Missal of Silos
Welcome to Wyoming, motto "We'd like to clarify that Cheyenne Mountain is in Colorado."
Welcome to Wyoming, motto "We'd like to clarify that Cheyenne Mountain is in Colorado."
This comic plays on the similarity in name between missile silos, places where long range weapons are deployed, and the missal of Silos, an old document residing in Spain.
In Christianity, a missal is a priest's book of instructions, texts, and music for the proper celebration of Mass. The Missal of Silos is an 11th-century missal from the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos in northern Spain; it is famous for being the oldest known paper document in Europe, written at a time when the usual writing material was parchment.
Missile silos are often thought to be the first targeting priority in event of a nuclear strike, in hopes of preventing retaliation. If one was searching for potential nuclear missile targets, the Missal of Silos could conceivably be returned as a result of a fuzzy search for "missile silos", and be made a target.
Fuzzy, or approximate, string matching is a technique used for searching text for sequences of characters similar to a given sequence. Normal string matching would only find results that matched the search exactly (searching for "missile" would find only occurrences of "missile"). Fuzzy string matching instead finds results that are "close enough" by some metric (searching for "missile" would find "missile" but also close variants like "missal" or "missel"). Fuzzy string matching is often used in search engines, as typos, misspellings, and inexact searches are common.
Cheyenne Mountain is a mountain in Colorado, which houses an underground military compound (aptly named the Cheyenne Mountain Complex) designed to withstand a nuclear strike and host to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Cheyenne, Wyoming, on the other hand, is the capital of Wyoming. The residents of Cheyenne, Wyoming would prefer their town not to be the target of a nuclear attack because of confusion with Cheyenne Mountain.[citation needed] However, Cheyenne, Wyoming is likely a listed target because of the nearby 90th Operations Group at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base operating Minuteman III ICBMs from missile silos.
There have been several comics with nuclear weapons as a part of the plot. See for instance 1655: Doomsday Clock, where several other comics are mentioned in the explanation.