Great Plains (24 page)

Beneath the concrete slab—the silo door—is the tip of a Minuteman II, a Minuteman III, or an MX missile. The Minuteman II carries a single warhead, the Minuteman III carries three independently targeted warheads, and the MX up to ten. The missiles are between fifty-seven and seventy-one feet long and up to seven feet seven inches across. Each silo contains a single missile, as well as support and launch equipment on platforms around the missile. The missile's guidance system depends on the fixed spin of several high-speed gyroscopes. Getting the gyroscopes running is too delicate a task to be left to the last minute, so once they are started up, they run all the time. A flow of sodium-chromate solution in which no organisms can live cools the gyros as they spin at many thousands of rpms. No people stay in the silo. Each group of ten missiles is fired from an always-manned underground launch control center nearby. The main color inside the silo is a
2001: A Space Odyssey
-white. There are no chairs. On top of a computer console or in a corner might be a cloth bag of commercial dehumidifying salts. Night and day beneath the prairie, the gyros hum. The air in the sealed-up silo holds a faint smell of the Old Spice after-shave which the last Air Force maintenance people to visit wore.

If you did not follow the last twenty years of the arms race, here is how some of it went: From the sixties through the mid-seventies, the Soviet Union developed a new generation of long-range nuclear missiles, the SS-17, SS-18, and SS-19, which were thought to be the most accurate missiles in the world. A Minuteman missile silo supposedly cannot survive a nuclear hit at closer than 370 meters; according to CIA reports at the time, the SS-18 was accurate to within 180 meters. American strategists began to fear that the Soviet Union could now destroy most of the Minuteman silos in a first strike, and they popularized their fear with the phrase “window of vulnerability,” which they said America now had. To defend against this threat, the Carter Administration wanted to build a new missile called the MX which could carry multiple warheads and which would be deployed on mobile launchers on three thousand miles of track beneath the desert in Utah and Nevada. When Reagan was elected, he did not like the idea of a mobile MX, but instead wanted to house the new missiles in existing Minuteman silos. Debate over the MX went on for years. Meanwhile, the CIA revised its opinion of the Soviet missiles, and said they might not be so accurate after all. Eventually, the MX was built. By the end of 1988, fifty MXs were placed in silos in Wyoming which had been “hardened” with additional concrete and steel. The recent development of other weapons systems like the Midgetman missile, which is small enough to be fired from a truck or an airplane, and new long-range submarine-launched missiles, creates the possibility that the Soviet Union may soon have a window of vulnerability of its own. Since both America and the Soviet Union have concentrated on weapons designed mainly to destroy the weapons of the other, neither country can now afford to wait out a first strike. A missile which is not fired quickly might end up not being fired at all. America used to say that it would absorb a first strike before firing back; today it does not rule out a policy of “launch under attack.” Presumably, the Soviet Union does not either. All of which means that any silo you stop to look at on the northern plains probably holds a missile with the locations of ten or more Soviet missiles in its targeting computer. And someplace in Russia, probably in an underground silo in western Siberia along the Trans-Siberia Railroad, a missile knows about this exact piece of nowhere prairie.

The Air Force personnel who look after the missiles in Montana are stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base, just outside of Great Falls. The public information officers there answer questions by mail about the Minuteman system with a vague line drawing of a missile in a silo. To callers who wish to chat about the missile installations, they reply in the most general terms. Then, in the summer, the base holds an open house for anybody who wants to come, and officers and enlisted men show their visitors around and tell them just about anything they want to know. This event, called Big Sky Days, is usually on a weekend in July. One year, along with about twenty-nine thousand other people, I went. At the gate, an Air Force guy in a short-sleeve blue uniform shirt was directing traffic. Nearby he had parked a Chevy Blazer with the doors open, so he could listen to the radio. “Standing in the Light,” by Fleetwood Mac, was playing. Malmstrom is mostly runway. The thousands of cars parked together took up only a little piece of it. In the distance, heat shimmers rose where it seemed to disappear around the curve of the earth.

Big Sky Days was the kind of summer event where people in shorts walk around dazed and asquint. Long lines waited to go up into the camouflage-painted B-52. In a big hangar, Air Force wives and local groups ran booths selling “Rambo Hotdogs” and “Commie Busters” T-shirts. At one booth, kids could get their faces painted camouflage. By the end of the day, about half the kids had. An M-60 tank in the middle of the hangar drew kids by the hundreds. It was like the most popular rock at monkey island. Members of Air Force security in mesh flak jackets and black berets, with automatic rifles across their backs, helped kids climb on and off. By the hangar doors, pilots in flight suits walked up to each other and put their heads together. Then, after a moment, they threw back their heads and laughed big openmouth pilot laughs.

I talked to an airman, name tag D. Moir, whose job for the day was to stand by a vehicle designed for transporting warheads and explain it. “I enlisted to learn aircraft maintenance at a base near where I live back East, and they gave me missile maintenance out here,” he said. He told me the name of the vehicle, which was an acronym about six letters long. The vehicle looked like a strange house trailer, and its dark, padded interior smelled like a new TV. An off-duty airman who said his name was Jay kept D. Moir company, straddling a racing bicycle and bumping it back and forth between his knees. Jay was wearing shorts, a T-shirt with the arms ripped off, and white-rimmed sunglasses on a purple cord. “Dwight and I are technicians. We do computer maintenance,” Jay said. “There's two kinds of missile technicians—electronic and mechanical. We're electronic. Malmstrom can be kind of a cliquey place. The computer guys usually hang out with each other, and so do the support people—cooks, logistics-and-transport guys, like that—and the mechanics, and the launch officers, and the security cops. Especially the cops. Those guys in the black berets, they may not be that smart. But I'll tell you one thing, they are some gung-ho soldiers. Last week I was with a crew out at an LF—launch facility, that's a silo—and when we radioed back we screwed up and forgot the password, so we just said, ‘Well, nothing to do now but wait.' About four minutes later, this helicopter comes over the horizon and sets down and these security guys jump off with the guns pointed
at
us, and they had us down on our noses in the dirt. And they
knew
who we were. But at least it was some excitement. This duty can get pretty boring sometimes. Like every three months or so, they change the target codes in all the Minuteman IIs, and we have to go out and put in the new codes. The codes come in a suitcase-like thing, looks like a big cassette. That's been every day for the last two weeks: loadin' codes. Drive all the way out to an LF, go down, take out the old codes, slip in the new codes, close up, get in the truck, drive back. Loadin' codes, man. In a few months, all the Minuteman IIs are changing over to remote loading, so we won't have to do that anymore. Can't happen soon enough for me. There's silos out there that are three and a half hours from the base by road, one way. And you're not supposed to drive faster than fifty on pavement or twenty-five on gravel—supposedly. Almost everything that has to do with missiles is ‘supposedly.' But I'll tell you, you wreck one of those trucks and they take it out of your pay.”

To train people to work in missile silos, Malmstrom has one on the base. They call it a Trainer Launch Facility, and it is like a real silo except that the missile it holds is not live. I went down in the silo with a bunch of other people on a tour led by Staff Sergeant John Swift. Sgt. Swift had a freckled face off a cover of
Boy's Life,
aged with a red toothbrush mustache. His eyes roved beyond his listeners as he spoke, like a man at a cocktail party hoping to spot a closer friend. Sgt. Swift led us along the doughnut-shaped platform that encircles the missile. The platform was twelve inches deep in foam-rubber padding, and felt funny to walk on. On it were an air-conditioning unit, a dehumidifier, a coolant pump for the missile's gyros, the circuitry for the security system, a radio receiver, a scrambler, a decoder, and the computers which talk and listen to the missile. The padding was to cushion any jolts to this equipment. Sgt. Swift said the whole platform was suspended from cables which would allow it to bounce three feet in either direction. The support equipment was connected to the missile by a thick, veined cable called the umbilical. No matter how high-tech things get, there is always a big cable lying around somewhere. Sgt. Swift explained the operation of the missile's guidance system so quickly that he might have been speaking Malay. He showed us the pewter-colored tip of the missile—the warhead shell—of titanium alloy. He said that it was ablative. I had not heard that word since Latin class. In rocketry, it means designed to ablate, or burn away smoothly and slowly during reentry into the atmosphere. Improvements in the ways warheads ablate is one reason they have gotten more accurate. Sgt. Swift said that in the event of a near-hit which tipped the silo on its side, it could still fire the missile from an angle lower than ninety degrees. He said that he had been working on these missiles for years, and could tell by the sound when he opened the silo hatch whether the gyros and the support equipment were running right.

The question everybody wanted to know was: “So, how do you fire one of these things?” Sgt. Swift's eyes roved farther beyond us as he began his recitation; the end of the world is a pretty personal subject, after all. He said that each group of ten missiles is controlled from a Launch Control Center—an LCC, also called a capsule—fifty to ninety feet below ground, where two Air Force officers wait on duty around the clock. When they receive an order to launch, they open a safe locked with two combination locks and take out two launch keys, which look like ordinary car keys. They insert the keys in control locks about fifteen feet apart in a computer console. They make sure the order is genuine by checking it against a verification code, they retarget the missiles as the order requires, they give the computer an “enabling code” to free the missiles for firing, and they talk to officers in four other capsules in a conference call via underground cable. One of these officers is the launch leader. The launch leader says, “Stand by for key turn.” Everybody waits. At the launch time indicated in the order, the leader tells the officers to turn their keys, and they turn them down and to the right to a position marked “Launch,” and hold them for two seconds. In most circumstances, it takes four officers—two in two capsules—turning their keys in close succession to fire one or all of a flight of ten missiles. The key-turns send a signal to the missile which begins its terminal countdown. This lasts a few seconds or as long as several hours, depending on the launch order. The missile “acid dumps”—that is, it activates its batteries by dumping acid into them. The missile is now on internal command and will accept no orders but its own. It drops its umbilical. It blows open the silo door. It fires its engines, and a smoke ring sixty feet across rises from the silo. A surge of smoke and flames follows the ring. The missile comes shooting through the smoke and flames into the sky.

Sgt. Swift pointed out the canisters of explosives overhead whose job it was to blow the silo door. They were as big around as stovepipes and several feet long. The slow, ominous opening of missile-bay doors with which movies like to indicate the beginning of World War III is a fiction. Out here, a bystander would know World War III was coming if he heard a big bang and saw a 110-ton concrete silo door go flying a quarter mile or more across the prairie.

The other question everybody asked was: “How much does all this stuff cost?” Sgt. Swift said that each silo cost about $20 million. In fact, costs having to do with nuclear weapons are hard to pin down. When I later wrote the Office of Air Force History to ask about the total amount spent so far on the Minuteman, they wrote back to say that looking for that information would be too expensive. The first silo of the two hundred in Malmstrom's wing went into the ground in 1961. It contained a Minuteman I missile. In the sixties, the Minuteman I began to be replaced by Minuteman II. In the seventies, many Minuteman IIs were replaced by Minuteman IIIs. Each generation of missile took years to develop, test, and build. From 1962 to 1965, the Air Force probably spent about $2 billion a year on Minuteman I. (A billion dollars then is about the same as $4 billion now.) The next generations of missiles cost at least as much. In the late seventies, all the Minuteman silos were improved with new support equipment, hardened silo doors, emergency power systems, and better targeting computers. Maintenance and testing of the missiles never stops. The Minuteman is an organism which requires a continuous flow of money. Just building the missiles has cost perhaps 100 billion present-day dollars. With the additional costs, the total might be as high as $150 billion spent on the system to date. There are a thousand silos at the six Minuteman bases. A thousandth of $150 billion is $150 million. So you might say that a single silo represents about $150 million in total spending. Montana's Pondera County, which contains many of Malmstrom's silos, produced about $30 million of agricultural goods in a recent year. A single missile silo would equal about five years' worth of all the cattle, wheat, and barley in Pondera County.