In North Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, and Missouri, the Strategic Air Command (SAC) has six Air Force bases that control the entire Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) stockpile. There are 1,000 of these missiles, each capable of flying across half the earth to deliver three individual nuclear bombs to selected targets. The multiplication is simple, 3×1,000; Minuteman has 3,000 nukes available. The math continues, the Minuteman forms only one third of a triad; SAC bombers and the Navy’s ICBM submarine fleet can drop thousands more bombs. These are tactical weapons, strictly designed as deterrents; our nuclear capability on the battlefield is equally astounding. It appears that our military and political leaders are genuinely democratic in their desire to assign every man, woman and child labeled our enemy a nuclear bomb each.
When you’re driving through a Minuteman missile field, you’d be hard-pressed to notice. Each of the six missile fields extends over tens of thousands of square kilometers. Missile silos and launch control centers are all buried underground, and any of their distinguishing features are hard to spot. If you didn’t notice the communication antennas on the ground or the tops of the silos, you wouldn’t know you were in a missile field.
Even the local population is hardly aware of their surroundings. Once, she had a flat tire in a rental car on a secondary road near the town of Knob Noster, Missouri. A middle-aged farmer stopped his truck to help me, and when he asked, I told him that he was working at Whiteman Air Force Base, which was about thirty miles away. He then asked me if he could tell him anything about the abandoned missile silo that was near his house. I didn’t have the heart to explain that it wasn’t really deserted, just unmanned, and that a missile could roar out of that silo at any time of the day or night.
In the early 1960s, work began on the sixth and final missile range at Grand Forks, North Dakota. The Wing VI team (the Air Force always uses Roman numerals for their wing numbers, similar to Super Bowl games), was very different from the team of the other five Minuteman wings. Our leaders in Washington, both the Pentagon and the politicians, knew there would be installation problems and delays because of the new equipment and because the schedules they had imposed were unrealistic. Claiming that Russia was much stronger than us, they insisted that their schedules be kept. This attitude resulted in millions of dollars being wasted and relentless pressure being placed on Air Force personnel in Grand Forks.
As the physical build neared completion and SAC prepared to install its missiles, I began my career at Minuteman. My company, General Telephone and Electronics (GTE), had won the contract to supply the command, control, and communications equipment for Wing VI. After minimal training, I was sent to Grand Forks as the head of a team of five engineers. We had to work directly with SAC, since they put their missiles online. My group’s job was to provide technical answers and information to all SAC staff. They had gone to school with our team; in fact, they had received much more education from Minuteman than we did, but the system is very complex and they had many questions and needed help. Because our company had built the team, they came to us for answers. We were supposed to walk, talk, textbooks.
We dispatch to sites with the Air Force, work in the electronic labs with the Air Force, and help update and correct Air Force technical manuals and procedures. The first six months on the job, the men on my team worked long hours and I worked overtime. We were not paid overtime; we just couldn’t walk away at the end of an eight-hour day and leave our co-workers overwhelmed and caught up in their problems. It was a hectic time.
This hard task taught me two things. The first was that I learned this missile system almost from A to Z. I worked on almost every aspect, from the 220-volt power lines that reach the sites, to the electronic equipment, to the computers that launched the missile. I became a walking, talking textbook.
The second thing I learned was to have a deep and abiding respect for the men and women of the Air Force charged with keeping these missiles operational. They worked long and hard to keep impossible schedules and meet arbitrary deadlines. They complained every step of the way, but they did what they had to do. Despite poor equipment, terrible weather, heavy flooding, and desperate fatigue, they continued to work. A lot of good people got tired, but finally all the missiles got going and got ready. (A state the air force calls Strategic Alert.)
After almost 15 months in Grand Forks my job was done. They called me at home in Massachusetts. From then on, until I retired in 1992, I worked at Minuteman, MX, which I called the Son of Minuteman, and Rail Garrison, which I called the bastard Son of Minuteman. My knowledge of Air Force procedures coupled with my knowledge of the system proved invaluable to my company. I moved between systems engineering, administration, specification writing and field engineering. They would send me to troubleshoot and/or attend technical exchange meetings. They gave me a free kidney and I thoroughly enjoyed my work.
Grand Forks was buried deep in my past and I probably wouldn’t have thought about it except for a curious incident that happened to me in 1989. I went to Great Falls, Montana for a three day Technical Exchange meeting held at Malmstrom Air Force. Base. It was getting dark, almost dark, when we left the airport and headed to our motel. As we neared our destination, a vehicle cut in front of us about three hundred yards away. What caught my eye was that it looked like an olive green armored car. I asked my colleagues if they had noticed the vehicle and they said yes, but they couldn’t be sure what they saw because the light was fading fast. I was wondering why the military would need an armored car. I decided they didn’t need an armored car, so I passed on the idea.
The next morning, after arriving at the base, we passed a parking lot where ten or twelve olive green armored vehicles were parked. I was curious, so I asked the Deputy Commander for Maintenance about them.
“Oh, we have to use them, like escorts, every time we change an R/V,” he replied casually.
I almost fell off the meat. R/V stands for re-entry vehicle. That is the euphemism used for the tip of the missile that contains the three warheads and the equipment that pushed each warhead to its selected target. When I was in Grand Forks, the only escort needed for the RVs was a jeep that had two air police on it. They carried loaded weapons and a radio for communications. He was even more curious now. Why were such elaborate precautions being taken?
On the last day of the meeting, I went out for a beer with an old friend of mine, a chief sergeant major. Senior NCOs are the backbone of the military; they know what is going on and they know how to do things. When he needed information, he always consulted with the senior NCOs. And that’s what he was currently doing. We had a couple of beers and he told me about armored cars.
Some time after the mistrust and ill feeling aroused by Watergate and the Vietnam War against the government, the military began to worry that some disgruntled fanatic might try to steal a nuclear warhead for their own purposes. To prevent any chance of this happening, they instituted new rules on the delivery of R/Vs from the guarded armory to missile sites. There would be an armored vehicle directly in front of and directly behind the truck carrying the R/V. Each armored car would have four air policemen with loaded guns and two-way radios on a dedicated frequency. The forward armored car would also carry a United States Marshall. This was because the Air Police would not have jurisdiction over a civilian crowd, and Marshall would first have to tell the crowd to disperse before he could call the Air Police for help. As this convoy left the Air Force Base and headed for the missile, a helicopter would begin to circle it until it reached its destination and the R/V was stacked on the missile. Back at the Base, another helicopter and its crew remained on alert; if something happened to the first helicopter, the second would immediately take off.
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The amount of additional effort required to perform a relatively simple mechanical task was staggering. She turned a routine job that happens quite often into a circus performance.
That night, when I was alone in my room, my mind began to replay my past experiences. More than three decades ago, when I first got involved with Minuteman, the enemy was abroad and it was communism. Now our original enemy is gone, but our warheads are not. Now we have a new enemy to take the place of the old one. Our new enemy is the lunatic fringe of our own society.
My question now is where should we aim our missiles, our bombers and our submarines?
