Bizarro Votkinsk

Well here I am in Utah.
I haven't been here since a layover between Colorado Springs and Great Falls Montana in 1994, on my first TDY ever ever, with Todd Gossett and Rob McIntyre, to go check out how missileers do training.
Thirteen years later, it's still as pretty, with snow-capped mountain ranges both east and west, which are supposed to get capped two feet more tomorrow (4-6" here southwest of Salt Lake City).
Here for more training ("hasn't the military taught you everything yet?" say the Boivins), a three-day course to learn about how we Americans build solid-fuel rockets such as the Trident II Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile and my old Minuteman III. After a morning of lectures, we drove through the sprawling missile production campus, with building-bunkers with sand piled up on all sides for explosion dissipation (it's safe, Ainsley, no worries!), then had to drive forty minutes to a different industrial park to tour a factory, as wide as a football field and as long as three. We got to wear cool wine-colored smocks and safety glasses while we looked at enormous pieces of equipment that drill this, spin that, wrap those, mold these. It occurred to me that this is probably what goes on inside the factory out at Votkinsk, though with different smocks.