Down a dusty Kansas back road, Ed Peden's place has a laundry line in the yard and a barbecue grill in the driveway. But that's pretty much where normalcy ends and Oz begins.

"Come on in," Mr. Peden's voice echoes as a visitor steps through his front door into a dank, 120-foot-long shaft of corrugated metal. At the end of the tunnel Peden opens another door and enters a musty foyer complete with a 1960s missile-base control panel.

As historians rethink the cold war, here amid Kansas milo fields, Peden is remaking a bizarre bit of memorabilia from the US-Soviet nuclear arms race: an abandoned Atlas E missile complex that he has adopted as an underground home.

"It's strange to think that for four years men sat in our living room around the clock ready to blow up a Russian city," says Peden, a former history teacher who grew up in the era of "duck and cover" drills.

That's not the only strange thing about Peden's experiment in missile-base living: His garage, the old launch bay, has a 47-ton, 20-foot-wide door. "It's automatic," he says.

His living quarters have 18-inch concrete walls and ceilings covered with three feet of earth. "No need for air conditioning." And for claustrophobic guests, a door marked "EXIT" opens to an escape hatch.

Peden admits he bought the missile site for $40,000 several years ago partly to do something off-beat. "I always liked the idea of being eccentric," he says, his angular face framed by wire-rimmed glasses and flowing, shoulder-length hair.

But by hunkering down in a cold-war fortification, Peden says he has also gained a unique perspective on history - not to mention an unusual opportunity for profit.

"Human history pivoted around these structures and their destructive capacity," he says, standing in his cavernous living room. "We now have a better view of what we better not do to each other on the planet."

The US installed more than 110 Atlas missiles - the country's first intercontinental ballistic weapon - in permanent bases around the country in the late 1950s and early '60s. Most of the weapons were located in the Midwest, with a few in California and New York. Peden's home is one of 19 Atlas sites in Kansas.

The Atlas E-type silo was built to withstand a one-megaton blast as close as a mile away. The missile had a range of about 6,000 miles. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Peden's site was manned by a double crew of Air Force missiliers.

Yet these first-generation missiles, which cost millions of dollars each, were not very accurate or reliable, Peden and others contend. "One missile engineer told me only 10 percent would hit the target," Peden says. "This piece of cold- war history is going to ... force us to take a closer look at how the government works."

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