Missile Town : Life Thrives in Shadow of Armageddon

Day in and day out--when the temperature climbs to 106 degrees or when gales drop the wind chill to minus 41, when fog shrouds the northern plains or now, when the green tips of the tulips are just pushing through the garden soil--whatever the conditions, teams of young Air Force officers fan out from the sprawling Strategic Air Command base 12 miles north of town.

In blue Chevy Suburbans, they wend their way over a prairie landscape dotted with hamlets and farms. North, beyond Lansford, pop. 294, and Donnybrook, pop. 139. South, beyond Makoti, pop. 199. Past school buses plying the county roads. Past the crossroads grocery that Benny Schimmelpfenning has operated for 50 years. Past fields of durum wheat, flax, barley and sunflowers.

Their destination: 15 reinforced concrete capsules buried in the cement-like hardpan that lies beneath North Dakota’s dusty topsoil.

The Ultimate Mission

Their ultimate mission: launching as many as 50 Minuteman 3 missiles on an apocalyptic 30-minute ride across Canada and over the Arctic to targets in the Soviet Union.

On duty or off, a day rarely passes without a reminder for the crews of the launching control capsules, for the maintenance teams that venture into the 87-foot underground silos where the missiles stand or for members of the omnipresent security force that they live on a peaceful plain which could, at any instant, become a nuclear combat zone.

For the people of Minot as well, the reminders are always there--in the graceful arc of an F-15 fighter-interceptor circling overhead, in the distant rumble of a B-52 bomber on takeoff at the Strategic Air Command’s nearby Minot Air Force Base. Or in the surprisingly inconspicuous 110-ton cement slab topping a missile silo behind a rectangle of wire fence on the edge of a wheat field.

21 Years Among Missiles

“I see them all the time,” said Lawrence Scheresky, a farmer who has lived among the missile tubes ever since the first Minuteman 1 became fully operational here in the northwest corner of North Dakota in 1964. “We think nothing of it. We’re so used to it, it’s just like a grove of trees.”

You cannot separate Minot--50 miles west of the geographical center of North America--from the missiles, from the bombers that stand always ready just off the runway at the air base, from the F-15 fighters poised to intercept attacking bombers.

When the B-52s shatter the prairie peace, their eight engines straining at takeoff, or when an oversize white trailer, accompanied by a phalanx of Air Force security police cars and a hovering helicopter, transports a missile down a country road, life in Minot does not come to a halt from the reminder that nuclear conflagration could be only minutes away.

“These are religious people here, and, if it’s their time to go, it’s time,” said Darla Schaeffer, an information specialist at the Minot public library. “The air base brings in a lot of jobs. People don’t think about it. I don’t think about it.”

Even at the air base, the more mundane concerns of simply keeping warm in winter and cool in summer are talked about more often than nuclear warfare. Said the Rev. Marvin Klemmer of St. Leo’s Roman Catholic Church: “I don’t think it has a negative effect, not negative, not a despairing effect.”

Still, he adds: “When you see that plane or see that missile, you say, ‘Heh, we’re right in the middle.’ You’re made to ask the question: What effect is this having on my life? You’re given a more visible reminder, more of a need to pray for peace.”

Sgt. Hubert Jefferson Christopher Burson does not deal with nuclear weapons; he puts water lines back in business when they have frozen and cracked at, say, minus 20 degrees.

But, he said: “I’d be less than a human being if I didn’t think the Hiroshima thoughts, the killing and all.”

Each of the 15 launching control capsules sits in the middle of a field of 10 widely separated missile silos. The fields of control capsules and silos form a rough letter “C” around Minot, with the closest missile about 35 miles from town, the most distant 90 miles away.

The capsules are connected to each missile by buried electronic cables--umbilical cords that can carry instructions to the 60-foot weapons. The silos, each at least three miles from its capsule, lie unattended in the austere prairie. But the missiles are ever-ready, guidance systems running, auxiliary power generators humming.

