PDA

View Full Version : Their nuclear missiles long gone, North Dakota silo and command center will come back



thedrifter
07-11-08, 06:22 AM
Their nuclear missiles long gone, North Dakota silo and command center will come back to life

By Chuck Haga
Wednesday, July 9, 2008

COOPERSTOWN, N.D. — It's been 10 years since the last of "our" missiles left the underground silos scattered among the wheat and sunflower fields of eastern North Dakota.

They left ever so quietly, one by one, stripped of their nuclear warheads and headed not in long, angry arcs toward Moscow or Prague but aboard long trucks and bound for storage or redeployment in another place.

Like the Cold War itself, the eastern Dakota missile field is now history, and the state is making it official: preserving one Minuteman III missile silo and one launch command center, like chunks of the Berlin Wall, as historical sites.

Come see the artwork scrawled on the walls of launch centers by young Air Force officers who were trained to turn keys and destroy cities, if ordered. Some missileers philosophized or painted murals inside their command bunkers.

At Echo-Zero, north of Devils Lake, N.D., crew members passed time during long stretches underground by searching for a dozen toy mice hidden by an earlier crew.

Before launch center Hotel-Zero was demolished, a menu posted in the mess recorded a last crew supper: a choice of country-fried steak, fried fish and pasta primavera.

Part of the prairie landscape
Many of us who lived and worked and played in the missile field, a region roughly the size and shape of New Jersey, came to an uneasy acceptance of the missiles' presence. They were part of the prairie landscape, as familiar as a patch of slough, a field pocked with rock piles or a hillside heap of antiquated farm machinery.

We reacted more viscerally than others, perhaps, when we saw "movie Minutemen" fly from Kansas silos in the 1983 film "The Day After," because we always wondered what it would look and sound and feel like if we ever saw one of our missiles leave in a hurry. Watching the film, we knowingly counted the minutes until Lawrence, Kan., disappeared under a retaliatory Soviet mushroom cloud.

For better than three decades, on every two-hour drive from Valley City, my hometown, to Grand Forks, where I went to school and later worked at the newspaper, I passed by several missile sites. And on the route out west, along U.S. Highway 2, they were mileposts outside Lakota and Michigan, N.D., and other small towns, a patch of gravel enclosed within heavy metal fence topped by barbed wire, with motion detectors and signs warning that "deadly force" was authorized against intruders.

The intruders usually were deer or rabbits, or occasionally a farmer who swung a plow too close or innocently walked out in the evening to inspect "his" missile.

"Once there were some little kids, fleeing a domestic thing, and the kids came up to the gate" and triggered an alarm, said Joe Conzo, 65, who retired in 1987 as an Air Force master sergeant after working at launch control centers.

On another occasion, members of a peace group poured blood at a missile silo and tried to climb the fence, Conzo said.

What kept the security guys busy
"But it was rabbits that used to set them off quite a bit," he said. "That's what kept the security guys busy."

The 150 silos and the 15 missile alert stations that controlled them were installed on leased farmland starting in 1964. They were deactivated in the late 1990s under terms of strategic arms treaties between the United States and Russia, and all but these two designated museum pieces have been dismantled.

"They did their job," Col. Robert Summers, commander from July 1995 to July 1996 of the 321st Missile Group stationed at Grand Forks Air Force Base, said at the time of the deactivation.

On the 3-foot-thick steel door of one launch control chamber, 45 feet below ground, members of the last Air Force crew posted their own epilogue: "Last alert, 17 July 1997. In Aquilae Cura."

The Latin phrase translates, "In the care of eagles."

Restoration to be done by next year
The Historical Society of North Dakota acquired control of center Oscar-Zero, four miles north of Cooperstown, and missile silo November-33, two miles east of town. With $500,000 from the state and a federal grant, plus proceeds from a public fund drive, the society plans to restore them by next year to duty status — except, of course, for the nuclear-tipped Minuteman missiles.

"We grew up with these missiles in our backyards," said Merlan Paaverud, director of the State Historical Society. "We watched the trucks go by, and the helicopters and armored vehicles, and now we know: This could have been the end of the world."

But it wasn't, he said. And to help tell the story, Paaverud and others have collected artwork that was done at the sites by young airmen "to try to keep sane," and they have recorded "the personal stories of some who sat and waited and went through tense situations that could have meant the end."

I came back to the missile field twice during the deactivation, meaning to explain what was happening here to Twin Cities readers. In June 1996, I described the standing down and removal of Charlie-26, a 60-foot, 70,000-pound, $7 million missile with a range of 6,000 miles and a top speed at burnout of 16,000 miles an hour.

Staff Sgt. Kenny Corzete of Chillicothe, Mo., helped remove it from its silo.

"You handle it just like you would a baby," he told me.

I returned in August 2001 to watch the imploding of missile site Hotel-29 just outside of Lakota, one of the last to go. I kept a jagged piece of rebar that came out of the ground. I'm still not entirely sure why.

Conzo's duty in 1979 was to check his site's equipment and water and fuel supplies, cut the grass or remove the snow "and do whatever needed to be done."

Two officers were wired to 10 missiles
He and a cook and a half-dozen security police had a pool table, TV, checkers and other board games, and other distractions for down time. Deep below, the two young officers with their doomsday keys and codes were wired to 10 missiles, each potentially carrying three independently targeted warheads far more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

"Downstairs, it was noisy, hot and confined," Conzo said. "I don't know how they handled it. All they had was a radio and magazines. They didn't have TV until '85. They had messages coming in all the time, and they were always doing their training. They kept busy."

He didn't spend much time contemplating nuclear war.

"It was just a job to me," he said, "except for one time. Something had happened during the night, and the following morning I was talking with the launch crew and they were still a little nervous.

