CHAPTER 5

SECRETS AND LIES

DURING THE HEIGHT OF the Cold War, all human beings lived close enough to nuclear weapons to be destroyed by them. Few lived as close as Shirley Norgard, however. She could see the launch control support building for a group of Minuteman-II intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) out the kitchen window of her family’s farm near Cooperstown, North Dakota. Because the facility’s underground launch control center directed a set of ten ICBMs, the Soviet military had almost certainly programmed the coordinates for her home into the navigation systems of similar weapons. Should nuclear war begin, everyone and everything inside and out would be instantly obliterated. Shirley knew this. But she was too busy to “get too excited about it.”1 At the end of the Cold War when the missiles around the Grand Forks Air Force Base were deactivated and the launch control support facility converted to a historic site, however, she “could almost brag” about having done her part. She liked having a base nearby and since many of her relatives had served in the military, she supported national defense wholeheartedly. Even so she admitted that the experience of having lived at “Ground Zero” of a possible nuclear war had left her having two “feelings at the same time”: certain that the evils of communism had merited her risk and sacrifice but more suspicious of and irritated by the federal government than ever.² Nameless bureaucrats from Washington had taken her farm’s “good land,” paid far too little for it, and never given it back. Meanwhile, the secretive missileers were terrible neighbors, treating her family “like the enemy” and—in a grave breach of small-town etiquette—never even stopping by for a cup of coffee.³

The arrival of air force bases to the Northern Plains and the arrival ten to fifteen years later of the ICBMs had much in common. But living near a base and living near a bomb were also distinct experiences with distinct, albeit complementary, consequences. For those in the many communities adjacent to the missile fields, the secrecy, indeed hostility, of the national security state was not just frustrating, it was insulting and potentially lethal. It accentuated the distance between the government and civilians, even as the “nuclear mode of war” reduced the distance between soldiers and civilians.4 For many Dakotans, the experience of living for decades in a potential “national sacrifice zone” reinvigorated their New Deal–era suspicions of the federal government.⁵

And yet it did not lead most Dakotans back to anti-militarism. Instead they forged a careful political path that disparaged big government and its bloated bureaucracy, while honoring the military and supporting increased funding for defense. Likewise they would come to see liberal protesters—antinuclear and others—as crazy at best, un-American at worst. In sum, men and women in nuclear country began to express, through lived experience, three of the most fundamental components of the ideology of the emerging New Right—even before they had the chance to cast a ballot for any of its candidates.

* * *

When the Department of Defense first considered putting air force bases on the Northern Plains in the 1940s, the idea that missiles could travel from one continent to another was but a glimmer in a military planner’s eye. But after the Soviets detonated their own atomic bomb in 1949, the United States determined that developing an ICBM and then closing the (imagined) missile gap with the USSR was a top national priority.⁶ First-generation ICBMs—the Atlas and Titan models, introduced in 1959 and 1962 respectively and housed in locations throughout the country—were far from perfect. They were cumbersome and time-consuming to launch.⁷ The Titan was stored above ground and vulnerable to enemy attack. Both required liquid fuel that could only be stored in missiles for short periods. By 1961, however, scientists had discovered how to use solid rocket fuel. Missiles could be prefueled and launched from concrete underground “silos” “on a minute’s notice.” The “Minuteman” series of ICBMs evolved throughout the 1960s until the Minuteman III was introduced in 1971: a weapon 59.9 feet long, 79,000 pounds, with a 6,000 mile range, two or three warheads, and a price tag of $7 million each.8

Technical, geographic, and political rationales dictated the placement of over one thousand Minutemen on the Central and Northern Plains, with a disproportionate count of 450 in North and South Dakota. The semiarid climate that bedeviled white settlers was well-suited to the dynamics of the new solid rocket fuel that, in more humid regions, absorbed water vapor from the air. New Yorker writer Ian Frazier explained, “The easiest way to wreck a nuclear missile would be to keep it in a damp basement.”⁹ As it had for the B-1 bombers, the Northern Plains region afforded the missiles the best access to a flight path over the Arctic Circle. The region also had the advantage of being remote and relatively sparsely populated, should the Soviets launch an attack. James Mesco, a technical sergeant and historian for the Space Warfare Center in Colorado, explained, “It was best to place the missile sites as deep in the country as you could.” This allowed for time to “retaliate before the first sites” were hit.¹⁰ This notion—that some areas of the country might have to be sacrificed to keep others safe—was reinforced both by Robert McNamara’s “no-cities” policy for targets and by navigation systems that allowed both sides to target each other’s weapons directly.

Finally, military planners looked to the Northern Plains because Dakotans had fully committed themselves to militarization when the bases arrived and had remained steadfastly committed ever since. They were quite unlike the people of New England, for example, who had followed up their unsuccessful bids to stop the construction of Plattsburgh (NY) and Pease (NH) air force bases with a successful campaign to stop the installation of advanced ICBMs in New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts.¹¹ Before long, engineers would place missiles in geographically huge “fields” around the bases, with each missile at least three miles from any other, so the Soviets could not target them all at once. But dispersing the risk to weapons also dispersed the risk to humans. Each of the three missile fields in the Dakotas contained 150 missiles and covered up to 15,000 square miles, with a certain killing zone extending even farther than that. Most importantly, the Soviet missiles that targeted this huge area did not, indeed could not, distinguish between weapons systems they wished to obliterate and women standing at kitchen windows nearby. In fact, in the “nuclear mode of war,” the only distinction between the combatants at nearby bases and “non-combatant” civilians was that the combatants, once alerted, might have the chance to fly away to safety.12

FIGURE 8. Minuteman II missile in its concrete silo, near Wall, South Dakota. Courtesy National Park Service.

