The Minuteman Fields

Somewhere beneath the grassland east of this city, inside a hardened concrete silo, a Minuteman Three intercontinental ballistic missile sits on what the Air Force calls full, constant alert. There are one hundred and fifty of them within range of this point, dispersed across nine thousand six hundred square miles in Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado. Each is controlled from a Missile Alert Facility embedded in the terrain, staffed around the clock by crews on rotation from Warren Air Force Base.

The missile age arrived here in nineteen fifty-nine, when Warren became the first fully operational ICBM base in the Air Force inventory, equipped then with Atlas rockets. The Peacekeeper missile followed beginning in nineteen eighty-six and was decommissioned in two thousand and five. The Minuteman Three is the current weapon, and the Ninetieth Missile Wing has operated it continuously from this location.

What distinguishes the Wyoming fields from other missile basing arrangements is the scale relative to the population around them. Cheyenne proper has roughly sixty-five thousand residents. The silos fan out in every direction across land that looks, from a car window or an overpass, like any other high plains landscape: grassy, dry, punctuated by fence lines and the occasional ranch road.

The presence of that deterrent infrastructure in this particular landscape is one of those facts that the drive itself tends not to disclose. The missile alert facilities are marked on no tourist signage. The only signs out there read: Restricted Area. Use of Deadly Force Authorized.