Grand Forks Air Force Base: Standing Guard on the Northern Tier
Near Grand Forks, North Dakota
Grand Forks Air Force Base opened in nineteen fifty-seven at the height of the Cold War, chosen specifically because its position on the northern Great Plains put it on the most direct route between the Soviet Union and American cities. If Soviet bombers crossed the Arctic, they would come this way. The base's job was to make sure they never arrived unchallenged.
By nineteen sixty-two, the base had received its defining mission: nuclear-armed B-fifty-two Stratofortress bombers, capable of flying deep into Soviet territory with atomic payloads. These aircraft participated in Operation Chrome Dome, the Strategic Air Command's program that kept nuclear-armed bombers on continuous airborne alert around the clock. The logic was terrible but coherent: if Soviet missiles destroyed American air bases in a first strike, bombers already in the air could still retaliate. The planes circling the skies above North Dakota were part of a deterrence system that made the entire Cold War feel perpetually on the edge.
By nineteen sixty-four, construction began on missile silos across the surrounding countryside. One hundred fifty Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile silos eventually dotted the North Dakota plains, fields of wheat and fields of fire, existing side by side. By nineteen ninety-eight, the last nuclear missiles had been removed from their silos, and the bombers had quietly gone off alert years before.
Today the base has reinvented itself. Its long tanker mission ended in twenty eleven, and it is now home to the Three Hundred Nineteenth Reconnaissance Wing.