From the beginning, nearly all Dakotans distinguished themselves from their New England counterparts with their enthusiasm for the Minuteman missiles.¹³ ICBMs came first to South Dakota, where Senator Francis Case acted the part of local booster once again. Between 1960 and 1963 three Titan and 150 Minuteman missiles were deployed in the western portion of the state. From Case’s perspective, housing the missiles was yet another opportunity for South Dakotans to demonstrate their commitment to the military and national defense. Case proclaimed in his constituent newsletter, “South Dakota has become a key area for defense planning in this day of long-range planes and rockets.”¹⁴ Case reflected many of his constituents’ views that the increased status that would come with the missiles more than compensated for its concomitant risks. Suddenly a region whose citizens had once shunned the military was now the center of deterrence, the last best hope for peace in the world.

Even when early details about deployment were still hazy, Rapid City leaders welcomed the news of Minuteman deployment with hopeful expectations: Rapid City Chamber of Commerce president Tom Walsh predicted that the economic benefits of the Minuteman would be long-term. The Rapid City Journal ran a three-part series on the impact of Minuteman deployment. A January 17 story proclaimed: “Minuteman Promises Economic Lift.”15 Based on interviews with expectant real estate agents, labor groups, and construction firms, the paper asserted that “there is little doubt” the missile program “will herald vast economic benefits for the entire West River region, as well as Rapid City.”¹⁶ While no firm data could be ascertained and very few local companies had actually been contacted by the government, everyone interviewed agreed that good things were to come. If previous air force projects were any indication, some of that $60 million would surely go to local laborers and companies.¹⁷

The construction phase was likely to provide the largest number of jobs and the largest spike in new monies for the state. Indeed, defense officials estimated that at least four thousand construction workers would be paid more than $2.5 million per month in each missile field. Boeing alone was expecting to make $250,000 in local purchases each month.¹⁸ Begun just months after the terrifying Cuban missile crisis, construction continued at a feverish pace: six or seven days a week, three shifts a day, even in the winter.¹⁹ And all kinds of associated, if temporary, construction-related services went up to support the project, including trailer parks for visiting engineers; new housing for missile personnel; new, upgraded electrical service; and new road construction in the area of the missile fields.²⁰ Ted Hustead, a teenager at the time, remembered that the children of construction workers or Boeing engineers created a miniboom in the local schools. His father and grandfather, who owned the Wall Drug Store, benefited too, as laborers picked up breakfast—including free coffee and donuts—before work.²¹

Given the small size of the missile crews—just two missileers for each flight of ten weapons, plus a support staff of maintenance workers, a cook, and a security detail—local leaders likely knew ICBMs would never make a huge contribution to their budgets. But even so, they knew that as long as the missiles were in the fields, the air bases—a much larger source of revenue—could never be closed. In fact the Minutemen sounded so advantageous that letters streamed into Senator Case’s offices from people in communities without a designated site, asking if he could get one for them. The people of Crocker, Crandell, Buffalo, Martin, and Lemmon all wondered how they could acquire a missile.22

In North Dakota, Senator Young championed the cause of acquiring Minuteman missiles just as he had championed the cause of acquiring air bases. He acted as a spokesman for the air force on all matters concerning the missiles and announced any new developments to the press. With the support of Governor William Guy, he worked to house as many of the missile wings in North Dakota as possible and, as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, scrutinized every detail of the process. In December of 1961, for example, he announced that he had convinced the Army Corps of Engineers to change gravel specifications so that the gravel available in the Grand Forks area would be suitable for the project. This decision, he announced in the Grand Forks Herald, “has almost assured construction of a Minuteman missile complex around Grand Forks Air Force Base.”²³ Today, Senator Young’s hometown, tiny LaMoure, North Dakota, honors his important contributions and “political clout” with a bronze plaque placed in front of an actual Minuteman II missile—the tallest structure in town.²⁴

As it turned out, though, neither Case nor Young—nor anyone else in North or South Dakota—played any serious role in the decision to place three missile wings in the region. In a 2003 interview with Nathan Johnson of North Dakota State University, former governor William Guy remembered that neither he nor Milton Young had had any influence on the missile site selection process. While he had “close relations” with President Kennedy, Guy recalled, the missile selection process was “above the President.”²⁵ Young also admitted that the military had greater authority than he did. He replied to a constituent, Mrs. Peter Peterson, who asked Young to ensure no more silos were placed in North Dakota, that missile location “was entirely a Defense Department decision.”²⁶ If the senators did have influence, it was only in getting the air force to choose the state as a whole for installation. Other decisions were “above the president,” and most certainly above farmers and ranchers who owned the land.²⁷

Long before they arrived to “negotiate” with farmers and ranchers, military personnel had decided which landowners they needed to contact, which parcels of land they needed to acquire, how much they could pay for it (below market price), and where on that parcel the silo or launch control support building would go. When they had established this process in Montana in the late 1950s, they also learned they could simply condemn land they needed or take it by right of “adverse possession” if a landowner was reluctant to sell.28 Years later local people remembered how this process worked. South Dakotan Ted Hustead recalled that “ranchers probably had lots of issues with having a missile in the middle of their field … but they were probably not asked, they were told.”²⁹ Even so, Dakotans were not the type to give in or give up. In the Grand Forks Air Force Base battle over land, farmers had sought legal redress; in western South Dakota ranchers organized an association so that the military would be forced to negotiate with them as a group. The vast majority of landowners insisted that they supported the missile project as a whole but wanted a fair price for their land and a say in which specific sections would be used. Why did they have to use what Shirley Norgard called “good land” rather than “waste land?”³⁰ South Dakota rancher Gene Williams’ father “offered to donate the ground to the air force if they would put it in the corner or basically just put it anywhere but in the dead center of the field.”³¹ Mostly they resented the way the military planners simply treated them as obstacles, rather than citizens. Gene Williams recalled that his father was even accused of being “unpatriotic” when he asked questions or made demands.³²

When they realized they were “being told” not asked, Dakota landowners learned what city officials in Rapid City, Minot, Grand Forks, and all the other towns that had hoped for a base had learned a decade earlier. The warfare state, and particularly the national security state, was not the welfare state. The warfare state was opaque, secretive, and its budgets were not debated openly in election years. To the national security state, protecting the nation against both internal and external enemies was paramount. The concerns of local communities and property owners were not even close.