Crews Work 24 Hours

At each capsule, the two young Air Force officers who make up a missile launching crew work 24-hour shifts, monitoring control panels, communications lines and remote security systems.

The officers read. They play chess and cribbage. They take advantage of fancy antennas and tune in Radio Moscow. They study for master’s degrees through a special University of North Dakota program. They eat meals prepared by Air Force chefs in an above-ground command post. They take turns sleeping.

And they wait--wait to validate a coded message, to unlock a safe holding two metal keys, to turn the keys in spring-loaded locks and hold them in position for five seconds, and, by doing that, send the missiles soaring on their way.

‘It Does Not Obsess You’

“We don’t go out there and stare at the key,” 1st Lt. John H. Burling said. “It doesn’t put us in a trance. We know where our mission is. You think about it, but it does not obsess your life.”

That mission is one of the constants of life here.

The other is the winter cold, the not-just-numbing-but-very-deadly cold, which can shatter an aluminum pipe dropped carelessly on the ground, which can freeze human flesh in minutes, which is often so bitter that maintenance personnel travel in pairs for safety and are forbidden to work outside more than five or 10 minutes at a time.

Minot’s civic boosters are proud of their air base and proud of their weather. Visit Minot for more than a day and chances are someone will give you a lapel button that reads: “-41 KEEPS OUT THE RIFF-RAFF.”

“In the winter, we’ve got the ice to contend with and, in the spring, we’ve got all that water,” said Col. Dion W. Turner, flying in an Iroquois helicopter 325 feet over fields where melting snow had created small ponds. “In the summer, we’ve got dust storms that’ll blast you. In the fall--well, we’ve got no fall. It lasts 20 minutes.”

Nevertheless, the Strategic Air Command found Minot irresistible when, 30 years ago, a group of residents entered the bidding for a base in western North Dakota. The residents came up with $50,000 to buy 5,000 acres and offered it to the Air Force for free. It is just about as far from any Soviet missile-carrying submarine as you can get in America.

“In those days, Minot was a real booster town,” said Carl Flagstad, city editor of the Minot Daily News. “They figured they could do anything.”

And so, eventually, SAC came to the farmland around Minot, with its missiles finding homes spread out over 8,500 square miles, an area roughly the size of Massachusetts. With the weapons came 5,900 military personnel and, with them, 7,600 dependents.

The missiles of Minot are the most modern intercontinental missiles now in the U.S. arsenal. With sophisticated computers, it takes only minutes to insert new targets into their guidance systems.

Each missile is equipped with three MK-12A nuclear warhead “re-entry vehicles,” the Air Force’s most modern, said Col. Christopher I. Branch, the commander of the 91st Strategic Missile Wing. “We’re really proud of that.”

Pride plays a big role in motivating members of the missile launching crews, who must sit in their bunkers for 24-hour stretches, knowing that they have the final responsibility for unleashing a warhead that can produce an explosive yield at least 15 times the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

“It doesn’t fit with the stereotype of a daring activity,” said Lt. Col. Richard Hughes, a clinical psychologist at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. “Sitting in a hole isn’t daring. It demands a lot, but it isn’t daring.” But, he said, the crews “are proud of it.”

Changing Crews

On entering the capsule, the two officers are briefed by the team they are relieving, reviewing the status of their missiles, any security problems, conditions in the areas through which their missiles would fly. Then yesterday’s crew leaves.

“Once the blast doors close, it’s you and your partner,” said 1st Lt. David Hafich, 25, of Fairfield, Calif. “Crew partners can know more about each other than a husband or wife.”

Col. Branch added: “Missile guys perceive themselves as a special breed of cat. We’re not macabre in any sense. Maybe that makes us a little less flashy. We don’t have the same dash and verve the fighter pilots have, the death-defying aces.”

That, he said, does not mean the missile combat crews are nonchalant about their mission.

‘We’re Just Citizens’

“But it’s not something you dwell on day-to-day, no more than anybody who gets in the car thinks about it being the most dangerous transportation system,” he said. “We worry about whether schools are good, whether the car is running. We’re just citizens. The pragmatic, pedestrian aspects of life intrude more than any ethereal thoughts about the responsibility we have.”

