A Countdown, a Rumble in the Earth and a Final Blast

Steve Marback has come for a last look around this peaceful prairie, a place where for three decades the unthinkable was always lurking just beneath the surface.

The Air Force sergeant wades into a yellow canola field swaying in the summer breeze, and the countdown begins.

“Three, two, one . . . “

The earth rumbles with what seems like long-suppressed fury. Plumes of dirty brown smoke smudge the sky. A small part of America’s nuclear arsenal has been blown into history.

To Marback, this stretch of soil was his workplace.

To farmers around here, this was a missile site, ground zero if the Soviet Union’s equally fearsome array of nuclear-tipped birds ever flew across the ice cap to strike at America’s heartland.

Every week these days, the Air Force is destroying 90-foot underground missile silos in a corner of the Great Plains that once stored enough nuclear warheads to ignite the inferno of Hiroshima thousands of times over.

The last missiles were pulled two years ago. Now their homes are being demolished, the final dismantling of Cold War hardware that began several years ago in South Dakota and Missouri--in accordance with a U.S.-Soviet treaty.

“It’s sad--but it’s happy in another sense,” Marback says, his smartly polished boots crunching gravel as he eyes the 110-ton silo door that remains unscathed despite the blast.

“We did our jobs,” he adds. “We did our jobs very well. The Cold War is over. And we never had to use these. That’s deterrence.”

The land that was sold to the government will be offered to farmers again. The swords are gone, the plowshare shall return.

It is the end of an era too for Marback.

The North Dakota boy who grew up seeing missile silos as he traveled to his grandparents’ farm became a missileer deep in the Ozarks, then came home and, as a technical sergeant, maintained the Minuteman--including this site, L-19.

He made sure the generators were working, the right parts were oiled, almost as if he were tuning up a car. But he never lost sight of the missiles’ awesome power.

“It didn’t scare me,” he says. “I understood it. It was what I was trained for. If it ever did come to that, boy,” he pauses, “What could you do? We hoped our leaders were smarter than that--and they were.”

Many Missiles Gone, but Many Remain

The Great Plains is a land of endless sky, one-stoplight towns, two-lane blacktops and nuclear missiles. Hundreds are gone, though hundreds remain.

Missiles were spread across tens of thousands of square miles from the Canadian border to the center of the country. Missouri. Montana. Colorado. Nebraska. Wyoming. South Dakota.

But no state had more Minuteman missiles than North Dakota.

The 300 missiles attached to the two Air Force bases--Grand Forks and Minot--gave folks here bragging rights.

“We would have been No. 3 as far as nuclear powerhouses go if we would have seceded from the union,” says Merlan Paaverud, a preservation officer at the State Historical Society of North Dakota who is working to make sure no one forgets the state’s role in the Cold War.

Col. Harold Radetsky put it another way when Grand Forks’ missile wing became operational: There is “more power in this area than in any other single part of this planet.”

The date was Dec. 7, 1966--the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

America was still jittery from the Cuban missile crisis four years earlier when the world seemed to teeter on the brink of nuclear war in a showdown over Soviet missiles 90 miles away.

People built bomb shelters, stocking them with food and water. Schoolkids practiced duck-and-cover air raid drills. And moviegoers laughed nervously at “Dr. Strangelove,” Hollywood’s screwball version of the road to nuclear holocaust, with military madmen named Jack D. Ripper and Maj. T.J. “King” Kong.

In real life, huge trailers rumbled down these roads with their 79,000-pound cargo. The 60-foot missiles were planted amid acres of wheat and barley, concealed beneath amber waves of grain.

The Plains were an ideal spot for weapons that could travel at 15,000 mph--capable of reaching Moscow in half an hour.

“It was best to place the missile sites as deep in the country as you could,” says James Mesco, technical sergeant and historian for the Space Warfare Center in Colorado. “It allowed for long reaction time to ensure that, yes, the threat is there and we can retaliate because we have the time before the first sites might be hit to launch back.”

And the sites needed to be spaced so no incoming Soviet missile could take out more than one.

Places like Steele County, home to Luverne, population 41, were ideal: It has only three people per square mile--and at one time had 14 missiles.

But decades have passed and the chill is gone. Now Russians eat Big Macs in the shadow of the Kremlin. And a large part of the Minuteman force in the Plains has been removed to comply with the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

About 300 intercontinental ballistic missiles have been removed and silos destroyed in Missouri and South Dakota. About 70 of 150 Grand Forks silos have been imploded; the rest will be done by the end of next year.

After the blasts, a ditch is dug and left open for 90 days for verification by Russian satellites.

Though about 450 Minuteman missiles have been dismantled, about 500 remain, including 150 at Minot. North Dakota is still keen on becoming the site for a national defense missile shield.

But there also is a sense that a moment in history has passed.

“In the 19th century, it was the cavalry that left North Dakota,” says Al Berger, a history professor at the University of North Dakota. “There were a whole string of forts up and down the Missouri River. Once that purpose was over, they left. That was true of the cavalry. Now it’s true of the missiles.”

*

The elevator chugs slowly, slowly as it descends 45 feet.

Welcome to Oscar-Zero, one of 15 command centers that controlled the 150 Grand Forks missiles. From the outside, this cream-colored building looks like a big house on the prairie--surrounded by an 8-foot barbed wire fence with a small brown O-0 sign.

Below, it is a world of its own.

Entombed in concrete and bathed in artificial light, the bunker was designed to withstand a nuclear blast. It has a suspended floor. Four 1,200-pound cylindrical shock absorbers tethered to the floor and ceiling by heavy-duty cable. An eight-ton door that opens only from the inside. An escape hatch equipped with shovel to dig your way to the parking lot five stories above--just in case.

And a red chair on tracks with seat belts--also just in case.

Just above the ‘60s-style console with a rotary dial and buttons for each of 10 missiles it controlled is a red box that says “Entry Restricted.” It held the two keys that would be used--simultaneously--to launch a missile.

Despite the secrecy, anyone could dial-up the command center: It had a listed phone number.

Like other centers, Oscar-Zero had a theme: Its mural features Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street strutting with an American eagle, both wearing patches with the words “Kremlin Krushers.”

The center operated for 10,950 “alerts,” a term with Cold War echoes that meant nothing more than 24-hour shifts.

The last alert was July 17, 1997.

Then Oscar-Zero shut down.