Once the “negotiations” for their land and subsequent disruptions of construction were over, thousands of men and women on the Northern Plains went back to the familiar hard work of farming and ranching. But now they cared for children, planted kitchen gardens, harvested crops, brought calves into the world, and repaired fences and machinery within sight of nuclear weapons. All the while, they knew that comparable Soviet missiles were targeting them. Like other Americans who lived near nuclear facilities, most Dakotans claimed that they had just “gone on with their business.”³³ In 1988 farmer Tony Ziden reflected, “After you’ve walked around a barrel of dynamite for twenty years, and it doesn’t hurt you, you sort of don’t think about it.”34 Others relied on equal parts faith and what John Laforge called “bleak fatalism,” saying that their lives and deaths were “ ‘in God’s hand’” and in any case, if a strike hit them, “ ‘at least we would be the first to go.’ ”³⁵ As with the bases, improved access to consumer goods and chain stores made the dangerous conditions easier to swallow—sometimes quite literally. Tom Brusegaard, who lived on a small farm outside Gilbert, North Dakota, recalled fondly when a Domino’s pizza opened in Emerado, just a mile from the Grand Forks Air Force Base. At sixteen, if he got into his father’s truck and floored it, he could be there in thirty minutes. For Tom, feeling that he was no longer just an isolated country boy with no access to the consumer goods so omnipresent in urban America made living with the fear of a Soviet nuclear strike almost worth it.³⁶

But decades of living with the bomb on the Northern Plains had long-term consequences. First and foremost, it reanimated Dakotans’ support for national defense as a whole, by putting their homes at its very center. By the 1990s, when the SALT I treaty demanded that some missiles be removed and destroyed, many Dakotans would brag that their sacrifice and vigilance had helped to win the Cold War.³⁷

Even in the “difficult years of Vietnam” which included anti-war protests at colleges and universities on the plains, most Dakotans believed it was important for the United States to have the strongest possible military, both to act as a deterrent and also to use in war. In 1983, ABC produced The Day After, a made-for-TV film about a Soviet attack on a missile field at Whiteman Air Force Base outside Lawrence, Kansas, and the widespread destruction it caused. Most Dakotans in the communities around the missile fields hardly blinked. Rather than being convinced by the film that nuclear deterrence was suicidal, many Dakotans used it to confirm what they already believed: that the US needed to continue to improve its nuclear arsenal to deter just such an attack. Gene Kipp of Black Hawk, South Dakota, for example, wrote to the Rapid City Journal that nuclear deterrence scared him more than the possibility of war. “The fact is for most victims of Soviet brutality, there is no day after,” he wrote. “They’re dead, victims of communist murderers. Given the Russian Penchant to bully and brutalize the weak by force, I personally think we need to strengthen and modernize our strategic and tactical nuclear weapons … until the Russians are motivated to understand serious mutual disarmament steps.”³⁸ After the Cold War ended, missileer Wendy McNiel reflected that working in a launch facility was “an invisible, thankless job…. [We were] almost invisible warriors.” But she added that since World War III never came, that meant “we did our job.”39

FIGURE 9. Snow removal around a Missile Launch Support Facility, North Dakota. Courtesy Orin G. Libby Manuscript Collection, University of North Dakota.

But before they could feel pride for doing their part, the culture of secrecy in the national security state made it impossible for Dakotans to know fully what their part was. They knew that sometimes the government lied to them, did not fulfill its promises, did not keep them informed, and was simply incompetent. It is even possible, for example, that many Dakotans did not know how many ICBMs were in the state. In the 1980s Nukewatch activists traveled more than thirty thousand miles over the Northern Plains simply to create a map of missile locations in each state. Said organizer John Laforge, “Even people living in the missile fields themselves” did not always know of their existence, unless they were “long-term residents who watched … the systems installed.”40 Nor did Dakotans know what the Minuteman missiles looked like. When the Minuteman on his land was taken out of the silo for repairs, Donald Lee of Devils Lake, North Dakota, was shocked. He told a reporter, “It’s a huge thing. I never dreamt how deep that hole is. I’ve often thought about what would happen if I was on my tractor near the silo and that missile took off.”⁴¹ Even after seeing it, Lee could not have known exactly how much destruction it could cause. According to the antinuclear information group Jonah House, “A nuclear bomb launched from a Minuteman silo produces uncontrollable radiation, massive heat and a blast capable of vaporizing and leveling everything within a 50-mile radius. Outside the 50 square miles—extending into hundreds of miles—the blast, widespread heat, firestorms and neutron and gamma rays are intended to kill, severely wound and poison every living thing and causing long-term damage to the environment.”⁴² In this scenario, no preparations for evacuation or civil defense would be effective.⁴³ As Shirley Norgard asked, “What would there be to come out to?”⁴⁴ Even missileers were never given complete instructions for what to do after a Soviet attack.⁴⁵

