The areas in black denote deactivated missile wings, the areas in red denote the active missile wings. Map showing the areas of the six Minuteman Missile wings on the central and northern Great Plains.
#Man tours abandoned missile silo pdf
United States Minuteman Missile Wings - 272KB PDF For instance, from Launch Facility (Missile Silo) Delta-09 to Moscow was approximately 5,100 miles.Ģ) Protection - Minuteman sites away from America's coastlines meant more warning time if submarines launched from off the coasts.ģ) Far Away From Population Centers - Minuteman sites on the sparsely populated Great Plains meant less lives were directly at risk from nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. Minuteman Missile Fields in the United States during the Cold War and after. J9:13pm Updated A subterranean bunker that once housed massive intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and was built to sustain a nuclear disaster has hit the housing market. The launch facility consists of a silo 12 feet in diameter and 80 feet deep made of reinforced concrete with a steel-plate liner. Map showing the areas of the six Minuteman Missile wings on the central and northern Great Plains. In total there were 1,000 Minuteman missiles deployed from the 1960's into the early 1990's. The following are considered the three major ones:ġ) Distance - The shortest distance to the Soviet Union - the United States main opponent during the Cold War - was over the North Pole. The Delta-09 missile silo was one of 150 spread across western South Dakota. Each tour lasts approximately 30 minutes. There was a multiplicity of reasons that Minuteman's were sited in the Great Plains region. Minuteman Missile National Historic Site offers underground tours for visitors to experience the silo and control rooms. Why Minuteman sites were constructed on the Great Plains From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s there were 1,000 Minuteman Silos and 100 corresponding Launch Control Facilities for command and control. They could also be remotely controlled from Launch Control Centers miles away from the actual silos, allowing sites to be dispersed over a wide geographic area. Due to its solid fuel technology, the missiles could be mass produced. The most common sites have been the Minuteman. Since that time there have been hundreds of Atlas, Titan, Minuteman and Peacekeeper sites constructed all the way from Texas to North Dakota, New Mexico to Montana. The first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silos arrived on the Great Plains in 1959 when Atlas sites were constructed in Wyoming. "A nuclear missile silo is one of the quintessential Great Plains objects: to the eye, it is almost nothing, just one or two acres of ground with a concrete slab in the middle and some posts and poles sticking up behind an eight-foot-high cyclone fence: but to the imagination, it is the end of the world." Ian Frazier, Great Plains, 1989 The missiles weren't able to be launched underground, but once fueled, an elevator would carry them up to the surface.Aerial view of the Delta-09 launch facility view towards southwest, 1992.
In addition to the protection offered from being well-below the earth's surface, the complexes were also hardened and equipped to survive a nuclear attack.
Futuristic underground cities with missile silos, a control center, powerhouse, and other support facilities that are connected by almost half a mile of steel tunnel, they are each buried more than 40 feet underground. The launch complexes themselves are architecturally fascinating. Colorado's Deer Trail complex ceased operations in 1965 after being open for less than five years. They were housed in the largest and most expensive underground launch complexes ever built and were in commission for less than a decade. Titan I missiles were 98 feet tall, had a range of 6,350 miles, cost $1.5 million each and from a financial standpoint, were a complete failure.
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During the Cold War, the federal government funneled millions of dollars into a variety of military defense projects at a time when fear of a nuclear attack so permeated society that bomb shelters were constructed and videos circulated instructing citizens how to react if the threat would ever come to fruition. The Deer Trail Missile Silo Complex is not the only one of its kind.
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