'They had almost launched a missile that night'
"They said they had almost launched a missile that night. They said it was five minutes from them turning the key."

It was "a misunderstanding or something," Conzo said. "They never explained further, and I wasn't supposed to know exactly what it was. But something like that makes you realize you're involved with something serious."

From New York originally, Conzo served in Vietnam before coming to the Grand Forks base in 1969. He married a woman from Finley, N.D., and stayed in Grand Forks when he retired in 1987.

"Every magazine on the shelf now was there the day we walked away," he said. "All the furniture is there, the pool table and the exercise bike, all the kitchen utensils, and lots of Western novels — lots of Louis L'Amour. It looks just like when I worked there."

The launch control center is surrounded by an open field, "a lot of weeds and grass," Conzo said. "It hasn't changed a single bit. No trees.

"I don't think most people even realized the sites were there, or what they did," he said.

"If we hadn't had this and deterred war and everything else, you might not be in a position to ask any questions about it.

"It's a good part of history, and you can go out and see it."

Chuck Haga, a Star Tribune staff writer from 1987-2007, is a reporter for the Grand Forks Herald. He can be reached at chaga [at] minnpost [dot] com.

Ellie

thedrifter
07-11-08, 06:22 AM
Cold War 2.0 heating up on multiple fronts
More nations with nukes, concerns in space, cyberspace complicate international tensions

By Charlie Coon, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Friday, July 11, 2008

STUTTGART, Germany — When the space shuttle program was coming together in the late 1970s, Moscow feared the United States would use its manned spacecraft to fly into low orbit, pull alongside the Soviet Union’s satellites and steal them.

Things were so much simpler then.

The Cold War pitted two superpowers with nuclear warheads trained on each other — from submarines, from silos, from mobile launchers. One false move and the world was a fireball.

Ah, those were the days.

In the 21st century, however, outer space and nukes are the domains of many nations, led by a variety of order-givers — some who like the U.S. and some who don’t. The low-orbit satellites on which the world’s leading economies and militaries depend are within reach of rockets from China. Nuclear-aspirants such as Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can now rattle sabers alongside President Bush and new Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Even though current battlefields employ much publicized micro-tactics such as firing mortars and setting off suicide bombs, global arenas such as the sky, space and cyberspace are being fought over, too, according to Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, commander of the Nebraska-based U.S. Strategic Command.

"There are a lot of asymmetric vulnerabilities in our mission areas that I worry about: space, cyberspace," said Chilton, a former space shuttle pilot. "And I worry about that terrorist whose stated claim is wanting to get his hands on a weapon of mass destruction and bring that to American soil."

Chilton advocates the furthering of a global missile-defense system to shoot down incoming nukes, and for improved oversight of the low-orbit satellite superhighway. As Ahmadinejad’s Iran test-fired missiles capable of striking Isael on Wednesday, Chilton had just finished talks with U.S. military leaders in Europe.

Running a worldwide missile-defense grid is complicated, Chilton said Tuesday in an interview with Stars and Stripes.

The military’s Stuttgart-based U.S. European Command, Colorado-based Northern Command and Honolulu-based Pacific Command all oversee parts of the world over which nukes might fly.

Some variables: Do you shoot down enemy missiles as they are blasting off, traveling through low orbit, or coming down toward a target? What happens when missiles fly from Pacific’s domain into Northern’s? Who tracks it? Who shoots it down? Who decides?

"How do you knit that all together so that you provide a seamless defense?" Chilton said. "And then, how do you plug that into the NATO countries’ defense systems so that you have complementary systems there?"

Nuclear weapons might have faded from the popular consciousness, but some contend they are as relevant today as in the days of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Still, it has been a long time since the U.S. has thought through the role played by nuclear weapons in its national security, according to Clark Murdock, senior adviser for the International Security Program at the Washington-based Center for Security and International Studies.

"It’s inconceivable to the American people that the United States would not be a nuclear power second to none, as long as other nations have nuclear weapons," said Murdock, a former Air Force and Pentagon strategist. "It’s part of our identity as a world global superpower.

"There is no question that one function nuclear weapons have had is that they have reduced the level of violence in major powers’ conflict. Nuclear weapons kept the Cold War cold."

Others believe that nukes have largely drifted into the category of a cumbersome, outdated fact of life.

"Nuclear weapons have become irrelevant from a deterrent standpoint against anybody but other states that have nuclear weapons; we can’t make nuclear threats to Afghanistan," said George Perkovich, vice president for studies, global security and economic development at the Carnegie Endowment Institute for Peace.

"Some military guys I talk to tell me, ‘We know we’re never going to be authorized to use nuclear weapons, and they’re a pain to have.’ And yet there are still bad guys out there we need to deter."

The global nuclear game plan is married up to the hundreds of satellites that orbit hundreds of miles above the Earth.

Experts debate how much damage to the world’s communications capabilities, if any, could be inflicted by a missile, even a nuclear-tipped one, that struck a satellite or group of satellites.

But there’s no doubt that nations are capable of reaching them.

In January 2007 China successfully launched a land-based rocket that killed one of its weather satellites orbiting 530 miles above the Earth.

In February, a U.S. Navy ship in the Pacific launched a missile that destroyed a dead spy satellite at approximately 130 miles altitude as it tumbled back toward the Earth’s atmosphere.

Chilton said that the U.S. needs to be able to better keep an eye on satellites, space junk and nefarious activities in outer space.

"How can we improve our surveillance of space in the domains and in the altitudes and orbits where we have critical capability?" Chilton said.

"This serves two purposes. It ensures safe passage and safe operation of our capabilities up there, and by increasing the transparency and insight into that, we can deter bad behavior up there."

Ellie