In the early 1960s, when civil defense preparations—however ineffective —were a national priority, some Dakotans wrote their senators to get more information about the missiles and what to do in an emergency. Mrs. Robert Lefevre, for example, wanted to know if it would still be safe to eat fruit and vegetables from the garden after the spring rains. Teacher Dennis Carter wanted information about how people would know when it was safe to come out of their fallout shelters after a nuclear attack.⁴⁶ Some letter writers also conveyed their growing suspicion that North Dakotans were not being told the whole truth. Harley Steffen of Garrison wanted to know why the missiles were only replaced at midnight and whether the water that drained from the silos onto his property might contaminate his crops. The senators had no answers. No one did. But in a side comment to Senator Karl Mundt about Mr. Steffen’s observations, Senator Young remarked dismissively that “you get all kinds of weird stories about these missiles, usually from a small minority of people.”⁴⁷

However unfathomable, the risk from a Soviet strike paled in comparison to the risks Dakotans faced from accidents involving nuclear weapons—called “broken arrows.” Just as the Minuteman was being developed and deployed on the Northern Plains, “broken arrow” incidents were increasing nationwide. Throughout the Cold War, air force pilots flew planes with nuclear bombs on board twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, for immediate deployment if needed. Every crash or malfunction threatened an unintended release of weaponry. Among the most terrifying accidents was the explosion, ignited by a fuel leak, of a B-52 carrying two hydrogen bombs over Goldsboro, North Carolina. One of the bombs “went through all of its arming steps to detonate, and when that weapon hit the ground, a firing signal was sent.”48 It was kept from detonating by the actions of a single safety switch. Less potentially disastrous but still alarming was an incident at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, in the 1960s, when an engine fell out of an Atlas missile and landed on a trailer home.⁴⁹

An accident in a Titan missile silo buried under a dairy farm near Damascus, Arkansas, showed that it hardly took a catastrophe to create catastrophic possibilities. On September 18, 1979, during routine maintenance, a young worker dropped a tool down the missile shaft, which punctured the fuel tank. As the tank lost pressure, it might have collapsed on the warhead and caused a detonation. The control room crew was evacuated but the public was told nothing. With two airmen agreeing to stay on and try to open a vent in the facility, the weapons exploded and the warhead was released. When it was found in a nearby ditch, it had not detonated, for reasons unknown then or now. One of the airmen died and another was seriously wounded.⁵⁰ Of thirty-two broken arrows verified by the Department of Defense, six included the loss of nuclear weapons that still have not been found or recovered.⁵¹

While not officially classified as a “broken arrow,” a serious accident took place at South Dakota’s Ellsworth Air Force Base in 1964 and was kept from public knowledge for more than a decade.⁵² Inside the Minuteman I silo near Vale, South Dakota, an airman used the wrong tool to take out a fuse on a security panel, causing a short circuit.⁵³ The electrical charge resulted in a huge explosion that detached the warhead from the missile. The warhead bumped and bounced its way down the missile shaft to the bottom floor. An off-duty airman, Bob Dirksing, recalled: “It could’ve been a lot worse. If the short had gone to the missile instead of to the retrorockets … the boys who were down there would’ve been fried.”⁵⁴ Once it was established that the warhead was safe, the group had to improvise a procedure for bringing the warhead up the shaft and sending it for repairs. In the end, a young airman, Bob Hicks of San Antonio, Texas, came up with a system of nets, cables, and mattresses to lift the warhead very, very slowly out of the silo into the back of a truck. Hicks also drove the truck back to Ellsworth the next day, since it seems no one else on site “knew how.”55

The list of “almost accidents” seared into missileers’ memories is far longer than the list of actual accidents. Most of them were likely never reported up the chain of command, much less released to the public. Louis Brothag, a maintenance worker in the Grand Forks missile wing, recalled that one day in 1967 or 1968, he received a “frantic call” from a launch officer on alert. “He said his missile was trying to launch.” This was such a dangerous situation that more senior maintenance crews were called and Brothag listened in on his radio. “Holy mackerel!” he heard one man shout. “It was a mouse!” As it turned out, mice liked to make their nests under the large doors that protected the missiles. On this particular day, “A mouse had gotten into the missile and was chewing on the wires, and shorted the wires out, and started the launch sequence.” After that Brothag’s duties included killing as many mice as he could around the facility.⁵⁶ South Dakota missileer David Blackhurst recalled the day when command and control officers at North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado Springs put his team on alert and even commanded him to put his key in the ignition switch and be ready to launch his Minuteman missile. Fortunately air force officials soon determined that rather than a Soviet attack on the horizon, they were “probably just seeing the moon.”⁵⁷

While they may not have known everything about the risks they took living in a missile field, Dakotans knew full well how the air force’s culture of secrecy affected their day-to-day lives. Dakotans recoiled from the pervasive culture of secrets and lies that they persistently encountered in nuclear country. And they did not just live next to underground bombs; they lived next to underground bombers. They knew that missileers acted like men on “foreign soil” who lived in a “world of their own.”⁵⁸ What they could not have known was that the isolated and cramped quarters of the launch control centers, overseen by the notoriously exacting Strategic Air Command (SAC), was in fact a world, if perhaps not foreign, unlike any Dakotans had encountered before.

