F.E. Warren: The Army Post That Became a Nuclear Arsenal
Near Cheyenne, Wyoming
Three miles west of Cheyenne, Francis E. Warren Air Force Base holds a distinction that has nothing to do with aircraft: it is the oldest continuously active military installation in the United States Air Force, and its story spans from cavalry forts to intercontinental nuclear missiles.
The installation was established in eighteen sixty-seven as Fort D. A. Russell, named for Civil War general David Allen Russell, a cavalry post at the edge of the Wyoming Territory. It guarded the construction of the transcontinental railroad through Cheyenne, hosted the Ninth Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers, and eventually grew into a major infantry training base. In nineteen thirty, it was renamed for Francis E. Warren, a Wyoming senator and Medal of Honor recipient from the Civil War who was also the father-in-law of General John Pershing, commander of American forces in the First World War.
The transformation came in nineteen fifty-eight. F.E. Warren became the Air Force's first ICBM installation, receiving Atlas missiles as America's nuclear strategy shifted from manned bombers to ballistic missiles. The logic was simple and terrifying: a missile buried in a concrete silo in Wyoming could reach Moscow in thirty minutes. Manned bombers took hours. Missiles could not be shot down on their way out.
Atlas gave way to Minuteman I in the early nineteen sixties, then to Minuteman III in the nineteen seventies. Today Warren's ninetieth Missile Wing operates one hundred and fifty Minuteman Three missiles spread across roughly nine thousand six hundred square miles of Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska, one hundred and fifty warheads, each carrying the explosive equivalent of roughly twenty Hiroshima bombs, sitting in silos within an hour's drive of where you are right now.
Warren is now scheduled to be the first base to receive the new LGM-thirty-five Sentinel missile as the Minuteman Three retires after sixty years of deterrence, the cavalry post turned nuclear arsenal updating itself again.
