Bloodthirsty or not, the scale of Cold War brinkmanship quickly reached peak absurdity. By the mid ’80s, the two superpowers possessed a combined sum of more than 70,000 nuclear warheads, a number sufficient to put 357 warheads, each with yields far exceeding that of the Hiroshima bomb, onto every capital city of every country on the entire globe. New missile systems came online every few years, phasing out old technologies almost as fast as they could be created. In the case of the sites for the Titan I missiles, one of the first ICBMs, some launch facilities were decommissioned mere months after being opened.

This rapid-fire upgrade in technologies combined with both nations’ relentless manufacture of missiles left a quiet mark across the remote parts of each country. Early-generation nuclear missile silos were left to rust and quietly collapse, marking the map like a secret Braille. To the uninitiated, defunct Cold War sites give little outward indication of their former purpose. Many of these facilities were designed to be obscure, showing only a small surface footprint that barely hinted at the extent of what was hidden just below the earth’s surface. Aside from former missileers and a small, passionate network of urban explorers, these long-ago vacated sites remain largely unknown, scattered across the globe in varying states of decay.

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In recent years, I have become one of these enthusiasts. My fascination with the implements of the Cold War is far from technical. The mechanics of their destructive potential is wasted on me. Instead, I see these things as part of a global semiotics, a secret language in which we collectively and unconsciously speak to one another. These places, defunct missile silos, collapsing early warning radar stations, and the infrastructure that was built to support them, are words in a sentence that expresses our priorities, our fears and our willingness to engage those fears on a primal level.

The simple fact that these sites have fallen so far off the map is, in my opinion, not a matter of human progress but, rather, willful ignorance of our own folly. We — all of us to an individual across the breadth of nationalities and on every side of this issue — have lacked the simple imagination to point out the madness herein and to realize another possible world. In the seven decades during which we have possessed nuclear weapons, we have never once had a moment where we were satisfied with the destructive powers at our fingertips. Our pursuits have been only to perfect the quality of the Armageddon we aimed to create.

It is foolish, and we are poorer for the things you are looking at in these pictures.

This work is featured in an exhibition in Denver at the Redline Gallery. The closing reception is Wednesday. And you can see more of Slaby’s work over on his Instagram feed, @mattslaby.