To some local people, perhaps especially farm women like Shirley Norgard and her friends who worked in their homes during the day while their husbands were in the fields, the missileers, guards, and maintenance workers did not make friendly neighbors. They used their property for strange drills and procedures without announcing or explaining them.59 When they brought a sick or injured serviceperson to the local clinic, they acted as if they were “protecting government property.” Helicopters flew so low they rattled the dishes on the shelves and disturbed children’s naps.⁶⁰ And while they occasionally helped to repair a fence, they also occasionally left a gate open allowing cattle to go free.⁶¹ And they certainly never bothered to stop in and introduce themselves as most country neighbors did.⁶²

To be fair, Dakotans could not have fully understood how the nature of the missileers’ work and the rigidity of their specific command (SAC) contributed to their odd and aloof behavior. A former Minot Air Force Base missile crew commander, Mark Sundlov, blamed any unfriendliness on the relentless workload, all of which had to be completed after long drives—sometimes as much as three hours—over rough gravel roads in all kinds of weather. Once on site, the crew spent twenty-four simultaneously boring and terrifying hours in a confined space fifty feet below the surface.⁶³ Furthermore, they operated under the supervision of a notoriously strict command. Each day’s series of routine procedures, tests, spot inspections, and checklists, as well as ongoing psychological monitoring, pop quizzes on rules and regulations, and health assessments reflected the seriousness with which SAC performed its duties. There was no room for even the smallest deviation from perfect performance. Michael Brown recalled, SAC’s golden rule was: “To forgive is human, but it is not SAC’s policy.”⁶⁴ Missileers did not chat with the neighbors unless it was on their checklist. And it was not.

All missile personnel were expected to maintain site security under all circumstances. They were, after all, guarding one of the most powerful weapons on earth. They were required to keep all unauthorized people out, no questions asked. Former missile instructor Michael Brown remembered that one day a US Marshal arrived without proper paperwork and tried to get access. “I told security if he came on site to shoot him,” he said. “You didn’t play games out there. Shoot first and ask questions later.... They would be right to shoot you if you were in the wrong place.”⁶⁵ Tim Pavek remembered that if a maintenance worker or any other air force representative—even someone they knew well—failed to provide the proper authentication code, military security would “jack him up”: “get [him] down on the ground spread-eagle,” search him, and send him “probably [on] a trip back to the base.”⁶⁶ Missileers were even told to consider members of their own unit as potential security risks. David Blackhurst explained that one reason a missileer was required to carry .38 pistols when they were on alert was so that if their partner “freaked out, I was supposed to use it on him…. In the air force we didn’t attempt to wound somebody, it was shoot them to kill them.”67

But missileers, in charge of guarding so many military secrets, had a few of their own. The first was fairly well-known: most missileers did not want to be there. Some missileers would eventually retire in the Dakotas and call it home. But when they were first stationed in the region, most couldn’t wait to leave. In Wade Bertrand’s security training class, for example, recruits could pick five of 150 locations for assignment. None chose Grand Forks or Minot “but there were 90 openings there so that’s where we went.”⁶⁸ Southerners were unaccustomed to temperatures that dipped to minus forty degrees; those from outside the plains were shocked by the flat, treeless landscape.⁶⁹ Personnel from larger cities struggled to adapt to smalltown culture.⁷⁰ Cleveland native Chad Jones remembered one night he spent on alert outside Grand Forks Air Force Base so well that years later it still made him angry: the local television channel had cancelled an NBA game to show “the class B girls’ [state] basketball championship.” He kicked the console so hard he thought he had broken it.⁷¹

The second secret was that few had wanted to be missileers in the first place. When Captain Marion Dinka, who was fluent in several languages and had hoped to work in intelligence, learned she had been assigned to missileer work, she cried. “I didn’t put it anywhere on my dream sheet, I’ll be honest.”⁷² Air force recruits perceived that missileers fell far below pilots in status and prestige, making it more difficult to get promotions or other recognitions.⁷³ And they were right: pilots were truly the “cream of the crop” across the armed services.⁷⁴ At the missile sites around Ellsworth Air Force Base, two popular songs made the point. One, set to the tune of “The Man Who Never Returned,” featured a missileer who went out to the site and “never returned.” The lyrics to the second read: “The pilots get all the gravy; the missileers get all the grit.”⁷⁵ But the work itself was also a problem. Nearly all missileers felt pride in the role they played keeping peace between the US and USSR during the Cold War and were prepared to follow their orders to launch a missile.⁷⁶ But it was hard to “feel good about a job where, by definition, success meant you never actually did the job you were trained to do.”⁷⁷

For many missileers, then, the best way to get through the stress, boredom, and disappointment of a twenty-four-hour work cycle and a four-year deployment was to add some levity. Allowed to paint murals on the doors and walls, they chose comic book characters or other icons of popular and military culture. When officials were not around, they also cloaked their doubts, fears, and frustrations about their work in jokes. When rabbits or tumbleweeds set off alarms, security guards would sometimes say, “Off to find the Commies!”78 Similarly, missileers sometimes kidded among themselves asking, “if a [Soviet] bomb hit us, would it bounce off the walls or just come through ‘nothing but net’?”⁷⁹ In that vein, the worst situation was pulling alert duty with a guy who took the job too seriously. Dennis Almer and his wife remembered a neighbor who was in charge of spot inspections and did “everything by the book.” All spot inspectors had been “handpicked by the wing commander. That went right to their head.”⁸⁰ In 1997 some of the missiles were pulled from their silos and deactivated and the silos destroyed. The last alert teams signed their names and left messages that reflected their ambivalent feelings. One said, “Mission Accomplished, Gone Home.” Others said, “Good Riddance.”⁸¹

FIGURE 10. Captain Mark Wilderman at the commander’s console in the Delta-01 Launch Control Center near Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota. Courtesy Mark Wilderman Collection, National Park Service, Minuteman Missile Historic Site.

Other kinds of secrets were held more tightly, contributing to the missileers’ distinctive subculture. Most members of the missile crews, other than the missileers, were very young—some still eighteen—and as a former crew commander from Minot Air Force Base admitted, they were often “very nervous” about their serious responsibilities. They were also away from home for the first time and unaccustomed to living with several other men in close quarters. Michael Brown remembered having to settle a dispute between enlisted men and the cook about what to watch on the only television: cartoons or football. He told them just to turn it off.82 A third problem that accompanied youth new to the military was an all-encompassing lack of status. Second Lieutenant Bob Hicks, the hero of the Vale, South Dakota, accident, had just turned twenty. When he approached a high-ranking officer with his idea to use nets and mattresses to move the missile, he was summarily dismissed. “Airman, when I want an opinion from you, I’ll ask you.”⁸³ Fortunately for all South Dakotans that day, the officer relented and let a young man make a suggestion.

An underground launch control center, like a submarine, was a tightly enclosed, cramped space with only two men on alert at any one time; the above-ground support building was not much more spacious for the greater number of staff.⁸⁴ As a result, missileer culture contained both formal and informal controls on sexual activity and expression. Gay men served in SAC’s missile wings, of course; in fact, to begin his path-breaking 1993 work on gays in the military, Randy Shilts declared something that may have shocked the readers: “Gay air force personnel have staffed missile silos in North Dakota.”⁸⁵ Furthermore, servicemen who might not have identified as gay nevertheless have long found opportunities for playful gender transgression, like dressing in drag for a skit or joke.⁸⁶ Given the imperatives of the Cold War, however, when surveillance of gays in the military and other areas of employment was at its height, all airmen were carefully watched for any signs that they were not “real men.”⁸⁷ Missileers and other launch staff thus understood that the public performance of heterosexual masculinism was a requirement of their work. Sometimes these performances overlapped with the young servicemen’s need to feel more at home in a strange place, to push the limits on protocol, or to bring levity to an alternately stressful and dull job.⁸⁸ But however enjoyable, humorous, or seemingly ordinary, these performances were serious business. They were so serious, in fact, that, even years later, missileers refused to tell all but the blandest stories about what happened “on alert,” maintaining the crew’s secrets and continuing the performance long after the official surveillance had ended.

The most obvious ways in which military men, like many civilians, performed their heterosexuality was through humor—the familiar use of sexual images, bathroom jokes, sexual banter, homophobic teasing, and misogynist references. Some of this started at the top, modeled by boot camp officers, trainers, and supervisors—not to mention coaches, teachers, scout leaders, and other men whom the missileers had encountered before they had enlisted. When he was an instructor, lecturing missileer candidates, for example, Michael Brown gave the missiles female names, like “Miss Isle” and “Farrah Fawcett,” to hold his students’ attention. Later he acknowledged, with a twinge of nostalgia, that in an “integrated [male and female] class, I could not have done so.”89 And, as military men had for many decades, missileers brought visual imagery of their girlfriends, wives, favorite pinups, and sex workers with them to their workplaces. Even years later, Dennis Almer’s wife remembered the fact that the men at his launch facility had a “Playboy drawer” and that they talked about it “all the time.”⁹⁰

The missileers also performed heteronormative camaraderie in ways that provided opportunities to blur the lines between permissible and impermissible behavior. Again and again, missileers reminisced about how “famous” their crews had been for their “sense of humor,” “pranks,” and “practical jokes.” They were especially effective when “new guys” arrived. Dennis Almer thought many new missileers took their jobs—and themselves—too seriously.⁹¹ A frightening prank might help put them in their place. But sometimes they pulled pranks on officers too. David Blackhurst recalled when a flight security supervisor did not have his identification and the young security guys “made him lay down in a mud puddle.”⁹² “If they are going to play funny games with us, we are going to play them with them too.”⁹³ And yet, despite a remarkable unanimity that “pranks” were part of the launch control culture, the examples missileers provided to their interviewers years later were remarkably tame. Mark Sundlov admitted to teasing guys in their pajamas for “fighting a war in bunny slippers,” “leaving little surprises for the oncoming crew, including putting all the tiny pieces of paper that gathered in the bottom of a shredder into their blankets” and “killing the breaker on the elevator.”⁹⁴ Other pranks undoubtedly were less tame than these junior-high-style hijinks. But those details we will never know. When asked years later to describe their best pranks, some missileers refused to answer, explaining that “some things you don’t talk about.”⁹⁵ When asked to tell stories about “hanging out with the guys,” Dennis Almer laughed it off instead—“I’ll just write you a memo on that”—and went on to the next question.96

Inside the tight quarters of the two-man launch control centers that the air force called “no lone zones,” where each missileer carried a pistol in case the other “freaked out,” missileers understood that no authentic demonstration of intimacy would be tolerated.⁹⁷ They remembered these “rules” even years later. Aaron Bass and Chad Smith had served together on an alert team for several years and were reunited at the opening of the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Historic Site in 2009. During their interview, they chose to sit so far apart on the interviewee’s couch that they appeared on the very outside edges of the video frame. Even so, they frequently reached over and tapped each other’s shoulders as if to emphasize a point. But when asked about their longtime friendship, Bass downplayed it: “Well, we lived in the same apartment complex and went out and got stupid together, if that’s what you mean.” As the interview ended and the men were parting ways, Bass taunted Smith. “Are you going to cry?” Smith replied, “That’s a negative. Not going to cry.”⁹⁸ Dennis Almer likewise struggled when he was asked to discuss his “relationship” with an instructor who had become a close friend: “Relationship? Relationship? That’s a kind of a tough word. [long pause] You look out for each other; you spend so much time together. You sleep with each other. Not in the same bed of course!”⁹⁹

