8/3/2023 0 Comments Nuclear silo peace signThe Historical Society of North Dakota acquired control of center Oscar-Zero, four miles north of Cooperstown, and missile silo November-33, two miles east of town. The Latin phrase translates, “In the care of eagles.” On the 3-foot-thick steel door of one launch control chamber, 45 feet below ground, members of the last Air Force crew posted their own epilogue: “Last alert, 17 July 1997. Robert Summers, commander from July 1995 to July 1996 of the 321st Missile Group stationed at Grand Forks Air Force Base, said at the time of the deactivation. They were deactivated in the late 1990s under terms of strategic arms treaties between the United States and Russia, and all but these two designated museum pieces have been dismantled. The 150 silos and the 15 missile alert stations that controlled them were installed on leased farmland starting in 1964. “That’s what kept the security guys busy.” “But it was rabbits that used to set them off quite a bit,” he said. On another occasion, members of a peace group poured blood at a missile silo and tried to climb the fence, Conzo said. “Once there were some little kids, fleeing a domestic thing, and the kids came up to the gate” and triggered an alarm, said Joe Conzo, 65, who retired in 1987 as an Air Force master sergeant after working at launch control centers. The intruders usually were deer or rabbits, or occasionally a farmer who swung a plow too close or innocently walked out in the evening to inspect “his” missile. Highway 2, they were mileposts outside Lakota and Michigan, N.D., and other small towns, a patch of gravel enclosed within heavy metal fence topped by barbed wire, with motion detectors and signs warning that “deadly force” was authorized against intruders. Watching the film, we knowingly counted the minutes until Lawrence, Kan., disappeared under a retaliatory Soviet mushroom cloud.įor better than three decades, on every two-hour drive from Valley City, my hometown, to Grand Forks, where I went to school and later worked at the newspaper, I passed by several missile sites. We reacted more viscerally than others, perhaps, when we saw “movie Minutemen” fly from Kansas silos in the 1983 film “The Day After,” because we always wondered what it would look and sound and feel like if we ever saw one of our missiles leave in a hurry. They were part of the prairie landscape, as familiar as a patch of slough, a field pocked with rock piles or a hillside heap of antiquated farm machinery. Many of us who lived and worked and played in the missile field, a region roughly the size and shape of New Jersey, came to an uneasy acceptance of the missiles’ presence. Some missileers philosophized or painted murals inside their command bunkers.Īt Echo-Zero, north of Devils Lake, N.D., crew members passed time during long stretches underground by searching for a dozen toy mice hidden by an earlier crew.īefore launch center Hotel-Zero was demolished, a menu posted in the mess recorded a last crew supper: a choice of country-fried steak, fried fish and pasta primavera. Like the Cold War itself, the eastern Dakota missile field is now history, and the state is making it official: preserving one Minuteman III missile silo and one launch command center, like chunks of the Berlin Wall, as historical sites.Ĭome see the artwork scrawled on the walls of launch centers by young Air Force officers who were trained to turn keys and destroy cities, if ordered. They left ever so quietly, one by one, stripped of their nuclear warheads and headed not in long, angry arcs toward Moscow or Prague but aboard long trucks and bound for storage or redeployment in another place. It’s been 10 years since the last of “our” missiles left the underground silos scattered among the wheat and sunflower fields of eastern North Dakota. The site has been inactive since 1997.ĬOOPERSTOWN, N.D. Rich Nameth describes the operation of Oscar-Zero, the final missile launch control facility of the Minuteman III deterrent system in northeast North Dakota.
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