The clock is set to Greenwich Mean Time ("Zulu time" in missile parlance), and is checked against the Navy's atomic clock twice a day for accuracy down to the millisecond. My deputy stares at his keyboard, while my eyes are locked on a large red clock above our heads. We finish our sequence in less than a minute, leaving 30 seconds to spare before initiating our practice launch. Both of us keep a sharp eye out for a "termination message," a quick stand-down notification that would cancel our attack orders. Several times during the process, we verify that the orders are authentic and formatted properly, and that they originate from the appropriate command authorities. Unlock codes provided by the president allow us to enable the missiles for launch, a function similar to the safety switch of a gun. The truth is the job is an awesome responsibility, but it's deeply weird.īack in the air-conditioned simulator, my deputy and I carefully, but quickly, walk through a precisely choreographed preparation sequence. But American citizens have no real connection with the shadowy operators who stand the old posts of the Cold War, despite the fact that they spend up to $8 billion a year to maintain our country's nuclear deterrent. For decades, missileers (as we're known in the military) have quietly performed their duties, custodians of a dying breed of weapon. Instead, I'd be wearing sweats, fleece-lined slippers and, naturally, my indispensable, royal blue Snuggie.Īmerica and her nuclear warriors have an odd relationship. I'd have shed my standard-issue flight suit and boots. The areas in black denote deactivated missile wings, the areas in red denote the active missile wings.If this were a real event, I'd be buried in a steel cocoon 100 feet underground. Map showing the areas of the six Minuteman Missile wings on the central and northern Great Plains. 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. 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. There was a multiplicity of reasons that Minuteman's were sited in the Great Plains region. 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 Aerial view of the Delta-09 launch facility view towards southwest, 1992.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |