Rumble, Boom and Blast End Plains’ Cold-War Era

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 icecap 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.”

A Nuclear Powerhouse

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

Missiles were sown 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 ensure 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. Schoolchildren 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 a half-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 have been dismantled, about 500 remain, including 150 at Minot. And North Dakota is still keen on playing a part in the national defense--it hopes to be 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.”

‘Kremlin Krushers’

The elevator chugs slowly, slowly as it descends 45 feet into the earth.

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.

Down 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 airplane-style 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 with a dime 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 shoulder 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.

Officials hope to make this command center in Cooperstown a museum that would be a stop on a “Cold War Heritage Corridor.”

One museum already is planned in South Dakota. A silo and launch center from Ellsworth Air Force Base have been preserved as part of the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site that should be open in about five years.

The idea has not been without controversy. Anti-nuclear groups have objected. When project manager Marianne Mills spoke last year in North Dakota, protesters pelted her with origami peace cranes.

But Mills says there is reason to preserve this history.

“This will remind people of the power there is in a nuclear war,” she says, “and the collective wisdom man has shown in not using it.”

There’s a curiosity, too, about the invisible warriors who defended the nation, says Paaverud, the historian.

“People have seen ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and ‘Fail Safe,’ and the idea of sitting down in a hole and waiting for this to happen is”--he searches for the right word--”intriguing.”

Col. James Mueller, a former missileer in North Dakota, remembers it another way:

“It’s probably the most boring job there is,” he says, recalling how there was nothing to watch on the 9-inch black-and-white television after Johnny Carson’s show was over. He earned a master’s degree during that time.

And he never underestimated the gravity of his mission.

“We understood what our job was,” Mueller says. “We didn’t sit around and discuss whether we were going to war tomorrow.”

Living With the Bomb

Not everyone wanted a missile in the backyard.

But most people learned to stop worrying and live with the bomb.

“After a couple of years, they were there just like a mosquito--no big concern,” says Don Haugen, mayor of Langdon, 17 miles from the Canadian border.

North Dakota is a conservative, pro-military state, and the missiles made some people feel safer.

Others, though, felt as if they had a bull’s-eye on their rooftops.

Russell Lorenz, who owns land next to an imploded silo, had his own theories about what would happen if the Soviets attacked.

“Our missiles would survive,” he says, “but we wouldn’t.”

Still, as the silos disappear, locals are ambivalent.

“Most of them were very patriotic,” says Mueller, deputy chief of the Mission Teams of the U.S. Air Force and the last operations commander at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.

“When they started pulling the missiles from Whiteman, a lot of the farmers were reluctant to see them go,” he says. “They saw them as their missiles. They had grown up with them, and there was a sense we had taken something from them.”

The missiles did bring tangible benefits: roads and bridges paid for by the government, business for rural electric cooperatives, small-town shops and cafes.

But still, some folks ponder the river of money poured into the arsenal that was buried out here.

“It was one hell of an expense,” says Gene Wolsy, who laid cables for missiles. “Now they’re blowing it up. All that wasted material. That’s apparently what they had to do at the time. Without them, the Russians would have had the upper hand, I guess.”

Missile Silos, Grain Silos

Back in Luverne, T.J. Sando, 15, watches the implosion of L-19 from atop a silver grain silo. He leaves with a souvenir: a wire-encased bulb from the generator hatch.

To him, the Cold War is just a phrase in a history book, but when his grandmother gripes about the millions spent, he replies: “Well, we didn’t get blown up, did we?”

Soon the crews will head to another silo.

Haugen, the mayor, is eager for the job to be done.

“If we can get rid of the fences and the gravel, get rid of the scars,” he says, “we’ll be North Dakota again. We protected the country. Now we can feed the country again.”

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On the Net:

www.grandforks.af.mil

www.afmissileers.org

www.state.nd.us/hist