This was both odd and a bit scary. It seems like a long time
since the cold war and bomb shelters and “duck and cover”. But it wasn’t until
Reagan was in office that we actually signed mutual nuclear arms treaties with Russia
which at least put a temporary hold on the nuclear arms race. Now with Kim Jong
Un (Mr. Nutcase), what is under the grasslands of South Dakota may be needed.
The cold war museum at the visor center is impressive. It
essentially chronicles what the command bunkers were like at the nuclear
missile silos, who occupied them (actual interviews with those crew as wells as
written diary like entries), and how the center was on 24/7 readiness to push
the button in the event of a Soviet attack. The interviews and accounts were
chilling.
After the treaties signed by Reagan, the Minute Man I
program was cancelled and all Minute Man I rockets were decommissioned. That
meant removing them from their underground silos and removing their 1.2 megaton
nuclear warhead. We visited Delta-09, one of 10 Minute Man I missile silos near
Wall South Dakota, and could see for ourselves how the system was meant to
work.
The Woman did not know that the US still has some 450 Minute
Man III nuclear missiles in underground silos much like these in Montana, the
Dakotas and Wyoming. She assumed since
we were looking at a decommissioned silo that they had all been decommissioned –
oops! She was not particularly comforted knowing that what we were looking at,
and the crew life we had learned about, was still in existence, but just had a
different rocket inside.
Talk to you soon!
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