A Wyoming Ranch Wife Fights The Bomb, but Resistance Has Its Cost

As Lindi Kirkbride kneeled in her garden to admire the first flowers of spring, a black shadow passed overhead, blotting out the sun.

“It’s them,” she said, not even bothering to look up.

“Them” was an Air Force helicopter that stuck out like a big bug against a bright blue sky.

The chopper was patrolling a few of the 12,600 square miles that the 90th Missile Wing of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command oversees in southeastern Wyoming, northeastern Colorado and western Nebraska.

But on that sunny day, its flight over some of Harding-Kirkbride Ranch’s 66,000 acres was a reminder that just beyond the gentle hills surrounding Lindi’s home the world’s deadliest weapons are poised beneath the prairie.

“Spiritually, morally, ethically, I’m against the MX,” said Lindi, 39. “When I drive by those three MX sites on our land, I force myself to think about them, and I pray. I pray that God has angels on them, holding the missiles down.”

Each MX is fitted with 10 “independently targetable” nuclear warheads carrying the equivalent of 300 kilotons of TNT apiece--more than 20 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. By year’s end, the Air Force plans to have completed deployment of 50 MXs in silos buried 80 feet deep on the Wyoming plateau.

In addition to the MXs, the 90th Missile Wing headquartered at F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, 35 miles southwest of the Kirkbride ranch, maintains 150 Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missiles scattered in the 12,600-square-mile corner where Wyoming meets Nebraska and Colorado, an area larger than Belgium.

Ever since America’s first ICBM, the Atlas, was deployed in 1959, Lindi’s family and neighbors have lived with The Bomb.

“The city of Cheyenne was so proud to be a part of the country’s new defense system that an addition was made to local road signs: ‘Welcome to Wyoming, Home of Frontier Days and the Atlas Missile,’ ” according to “Peacekeepers of the Plains,” the title of the missile wing’s official history and also its nickname.

No one opposed the ICBMs. City fathers welcomed the revenue and jobs. Ranchers gladly sold land for missile sites and were happy to see new roads.

When the Atlas was declared obsolete, it was replaced with the Minuteman series. Then came the MX.

“We were so naive, so silly,” Lindi recalled. “I didn’t know diddly-squat about this issue. I suspected I didn’t want to know; it was too complex. I felt powerless.”

A fledgling group calling itself Wyoming Against MX held its first meeting in January, 1981.

“I finally got off the fence,” Lindi said. “But even then I knew I didn’t have to win anything; I just had to do the right thing.”

From that moment, nothing was the same for the close-knit Kirkbride clan, founded in Wyoming five generations ago by a Scot who arrived with $5 and a rocking chair.

Lindi, a Texan who met her husband, Alan, at the University of Wyoming, where she majored in social work and he studied agriculture, became a spokeswoman for Wyoming Against MX. She testified at hearings and wrote letters to newspapers. She went to the Soviet Union with a group called Ranchers for Peace. This wife, mother of three, homemaker, churchgoer, guest on “Nightline,” came home from Moscow a pariah.

“Nobody asked me a single question about my trip,” she said quietly. “The local paper crucified me, people called me a communist, accused me of being like Jane Fonda.”

Party invitations from the conservative, patriotic Cheyenne Establishment dried up. Her children told her, “Mom, you’re weird sometimes.” Relations became increasingly strained between Lindi and her husband’s family.

“I told my whole family, ‘If I can’t get along with you, I have no business going to the Soviet Union, talking to the Russians,’ ” she said. “ ‘Therefore, I will continue to try to communicate with you even though sometimes it is hurtful and painful.’ ”

There were blowups.

“We discuss all this in our family and we disagree,” Shirley Kirkbride, Lindi’s mother-in-law, said tactfully. “But we all love each other. . . . We love Lindi. She’s never been anything but gracious. She’s respectful and she studies a lot about it. She doesn’t just lash out emotionally. This is her thing, and I support her right to do it.”

To the windowsill above her kitchen sink, Lindi has taped a poem she reads daily.

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.”

The first MX was deployed in December, 1986.

“When I heard the news, I felt like I’d been kicked in the teeth. I wanted to throw up,” she recalled.

That Christmas, she placed a wreath at the missile site 4 miles west of her house and began fighting a new battle.

The Pentagon wants to deploy “Rail Garrison,” a mobile defense system that would, in times of international crisis, shuttle 50 MXs around the country aboard 25 trains to confuse the enemy. The Air Force wants the system based at Warren AFB.

“We’ve come a long way,” said an ever optimistic Lindi. “We may stop it this time.”

Awaiting Orders

Meanwhile, the helicopters fly overhead and armed guards in military vans patrol the ranch’s gravel roads. Beneath the ground, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in bunkers built to withstand nuclear fallout, young officers sit trained and ready, awaiting orders to launch.

“Sometimes, especially in the spring, I look out over the valley at the new grass and the cattle and I try to visualize what the prairie was like before the missiles came. That’s what I wanted to pass on to my children,” Lindi said.

“Instead, I see what we get when we don’t trust one another, when we hate. We get an imperfect, deadly world. People say we can’t go back, we have to accept this monster, this mutant.

“My vision is to say, ‘No, we don’t.’ ”