Bellevue, WA police responded to a call from a US Air Force museum that said a man had offered to donate a Cold War-era missile stored in his late neighbor’s garage

Gifted link

[Bomb] Squad members identified the rocket as a Douglas AIR-2 Genie missile, designed to carry a 1.5-kiloton nuclear warhead.

First put into operation in 1957, the Genie was the world’s first nuclear-armed rocket designed to destroy aircraft targets, and was the most powerful interceptor missile deployed by the U.S. Air Force, according to Boeing.

In 1954, Douglas Aircraft began work on “a small unguided nuclear-armed air-to-air missile,” according to Boeing. Douglas Aircraft built more than 1,000 Genie rockets before discontinuing production in 1962.

It was clear that the missile remnant did not pose a threat given that it was missing its warhead and did not contain rocket fuel, Officer Tyler said.

“It was essentially just a rusted piece of metal at that point,” he said. “An artifact, in other words.”

Because the military did not request it back, the police left it with the man to donate.

It was not immediately clear whether the missile remnant would be destined for the museum in Ohio, and efforts to reach the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton on Sunday were unsuccessful.

I'm posting this in ~humanities.history for the benefit of those who are interested in the Cold War era. It's not surprising that museum artifacts from this period are just lying around in garages. At the time, U.S. military expenditures were double (almost 8%) today's fraction of GDP, and a huge amount of industrial capacity was devoted to manufacturing implements of conventional and nuclear war.

It's recent enough that people who lived through the Cold War are just starting to pass away from old age. This period isn't as salient to American historians as World War II, since the most dramatic military interactions like Korea, Vietnam, and the first Iraq war (arguably not a Capitalism vs Communism face-off, but rather American oil trade hegemony), ended poorly or indecisively. There are signs that the U.S. is embarking on another cycle of heavy military investment to combat rising Cold War-reminiscent threats, whether or not this is advisable in a time of dire global environmental and other needs.

From where I sit, it's just as applicable to move this topic to ~enviro. There's a dire environmental legacy from weapons production, and I still have a personal interest in disposal at the Hanford, WA Nuclear Reservation.