F.E. Warren Air Force Base: From Fort to Nuclear Arsenal
Near Cheyenne, Wyoming
Just west of Cheyenne sits the oldest continuously active military installation in the United States Air Force. What is now Francis E. Warren Air Force Base began its life in eighteen sixty-seven as Fort David Allen Russell, built to protect Union Pacific workers pushing the transcontinental railroad across Wyoming Territory. The railroad is long finished, but the base never closed. In the Cold War it found a second mission that made it one of the most strategically significant parcels of ground in the world.
The installation was renamed in nineteen thirty in honor of Francis E. Warren, a Medal of Honor recipient and Wyoming's first state governor. The transformation that would define it came in nineteen fifty-seven, when the Department of Defense selected Warren as the location for the first intercontinental ballistic missile base in the United States. That announcement set in motion a construction project of extraordinary scale.
Beginning in nineteen sixty, Atlas missiles were scattered across the ranching country of southeast Wyoming, southwest Nebraska, and northeast Colorado, the first American ICBMs on operational alert. Between nineteen sixty-three and nineteen sixty-five the Atlas weapons were replaced by Minuteman I missiles, and by the early nineteen seventies Minuteman III missiles had taken their place across two hundred hardened silos spread over roughly eight thousand three hundred square miles of plains.
The math of that deployment is worth pausing on. Two hundred missile silos, dispersed so that a single Soviet warhead could destroy only one. Each armed. Each on continuous alert. The empty-looking prairie you drive through east of here is one of the most heavily armed landscapes on earth, though almost nothing marks the silos from the road.
Today the base remains home to the Ninetieth Missile Wing, still operating one hundred fifty Minuteman III ICBMs. The Warren ICBM and Heritage Museum on base tells the full story, from the cavalry barracks of the eighteen sixties to the nuclear calculus of the twenty-first century.
