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A nuke could well have hit this place at some point: The environment is bleak, dry and post-apocalyptic. Most everything appears to be in a state of disrepair. Add a marauding gang of mutant bikers and you've got a Road Warrior ripoff.

But the site's surroundings are considerably more lush than they appear on the videotape. Ranches and a testing facility for engineers border the site, with the Rockies visible and the cowpies numerous. Signs on the site's capably patched fence reading "No Trespassing" and "Government Property" are the only clues to the original intent behind the sparse concrete structures sitting amid the sunflowers and thistles.

But nuclear war looked like a distinct possibility as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded in October 1962, and this Titan I site would have been a serious player if push had come to mushroom-cloud shove. If either Khrushchev or Kennedy had pushed the button, nuclear strikes and counterstrikes theoretically would have been launched from Denver's back yard. It follows that -- also in a worst-case scenario -- a new society might well have been born on the high plains around the old missile site.

As such, the Denver Titan I site represents "a rare piece of American history and Cold War history," Peden says.

So what bold redevelopment plans might jump off a buyer's drawing board? Does anybody want an impenetrable, windowless, castle? Is Qwest looking for a super heavy-duty data center? Are any former Qwest execs looking for a place to hide? Peden thinks the right company could turn the site into a lucrative tourist attraction. "It's more exciting than a fort or a battlefield," he says. "It's like a cave, and yet it has this historical significance from the Cold War era."

For a place that's been stuck in the 1960s for forty years, the future looks wide open -- and the price is negotiable.