In these isolated and highly masculinized spaces, officials tasked with the integration of women missileers in the 1980s and early 1990s, were completely flummoxed.¹⁰⁰ A series of studies and reports outlined the potential pitfalls: What would air force wives think as they sat at home while their husbands were on alert with a female missileer? What would happen if a female missileer was promoted before her male counterpart? Would it hurt his morale? What if a female missileer were menstruating, pregnant, had recently miscarried, or given birth? Could she be counted on to be “emotionally stable?”¹⁰¹ And would the vibrations and constant loud noises in the missile cause a miscarriage? Would the propulsion fumes cause birth defects?¹⁰² Clearly, these “problems” focused on the negative effects of gender integration on men and their families, or on unborn children, rather than on women themselves. Beneath them all was a fear that those spaces would by definition be domesticated if women worked there, and perhaps the men would be too.¹⁰³ For many former missileers, having women at the launch centers would change everything—especially what Dennis Almer said were the “best parts of the job.”¹⁰⁴ Even years later, when Wade Bertrand visited the Ronald Reagan Historical Site where he had once worked, he couldn’t imagine why there was a women’s bathroom.105

FIGURE 11. Three airmen relaxing at the Ellsworth AFB military gas station after pulling a twenty-four-hour shift at the Echo missile launch facility. Courtesy Mark Wilderman Collection, National Park Service, Minuteman Missile Historic Site.

One last secret might have been the most important of all. It might have sealed the sequestration of missile crews from their Dakotan neighbors. As Shirley Norgard had suspected when her young daughter rode her bike up to a station guard and he pointed his rifle at her, or Gene Williams’ mother had understood when she offered a missileer a glass of lemonade on a hot day and was reprimanded for doing so because his commanding officer worried she might have drugged it, missileers did consider local people to be the enemy—or at least potential enemies.¹⁰⁶ Tim Pavek admitted that missileers were trained to consider anyone—their crewmate on alert, an unknown visitor, a girl on a bike—a potential threat to national security and, when in doubt, to kill them. Furthermore they believed the threat of spies or just “convenient idiots” in the community to be “very real.” They were taught that if a Russian agent was in the area, he or she could put together small snippets of information—overheard at the bar, in a restaurant, in a beauty salon—and put them together to discern top secret information about missiles.107 Consequently missile crews were told to say nothing about their work to anyone—even their wives. When interviewed many years later, missileers and other launch center staff were still uneasy talking about their work. More than one said “maybe I shouldn’t have said that” or asked, “is that thing [the audio or video recorder] on?” Their unease betrayed the intensity of their training to maintain strict confidentiality and view all others with suspicion. If Dakotans felt “this feeling of invasion and abuse of individual property,” they were not far off.

* * *

When the Reagan administration advocated for a renewed nuclear buildup, the risks Dakotans had lived with for years suddenly seemed more immediate. At that point Dakotans, from local colleges and universities, liberal political organizations, and social justice–focused church groups joined the growing international antinuclear movement. They worked with Nukewatch to create a complete map of the missile fields, gathered for annual Easter vigils and scores of other protests, and launched an innovative multi-disciplinary Peace Studies program at the University of North Dakota.¹⁰⁸ By then, Marvin Kammerer, a rancher near Ellsworth, who had once thought the Soviets were a legitimate threat but now considered his own government to be a greater one, took bolder action.¹⁰⁹ He joined forces with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and environmentalist groups to protest proposed uranium mining and the deployment of the new MX missile in the Black Hills. He helped organize the 1980 Black Hills International Survival Gathering that brought together twelve thousand people of different racial and religious backgrounds to protest what they believed could be “the annihilation of the species.” Later he advocated reducing defense spending to end the Farm Crisis and used the family farm movement’s new motto: “Farms not Arms.”¹¹⁰

But Kammerer and other peace activists acknowledged that most Dakotans did not participate in these protests, were not interested in creating a multiracial liberal coalition, and derided the activists as “fruit loops.”¹¹¹ A large majority of men and women on the Northern Plains had voted for Reagan. As we will see, by the presidential election of 1980, they had determined that, despite the concerted efforts of anti-war protesters and their local champion, Senator George McGovern, to revive the tradition of anti-militarism, the region’s commitment to all forms of national defense had come to stay. By the end of the Cold War fifteen years later, North and South Dakota would have become one of the most politically and culturally conservative regions in the country, with a reanimated antipathy toward big government and liberal elites. Their life in nuclear country had more than a small amount to do with it. Many Dakotans felt that the New Right’s critique of “big government” together with its aggressive support for the military, hostility to leftist protest movements, and embrace of cultural conservatism echoed almost perfectly their lived experiences since the arrival of the military. They had been asked to give up land and any easements to that land. They had been paid too little for both and had had no say in the placement of the missiles. They had been made targets of annihilation and objects of sacrifice, and all the while the federal government had met their inquiries and concerns with a “wall of silence.”112 They had been treated suspiciously and dismissively by the isolated and sometimes disgruntled missileers, who themselves had developed an all-encompassing hypermasculine subculture. The “forgotten soldiers of the Cold War,” Dakotans believed that the “brass” in Washington, DC, “never gave us a second thought.”¹¹³

Dakotans began to blame the federal government for the problems that developed in nuclear country almost as soon as construction of the missile sites began—two years before Ronald Reagan, in support of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, gave his first national speech assailing big government. The projects were mammoth in scale: Curtis Anderson, an engineer from the Twin Cities, remembered that 350 men were housed in temporary trailers, four men to a trailer, outside rural Adams, North Dakota. Over 1,000 men worked on the Minuteman construction sites with fatalities as high as one death per month.¹¹⁴ Unsurprisingly the projects involved plenty of headaches for local residents. Contractors had to truck in large numbers of workers and enormous quantities of materials to build so many silos and launch support facilities so quickly. The Grand Forks Herald estimated that “a road eight feet wide and three inches thick could be laid from Grand Forks to Williston with the concrete used…. [There is] enough steel … to manufacture 40,000 automobiles.”¹¹⁵ To handle the heavy equipment and service the silos, road crews graveled and upgraded three hundred and forty miles of roads. Meanwhile landowners endured the constant noise and light pollution of twenty-four-hour work cycles and sometimes had trouble accessing their own property. They also noted the high number of out-of-state workers, even though the air force had promised to give priority to local firms and workers.116

