Minot Air Force Base: The Arctic Fortress
Near Minot, North Dakota
About thirteen miles north of Minot's downtown sits one of the most powerful military installations in the world, though you would barely know it from the flat farmland surrounding it. Minot Air Force Base is the only base in the United States that hosts two of the three legs of the nuclear triad simultaneously: intercontinental ballistic missiles in hardened silos scattered across the surrounding prairies, and B-fifty-two Stratofortress bombers on the flight line. In the Air Force's own slogan, there is no better, a phrase that has become something of a sardonic local identity.
The base was established in nineteen fifty-seven during the early Cold War buildup, chosen for its northern location within striking range of the Soviet Union and its relative distance from populated coasts. The fifth Bomb Wing flies the B-fifty-two, a design so enduring that the aircraft in service today were built in the early nineteen sixties, and airmen are occasionally flying planes their grandfathers flew. The ninety-first Missile Wing controls roughly one hundred and fifty Minuteman Third intercontinental ballistic missiles buried in launch facilities spread across fifteen thousand square miles of North Dakota prairie. Each silo is operated by two-person crews in hardened underground capsules, part of a system designed during the Kennedy administration as a survivable second-strike deterrent.
The base employs roughly twelve thousand military and civilian personnel and is among the largest employers in North Dakota. Its presence has made Minot something of a company town for the Air Force, with housing developments, schools, and businesses oriented around the base's rhythms of deployment and return.
For anyone driving north out of Minot, the occasional security camera on a fence post in the middle of a wheat field marks the perimeter of a missile launch facility, a reminder that the Cold War infrastructure is still very much operational beneath the prairie.
