A Cold War missile silo isn’t most people’s ideal home, but for over 30 years, it was David McIntyre’s. Now, the underground bunker in rural Lincoln County is being put up for sale by his daughter and attracting potential buyers eyeing the subterranean lair for a wide variety of uses.
The Atlas E missile silo, which housed an intercontinental ballistic missile with a 4-megaton nuclear warhead during the Cuban missile crisis, is going for $1.45 million, listed on Zillow. That’s a surprisingly comparable price to the median single-family home in Seattle of over $1 million this spring.
The underground structure was built in the 1950s, part of the 567th Strategic Missile Squadron attached to Fairchild Missile Base in Spokane. There were only 27 Atlas E missile sites ever built, according to missilebases.com. They were activated in 1961 during the Cold War before they were decommissioned just four years later.
The bunker is designed to withstand a 1-megaton airburst from a distance of 1.6 miles. The Atlas E class silo boasts roughly 12,500 square feet with a nearly 2,000-square-foot living area buried under the 24.5-acre lot. Aboveground, there is a workshop and a smaller one-bedroom living area.
McIntyre renovated the silo after he purchased it in 1991, said daughter Chandra Spary. He wasn’t a doomsday prepper, she said, just fascinated with the idea of living underground.
Over the years, McIntyre decked out the submerged two-bedroom living space and kitchen — which only account for a fraction of the cavernous property. He spiffed up a large high-ceiling storage area he called the “green room” with a pingpong table and basketball hoop, and dreamed of turning the large flame pit for the ICBM into a pool, Spary said. An elevator’s ride above the bunker, he loved to watch the sunset, framed by wildflowers and fruit trees.
Located in a dry and dusty landscape off Interstate 90, where the closest city is Sprague with a population of just over 500, the missile silo is at least a shelter from civilization.
The sunless bunker is constructed with reinforced steel and designed to withstand direct blasts and nuclear fallout, according to Boundless Estates. The space is heated with electric, propane and oil systems and cooled with mounted air units.
The Cold War has been over, more or less, since 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, but the threat of nuclear war hasn’t gone away. Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened nuclear retaliation in its war against Ukraine. Israel just attacked Iran in an attempt to thwart its ability to build a bomb.
When Spary and her husband began advertising the property, they thought preppers might be interested, but came to realize most were unequipped for making use of such a space, and soon began turning their attention to people interested for storage purposes. Since its most recent listing in December, the silo has been eyed by potential buyers working in energy development, cryptocurrency, sciences, food banks, mushroom farming and more, she said. The property is currently zoned for residential.
If you’re not a prepper or a mushroom farmer, but are interested in Cold War history, you don’t have to make the trip out toward Spokane for an open house. Look no further than the nation’s first fallout shelter to be built into a freeway in Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood, right off Interstate 5.
The Ravenna shelter inspired McIntyre’s subterranean passion. It could host up to 300 people in the event of a thermonuclear attack. It features a squad room, a radio dispatch room, a clerical area for the Washington State Patrol, beds, a medical center and sick bay, decontamination showers, and a recreation area.
Clearly, nuclear war never broke out and by the late 1970s, its emergency escape tunnel was blocked, its communications equipment was removed, and the shelter was repurposed as a storage facility for the Washington Department of Highways. By 2010, it sat vacant.
In the 1980s, Washington, like the federal government, decided the costs to plan for mass evacuations and mass fallout shelters were unreasonable, given the assumption that nuclear war would be unsurvivable.
Washington even passed a law in 1984 banning such spending, and exempting itself from liability, even though it is home to the world’s third-largest stockpile of warheads — over 1,120 — stored near the Trident nuclear submarine base on Hood Canal, making the state a likely target in a nuclear exchange.
McIntyre died in 2023 while working in a separate pump room on the property, doing what he loved, Spary said. Her father said he didn’t want to die at the hospital, but at the silo that had become his decadeslong project.
When a neighboring cattleman, found him, Spary said, McIntyre was under an open hatch door, looking up at the sky with a smile on his face.
