On the roads separating Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota, from Cooperstown, there is a drab wilderness of green grassland and wheat fields. Nor is there anything interesting to see in the city of 900 inhabitants 200 km from Canada. Unless you descend 20 meters below ground.
The industrial elevator is slow and takes almost two minutes to descend. It’s like a time warp to 1966, the year the Oscar-Zero Missile Alert Facility, a Cold War-era military installation, was activated.
For 31 years, beneath the bucolic landscape, the site housed a control system an arsenal far more destructive than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the officers’ fingertips was the firing of ten nuclear missiles from the Minuteman fleet, buried throughout the region and ready for attack.
The information appears to have come from a sci-fi movie, but is well documented in space, now preserved by the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site , which receives about 4,000 visitors a year for $10 tickets. Friday quotation 3).
In all, the US has buried 1,000 nuclear missiles on its territory, spread across seven Midwestern states, the closest to the Soviet Union. The weapons were 17 meters long, weighed 32 tons and could reach Moscow in 30 minutes via the North Pole, at a speed of 24,140 km/h.
“Americans have an idea of what the Cold War was like, but I don’t know if they really know these details,” says Robert Branting, supervisor of Oscar-Zero. “These are things that sometimes appear in movies. It’s part of our job to promote and interpret the great story of the Cold War in North Dakota.”
The state with 780,000 inhabitants received the greatest number of weapons: 300 nuclear missiles were hidden amid wheat and barley fields, on land purchased or rented from farmers.
For the residents, it was something patriotic. In 1966, the US completed 25 years since the Pearl Harbor episode, in World War II, and four years since the Cuban missile crisis. In addition, Americans were eating dust in the space race after the Sputnik satellite launched nine years earlier.
The manufacture of the Minuteman began in the 1950s. It brought engines powered by solid fuel as an advance, which remain ready for launch for longer periods. Hence the name, inspired by fighters from the War of Independence, who would be ready in a minute.
The Oscar-Zero Missile Alert Facility was the launch control center. There are two cylindrical capsules protected by six-ton security doors, crammed with machinery and computers, like a period movie set. It is also where the room of the two Air Force officers responsible for the detonation was located, who worked in pairs in 24-hour shifts.
“After the training and maintenance routine, there was a lot of free time, and they filled it with a lot of reading and studying,” says Branting. “The Air Force allowed them to study here for their masters.”
Then-Captain Warren Tobin’s white mug still rests on the worktable, with a gray panel on the front studded with buttons and a black telephone attached. There is also a notebook protected by an acrylic structure and a red chair with a not to sit warning.
A red box with two padlocks, one of which Tobin donated, sits on top of the first-in-command’s desk. To detonate a missile, the two officers needed to open the locks with their respective keys and access two other keys inside the box. The new keys would then have to be turned at the same time on their desk panels, separated to prevent a single person from making the protocol.
“They were given lessons in the aftermath of launching a missile, so they hoped the job would be pretty monotonous so they never had to fire anything. Everything was very strict.”
Tobin’s overalls, like those of other colleagues, hang over the exit of the capsule, which has a tiny bathroom and a space to rest. In an emergency, it would be possible to escape through a hatch, with the help of a shovel, as the tunnel would be filled with earth to block invaders.
The veteran now lives 100 km from Cooperstown. “Both sides of the Cold War were mutually assured destruction. You can’t really win a nuclear war. Even today, you have to be ready so the other knows you’re ready,” the veteran told a regional newspaper.
Despite the sober atmosphere, the soldiers managed to bring some color to the place. They painted a mural on a metal plate with an American eagle in sunglasses and the character Oscar from “Villa Sesame” wearing the blue uniforms of the military. “This is a job for the best of the best,” says the puppet. There is also a painting of Bugs Bunny in overalls, eating a carrot on the beach.
On the surface, the installation tries to keep the original decoration. The rooms have bunk beds, in which the two teams of armed guards, an administrative officer and a chef, slept in layovers.
The game room has a pool table and a computer with a huge monitor. In the kitchen, a panel shows the meal options of the day, and the cabinets bring seasonal food. In the command center at the entrance are two fake machine guns, which tourists can use to take pictures.
Oscar-Zero was just one of 15 launch centers distributed this side of the state at Grand Forks air base. Each facility handled ten missiles, placed in individual underground chambers, spaced 8 km to 24 km apart. 10 km from Oscar-Zero, very close to the road and in the middle of plantations, is the mark of what is left of the November-33 base, where a Minuteman rested. The land is covered in gravel, surrounded by a grid and with mysterious doors installed in the ground.
After a disarmament agreement in 1991, missiles began to be unearthed and destroyed, and launch centers deactivated. The land was returned to the farmers, and today many of them use the old facilities to store machinery or store food.
But North Dakota is still an important center of American nuclear power. The state is one of five that are home to a new generation of some 400 Minuteman missiles. It is a small portion of the US arsenal of 5,000 nuclear warheads, 1,750 of which are ready for use on land, sea or air.
.
