd know for sure. Not now, empty cash machines, we have other things to worry about.
---
Ed dozes in the shade on a swinging wooden bench beneath leafy eaves of his gazebo, outside the door, which has "Namaste" written on it in friendly black and white letters. He used to sing and play tom-toms and wooden flutes. The place to do this would have been the large communal space, which various small, cosy-looking living quarters installed all around. It's an indoor village, and long, strange weekends once happened in this roofed town square. Shamans were invited, and journeys of self-discovery were undertaken involving peyote and many, many hours of drumming.
The past hangs around. Former guests left their marks. Even 20th century castles have ghosts. Ed says that one of the towers – oh, and the stone circle outside - was actually constructed by a reclusive "genius." But he killed himself over a woman, Ed says. Even now, the chairs in the larger space downstairs are arranged in circles, as if a party of tom-tom drummers had just left.
It all happened a while ago, before Ed grew old and a stroke weakened his left arm. The rooms all seem to have other stories inside them. One room, once conceived and arranged by Ed's absent wife Dianna, is filled with tokens of all the world's religions: There's a stained glass window rescued from a church she once maintained as a girl, there are portraits of Russian Orthodox Marias, Hindu gods, and a figurine of two Native Americans cradling a peace pipe.
"Things are gonna slide, slide in all directions," Ed says suddenly, now resting on a kind of wooden throne in the religion room. "There won't be nothing, won't be nothing you can measure anymore," he mumbles. I realize he's trying to remember the lines of a Leonard Cohen song. There's a small pause. "The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold, and it's overturned the order of the soul."
"Overturning the order of the soul. What is that about?" announces Ed. We all have a think.
Ed has more to say. "I was reading a book, about three winters ago, that talked about when they built American properties. They liked to build them on the intersection of ley lines on the Earth. So I think it's very likely that this property – I don't know how they selected where to build these things, but it could be on these ley lines, which some people say empower the location."
Given the powers hidden in the earth here, it's all the sadder that Ed wants to sell now. The place demands more upkeep than he and Robert can muster, so now Subterra Castle is on the market for $1.5 million. It would be the last deal of the business he had going.
But there's still something bothering me. This place is clearly more than a haunted castle. For one thing, what else has he got in here? What would he do if, in a crisis situation, some people wanted to get in. Isn't there a contradiction between living in a bunker, and wanting to send a message to the world? Ed knows what I'm getting at, I'm sure of it.
"It's very quiet at night here. If there was a crisis situation, aren't you worried about people trying to get in?"
"Well, we have a lot of friends that we would welcome here."
"But you've been on TV. People know about this place."
"As long as they come in peace, we'd try to work something out. If they weren't peaceful that would be a problem, especially for them."
I laugh nervously, trying to lighten the mood. "What would you do?"
"Well, it's kind of an unthinkable... You know … thoughts manifest."
"Hm."
"I've created a bunch of things here with thoughts," says Ed. "The psychology of the human mind is very creative. But I would not want to have my friends and relatives harmed. ... I have to be careful what I even say, because what I say increases the likelihood of that coming to be."
"You think?"
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"I've proven it to myself many times here. I have thoughts that scare me, so to speak them gives them more likelihood of manifestation."
"Okay."
"Yeah."
"This is all a lot to think about for me," I say.
"It's a lot to think about for me too," says Ed.
You can meet Ed in my new documentary We’re All Going to Die. If you’re in Berlin this summer, there’ll be two exclusive chances to watch the film on the big screen. Info and tickets.