Grand Forks Air Force Base: Cold War Sentinel
Near Grand Forks, North Dakota
About sixteen miles west of downtown, Grand Forks Air Force Base sits on the open prairie in a location that made perfect strategic sense during the Cold War. When the base was established in nineteen fifty-seven, it was part of the Strategic Air Command's plan to disperse nuclear strike forces across the northern tier of the United States, keeping bombers and later missiles close to polar routes over the Arctic, which represented the shortest flight path between American bomber bases and Soviet targets.
During the nineteen sixties, Grand Forks became one of the most important intercontinental ballistic missile installations in the country. The base controlled a field of Minuteman missiles scattered in hardened silos across a vast swath of eastern North Dakota, covering thousands of square miles of farmland. At the height of the Cold War, one hundred fifty Minuteman missiles were under the operational authority of the Grand Forks missile wing, making this corner of North Dakota one of the most heavily nuclearly-armed patches of ground on earth. Farmers in eastern North Dakota knew they were growing wheat a few hundred yards from a Minuteman silo, and that their county was a primary Soviet target.
The bomber mission eventually consolidated elsewhere, but the missile mission continued until arms reduction treaties in the nineteen nineties eliminated the Grand Forks missile field under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as START. Today Grand Forks Air Force Base is the home of remotely piloted aircraft operations, particularly the MQ-Nine Reaper drone, a complete transformation from its Cold War nuclear role. The base remains one of Grand Forks's largest employers, with several thousand military and civilian personnel. The open North Dakota landscape that made it strategically useful in the nineteen fifties now makes it equally useful for testing and operating drone aircraft over uncontested airspace.
