Malmstrom Air Force Base

The fields around Great Falls look like ordinary Montana wheat country. Beneath them, scattered across an area of more than twenty-three thousand square miles, bigger than the state of West Virginia, sit one hundred fifty intercontinental ballistic missiles, each carrying a warhead many times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This base controls all of them.

Malmstrom began in nineteen forty-two as Great Falls Army Air Base, a training facility for heavy bomber crews in the northern tier. Its position mattered: it was the staging point closest to the great-circle route across the North Pole toward the Soviet Union. That geographic logic didn't go away when the war ended. In December of nineteen fifty-nine, the Air Force selected Malmstrom as the host site for Wing One of the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile program, the first such wing in the country.

The first Minuteman missile arrived by train on July twenty-third, nineteen sixty-two, and was placed in its underground launch facility four days later. By October of that year, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the initial flight of missiles at Malmstrom was placed on what the Air Force called Alpha Alert. President Kennedy referred to these Montana missiles as his ace in the hole.

The base's Cold War history has an appendix that the Air Force has never fully explained. On the morning of March twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-seven, a security guard at one of Malmstrom's launch facilities reported a glowing reddish-orange object hovering over the front gate. According to the deputy commander on duty that morning, Captain Robert Salas, ten Minuteman missiles simultaneously went offline within seconds. Each entered a no-go condition, inoperable for launch. No equipment was damaged. The Air Force later attributed the shutdowns to a nearby test of an electromagnetic pulse simulator, though it has never established any connection between that test and the object Salas described. Salas spent decades afterward testifying to congressional staff and before public hearings that what he witnessed was a craft of unknown origin. The Air Force's position remains that no connection between the object and the shutdown was ever established.

Today the three-hundred-forty-first Missile Wing at Malmstrom is one of three wings operating the Minuteman Three, the last land-based ICBM in the American arsenal. The silos are still out there, unmarked on most maps, beneath the Montana wheat.