Minuteman Missiles on the South Dakota Prairie
A traveler crossing western South Dakota in the 1960s and after would have passed them without knowing it. Off the section roads, behind chain-link fences in the middle of pastures and wheat fields, sat low concrete pads with antennas and a flat lid set into the ground. There was rarely anyone in sight. Beneath each of those lids, in a hardened tube reaching dozens of feet into the earth, stood a Minuteman missile carrying a nuclear warhead, kept on alert and ready to launch on a few minutes’ notice. The name was apt.
The missiles came to the prairie as the bomber age gave way to the missile age. The great B-36 bombers that had flown from the base east of Rapid City were already obsolete by the late 1950s, and the Air Force was looking for a weapon that could not be caught on the ground or shot down on the way to its target. The solution was the intercontinental ballistic missile, buried in silos far apart from one another so that no single attack could destroy them all. The open, lightly populated country around the Black Hills was, by the cold logic of the planners, close to ideal.
A weapon spread across the land
Beginning in the early 1960s, crews fanned out across the ranchland to build the fields. The work involved hundreds of separate sites, each silo connected to an underground launch control center where two officers stood watch in shifts that ran around the clock. The missiles were grouped into squadrons, and the whole network spread over thousands of square miles of farm and grazing country, tied to the base at Rapid City and to the larger command that ran the nation’s land-based deterrent.
For the ranchers whose land now held a missile site, the arrangement was peculiar and permanent. The government took small parcels, fenced them, and maintained them, and life went on around them. Cattle grazed up to the wire. Children grew up knowing that the fenced square down the road held a weapon of almost unimaginable destruction, and most of the time gave it no more thought than they gave the grain elevator. The missiles were a quiet presence, manned but unmanned, dangerous but dormant, woven into the everyday landscape in a way that later generations would find hard to picture.
The long watch
The crews who pulled alert lived a strange routine. They drove out to remote control centers, descended into capsules buried beneath the prairie, and waited through long shifts for orders that, if they ever came, would mean the world above had ended. The training was relentless and the discipline exacting, because the entire value of the system rested on the certainty that it would work and on the equal certainty, the planners hoped, that it would never have to.
The Minuteman fields outlasted the Soviet Union that they were built to deter. Through the 1990s, as the Cold War wound down, arms agreements led to the deactivation of much of the force in western South Dakota. Crews pulled the missiles, and contractors blew up the empty silos and filled them with rubble, leaving little but a disturbed patch of ground to mark where each had stood. The land returned, mostly, to the ranchers.
Not all of it vanished. One launch control center and one silo were preserved and turned into the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site near the Badlands, so that visitors could see what had been hidden for decades. It is an odd thing to memorialize, a weapon that was never used and whose success was measured entirely by its idleness. But for a generation of people in this part of the country, the missiles were a fact of home, a buried presence in familiar fields, and the preserved site keeps the memory of that long, quiet watch from disappearing along with the silos.