Watching the film, we knowingly counted the minutes until Lawrence, Kan., disappeared under a retaliatory Soviet mushroom cloud.įor better than three decades, on every two-hour drive from Valley City, my hometown, to Grand Forks, where I went to school and later worked at the newspaper, I passed by several missile sites. We reacted more viscerally than others, perhaps, when we saw “movie Minutemen” fly from Kansas silos in the 1983 film “The Day After,” because we always wondered what it would look and sound and feel like if we ever saw one of our missiles leave in a hurry. They were part of the prairie landscape, as familiar as a patch of slough, a field pocked with rock piles or a hillside heap of antiquated farm machinery. Many of us who lived and worked and played in the missile field, a region roughly the size and shape of New Jersey, came to an uneasy acceptance of the missiles’ presence. Some missileers philosophized or painted murals inside their command bunkers.Īt Echo-Zero, north of Devils Lake, N.D., crew members passed time during long stretches underground by searching for a dozen toy mice hidden by an earlier crew.īefore launch center Hotel-Zero was demolished, a menu posted in the mess recorded a last crew supper: a choice of country-fried steak, fried fish and pasta primavera. Like the Cold War itself, the eastern Dakota missile field is now history, and the state is making it official: preserving one Minuteman III missile silo and one launch command center, like chunks of the Berlin Wall, as historical sites.Ĭome see the artwork scrawled on the walls of launch centers by young Air Force officers who were trained to turn keys and destroy cities, if ordered. They left ever so quietly, one by one, stripped of their nuclear warheads and headed not in long, angry arcs toward Moscow or Prague but aboard long trucks and bound for storage or redeployment in another place. It’s been 10 years since the last of “our” missiles left the underground silos scattered among the wheat and sunflower fields of eastern North Dakota. The site has been inactive since 1997.ĬOOPERSTOWN, N.D. Rich Nameth describes the operation of Oscar-Zero, the final missile launch control facility of the Minuteman III deterrent system in northeast North Dakota.
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