This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. John Hooks This was all going on in the early '60s. What was the timeline of building the facilities and actually putting the missiles in? Anti-nuclear activists actually came up with a pretty colorful term to describe this strategy, calling these states America's "nuclear sponge."Īustin Amestoy Wow, that's a pretty dark term. John Hooks This strategy of placing ICBMs in low population Western states was also part of a government decision that in the event of a nuclear attack, it would be better to draw enemy fire to places where fewer people lived. Air Force A missile launch control facility under construction at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, MT. And each launch facility, 3.5, two 8.5 miles apart from one another. Troy Hallsell They had to space each launch facility between 3.5 And 17.5 miles away from its launch control center. John Hooks Initially in Montana, they put in 150 launch facilities, but each of these facilities had to be far enough apart to make sure the system could survive If one or more of the sites were hit by an enemy attack.
Troy Hallsell So, the reason that the Air Force selected to get Montana and the Great Plains is that it needed big, wide, sparsely populated stretches of land to build this weapon system.
#ABANDONED MISSILE SILO LOCATIONS INSTALL#
Hallsale told me that the missiles arrived in Montana once the military and defense contractors had successfully developed a missile called the Minuteman, which the Air Force decided to install in five missile wings across the middle of the country. He is the official historian of the 341st missile wing, which is the unit of the Air Force that maintains and operates the missile sites in Montana. Just passed through all the security checkpoints and we are driving into the museum and air park, a big field with a bunch of old planes, and conspicuously, one big former nuclear missile. I am on Malmstrom Air Force Base right now. Air Force Emblem of the 341st Operations Group, 341st Missile Wing of the United States Air Force. John Hooks Well, to get the answer to that, we have to take a field trip. But why did the military place them in Montana? That explains the origin of these missiles. The military still argues to this day that having the ability to strike from so many places deters attacks from potential adversaries because America has all these different ways of ensuring that we could retaliate.Īustin Amestoy All right. John Hooks Korda says that the rationale that the military and the government came up with was this idea of a nuclear triad basically, that America needs to have nuclear capability from air, land and sea, with the ICBMs being the land portion. Matt Korda I'm a senior research associate project manager for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. Matt Korda Counterintuitively, the weapons came first and then the questions of how and when to use them came second. At that time, the focus was on building as many missiles as we could, as quickly as we could. John Hooks Sputnik kicked off a whole new phase of the conflict and triggered a deluge of military spending to ramp up our own missile technology in competition with the Soviets. And the origin of those dates back to the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and '60s, specifically the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. The weapons here in Montana are intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBMs. John Hooks Well, first we got to dig into how they got here in the first place. John Hooks That's because our listener question this week is why? Why are there so many nuclear missiles scattered over central Montana?Īustin Amestoy Okay, so where do we start? But why are we talking about them for this episode? The areas in black denote deactivated missile wings, the areas in red denote the active missile wings.Īustin Amestoy So I remember hearing a lot about these missile sites during that whole recent Chinese balloon debacle. National Park Service Map showing the areas of the six Minuteman Missile wings on the central and northern Great Plains.
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