It was built by the forces of Nazi Germany in northern Occupied France, between 1943 and 1944, to serve as a launch base for V-2 rockets.
The facility was designed with an immense concrete dome to store a large stockpile of V-2s, warheads and fuel, and was intended to launch V-2s on an industrial scale.
A similar-purpose but less-developed facility, the Blockhaus d'Eperlecques, had also been built, some 14.4 kilometers (8.9 miles) north-northwest of La Coupole, and closer to intended targets in southeastern England.
Following repeated heavy bombing by Allied forces during Operation Crossbow, the Germans were unable to complete construction of the works and the complex never entered service.
The United Kingdom conducted post-war investigations, determining that it was "an assembly site for long projectiles most conveniently handled and prepared in a vertical position".
There were three main reasons behind this siting: reducing the flight trajectory between the United States and the Soviet Union, since the missiles would travel north over Canada and the North Pole; increasing the flight trajectory from SLBMs on either seaboard, giving the silos more warning time in the event of a nuclear war; and locating obvious targets as far away as possible from major population centres.
The United States has many silo-based warheads in service, however, they have lowered their number to around 1800 and have transferred most of their missiles to nuclear submarines and are focusing on more advanced conventional weapons.
Notable accidents: The solid fueled LGM-30 series Minuteman I, II, III, and Peacekeeper ICBM configurations consist of one LCC that controls ten LFs (1 × 10).
This distance ensures that a nuclear attack could only disable a very small number of ICBMs, leaving the rest capable of being launched immediately.
Dense Pack was a proposed configuration strategy for basing LGM-118 Peacekeeper ICBMs, developed under the Reagan administration, for the purpose of maximizing their survivability in case of a surprise nuclear first-strike on their silos conducted by a hostile foreign power.
The Main Centre for Missile Attack Warning, near Solnechnogorsk outside Moscow, was completed by the Soviet Union in 1971, and remains in use by the Russian Federation.
During the 1960s several surface based erector launcher pads for Thor IRBMs were installed but were removed just a few years later when Blue Steel carrying V bombers came into service.
Pakistan has built hard and deeply buried storage and launch facilities to retain a second strike capability in a nuclear war.