But Brig. Gen. Samuel H. Swart Jr., commander of the 57th Air Division, which encompasses Minot Air Force Base, says: “Within some limits having to do with the age and maturity of the individual--I doubt that there is anyone involved in this command who has not, at some time or another, and with some frequency, thought about the (moral) question” posed by nuclear weapons.

Moral Compunctions

Those thoughts are forced on the missile crews during their training at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. “They really talk about all the aspects,” said Col. John Duncan, a former missile combat crew member who now supervises the younger officers. “At that point, they are asked to sign a statement saying they have no moral compunctions” against following an order to launch the missiles.

“There are a few, not many, who can’t make that commitment,” he said.

Airman Joe Orr, 28, grew up around the hardware of the nuclear age in Great Falls, Mont., home of SAC’s Malmstrom Air Force Base. Now, he pumps JP4 jet fuel into the B-52s and aerial tankers that fly out of Minot. He has a simple philosophy: “Anything that bases here, I fill it.”

The Air Force maintains what it considers a strict program to weed out anyone who is either emotionally or physically unfit to work around nuclear weapons.

An officer or airman going through a divorce would almost automatically be relieved of his duties until commanding officers were convinced that any emotional distress he was undergoing would not effect his work.

The taking of medications--often anything stronger than aspirin--that could impair “mental or physical acuity” also is a reason for relieving an officer or airman. Medical authorities said that squadron leaders are often notified by health personnel within 15 minutes that a prescription has been dispensed.

Drugs and Alcohol

Use of illegal drugs would bring permanent decertification from any job involving nuclear weapons; alcohol abuse brings a temporary suspension.

Although participation in an anti-drug-abuse program has dropped since 1982, a trend the Air Force attributes to reduced drug use as a result of fear of eventual discharge from the service, enrollment in the alcohol program has doubled, to 213 from 106, over the same period.

“I don’t think weather is a factor” in abuse of drugs and alcohol, Lt. Kenneth Nelson said, but “a lot of people use it as an excuse.”

A few weeks ago, Canada geese, which share the skies with the bombers in the autumn and spring, began returning north along their age-old flyway.

“I like to see the geese,” said maintainence chief Turner, a transplanted Texan whose face was creased and red from one more northern winter. “As hard as the winter is, they tell you there’s renewed life.”

In the deepest winter, when the northern lights shimmer across the sky, light from street lamps pierces the night in vertical shafts, focused up and down by ice crystals in the air. When the wind comes down out of the north, it picks up loose dirt, whips it into the falling snow and creates a dark sooty mixture people here call “snirt.”

But now, when the morning low may be 10 degrees, the lights are pinpoints across the base, visible 10 miles away in the crackling clear air just before dawn.

The base commanders have set temperature limits for outdoor work: When the wind chill drops to minus 65 degrees, all but the most essential outdoor tasks are halted. “You work for a little while and then you go hug the heater,” said Staff Sgt. David Hull, member of a bomber maintenance crew.

The crews are issued about 45 pounds of outdoor gear: insulated parkas and trousers, thermal underwear, wool gloves that fit inside wool and leather mittens, leather and wool face shields, quarter-inch thick wool boot liners and rubber boots into which an insulating layer of air can be pumped.

Summer an Elusive Concept

Summertime? In December or January or even March, it’s an elusive concept here. But there are reminders: The lobby of the child care center, bright and open under a skylight, is decorated with scenes of green forests and waterfalls. And a “snow pitch” softball tournament was held on Jan. 19, a day the temperature dropped to minus 25 and drifts on the ball field were three-feet high.

The air base has a golf course, too, and Gen. Swart is an avid golfer. His last round was in early September.

When will he play again? He hesitated. Remembering that the course opened for the summer last year on April 15--nine days before the season’s worst storm blew across the Dakotas--he summoned the voice of a man refusing to divulge top-secret information and said:

“I can’t tell you that.”