In some cases these short-term disruptions became long-term problems. North Dakota senator Milton Young received several letters from constituents about road conditions long after construction ended. Although roads were meant to be upgraded for the use of heavy equipment, some North Dakotans saw local roads used and, consequently, damaged without repair. Mr. and Mrs. Nels Peterson of Petersburg lived within two miles of a missile site; gravel trucks used many roads in their township and the government had not replaced the gravel.¹¹⁷ Several other families had problems with water drainage. In 1965, the air force dug a huge ditch on George Johannsen’s farm in Parshall, North Dakota, across the road from a missile site. Trouble was, by 1967, the government still had not filled it in. The ensuing water on Johannsen’s land made it impossible for him to cultivate fifteen acres of corn. Then, wild oats went to seed on the same acreage and it cost him $75 to spray.¹¹⁸ Young assured several constituents that the air force would provide funds for extra road repair, but the problems remained unsolved. Melvin Jensrud wrote as late as 1970 that “I can get no satisfaction as to who will fix these roads…. These missile trucks use all of our roads not only the designated ones. Can you help us with monies and designating who is responsible so they can quit passing the buck?”¹¹⁹

Landowners also complained about the amount of money the government was spending on the Minuteman project, particularly considering how little they had received for their land. To Gene Williams, the whole thing sometimes seemed like a “boondoggle.” He described the government’s new radar system installed in the late 1980s that cost “I don’t know how many millions of dollars.” At first they did not install it properly; then they spent more money to extend fence lines to make it work. Three years later they deactivated it entirely. Gene continued, “Well, I guess things change and everything but good grief you could have saved ten, fifteen million dollars.”¹²⁰ And everyone on the Northern Plains knew the story of the Safeguard Complex, a six-billion-dollar anti–ballistic missile system installed outside of Nekoma, North Dakota, that was abandoned in 1974 within twenty-four hours of its completion.¹²¹ The General Accounting Office tried to explain why the cost had skyrocketed: along with inflation, the bill included $112 million in “excess materials,” $481 million in “lost effort,” and $697 million in “schedule changes.”122 Embarrassed by his support of a similar defunct project, the mayor of Conrad, Montana, wore a sign around his neck: “Don’t even mention ABM [anti–ballistic missile system] in my presence again.”¹²³

Dakotans responded even more vociferously when the government acted both wastefully and incompetently. On August 14, 1968, congressional representatives, members of the press, military brass, and local men and women gathered near Michigan, North Dakota, for a test firing of a Minuteman II. The “missile fizzled” and the launch failed—just as it had twice before, on October 19, 1966, and October 29, 1966. The Grand Forks Herald—a longtime defender of the military bases—initially worried that this setback might delay production of the Minuteman III missiles headed for the state. But its editors still reminded the government of the promise implicit in nuclearization: Dakotans who had accepted “without complaint” their “roles as the nuclear stronghold of the free world’s defense arsenal” needed reassurance that they had done so for a “good reason” and not as guinea pigs in some kind of fatally flawed experiment.¹²⁴

The Devils Lake Journal (ND) asked more pointedly, “Is this Protection?”¹²⁵ In a letter to Young, Lawrence Woehl of Carrington was also direct. “Well, with three tries I’m convinced that [Defense Secretary] Mr. McNamara sold the nation an Edsal [sic] for defending the nation…. They may be able to sell [their] slop to somebody else but not to me and a lot of thinking people.”¹²⁶ After years of living with bases, bombs, and bombers, “thinking” Dakotans had learned—or, more precisely, remembered—not to trust the government, its promises, and its many outside experts, and certainly not to think the government had the best interests of rural people in mind. By 1968, Dakotans smelled the rotted food and spoiled milk of slop, and weren’t afraid to say so.

* * *

Gene Williams understood exactly why the experience of nuclearization had led him to hold what may seem, to those outside the region, contradictory political views: ardent support for the military and an equally strong rejection of the federal government. He explained that, while some of the missileers “acted like jerks,” he believed that they were just “fresh-faced kids” sent to what they must have thought was “God’s forsaken half-acre.”127 The air force itself was a great organization; he was proud to have found a way “to do what was right for the country” as his relatives who had fought in World War II had done. “We are extremely lucky in this country that we have the military, the people in the military that we do have,” he said. “We have the finest military in the world.”¹²⁸ Whatever went wrong in the missile fields was the government’s fault, plain and simple. Bureaucrats, Williams said, always proclaimed: “Trust us; we’re the government and everything’s fine.” But the closer to Washington, DC, that any official lived, “the less he actually knew about the region’s problems.” In fact, in his view, there were only three things Americans could count on from their government: paperwork, waste, and being treated like a “peasant.”¹²⁹ Over the course of the Cold War, Williams believed, his government had “fallen into the same trap that it’s supposedly defending us from,” resembling Soviet-style totalitarianism more every year.¹³⁰

To Gene Williams and thousands of others on the plains at the end of the Cold War, the United States government was no longer credible, accessible, or even recognizable. The damage the warfare state and the nuclear weapons industry had done to ordinary Americans’ faith in government was greater than anything the Soviets could ever have accomplished, short of nuclear Armageddon. We live with its consequences still.