Minuteman Missile: The Capsule Beneath the Prairie

Thirty-one feet below the South Dakota prairie, behind a heavy blast door, two Air Force officers sat at a launch control console through long alert shifts. This was the Delta One Launch Control Facility, one of fifteen such capsules that commanded a field of one hundred fifty Minuteman missiles spread across the far western end of the state.

The missiles themselves were in unmanned silos dug into ranch land nearby. Delta Nine is one of those silos, and you can look down into it from a viewing window at the National Historic Site here. The missile, a Minuteman Two, stands on its launch pad behind a concrete door in the ground. The warhead it once carried has been removed. The launch keys have been taken out. But the structure is otherwise unchanged from the years when it was loaded and ready.

The South Dakota missile field was built in the early nineteen sixties for the Ellsworth Air Force Base missile wing. The missiles could fly over the North Pole and reach a target in roughly thirty minutes. That thirty-minute window defined much of American foreign policy for three decades.

The two officers in the capsule did not have to want to launch. They had to be willing to follow a valid order if one came. The psychological screening to arrive at that willingness was rigorous. The protocols that ensured one person could not act alone were carefully designed. And the missiles sat there, every day, for thirty years.

Congress designated the site as the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site in November of nineteen ninety-nine. The Cold War had been over for nearly a decade. The missiles in the field had been removed under the terms of arms reduction agreements. What remains is a very quiet place that asks a very large question.