Offutt and the Cold War in the Heartland

A few miles south of Omaha, on a flat stretch of land along the Missouri River, sits Offutt Air Force Base. For more than four decades of the Cold War, Offutt was the most important single military installation in the United States, and possibly in the world, because it was the headquarters of Strategic Air Command.

Strategic Air Command, known as SAC, was established in nineteen forty-six and moved its headquarters to Offutt in nineteen forty-eight. SAC controlled the American nuclear bomber force, and later the intercontinental ballistic missile fleet that extended across missile silos in Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, and South Dakota. At any given moment during the Cold War, SAC maintained a significant portion of the American nuclear arsenal on airborne alert, meaning bombers loaded with nuclear weapons were always in the air, always within range of their targets, waiting for orders that the command hoped would never come.

General Curtis LeMay built SAC into what he described as the most powerful military force in human history. He was not making a modest claim, but the force he built was real. The command center at Offutt was hardened against nuclear blast, sunk into the earth, staffed around the clock by people who rehearsed the end of the world on a regular basis.

The base sits on land that was previously Fort Crook, a frontier Army post established in eighteen ninety. The same ground that once housed cavalry soldiers who policed the western plains later held the targeting computers for thousands of nuclear warheads. Nebraska, geographically central to the continent, found itself geographically central to the strategy of mutual destruction that defined the second half of the twentieth century.

Strategic Air Command was inactivated in nineteen ninety-two. Its successor, United States Strategic Command, remains at Offutt today.