Air Force crews began lowering the weapons into the silos at the end of July, and Malmstrom AFB's first ten-missile flight was hurriedly activated on October 27, 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the spring of 1962, the Associated Press reported that the Montana silos were being "rushed to completion," and that the first missiles, each loaded with "one megaton of death and destruction," would be ready by late summer. The Air Force began constructing the Nation's first Minuteman missile field on March 16, 1961. In addition, the region offered an established network of roads and, like much of the West, a large amount of easy-to-acquire public land. In the event of a nuclear accident or attack, the low population density near Malmstrom AFB would minimize civilian casualties. In 1960, the Air Force decided to locate the first Minuteman installation on the high plains around Great Falls, Montana, at Malmstrom AFB. But when early models of Minuteman missiles fell short of their intended 5,500-mile range, the Air Force selected sites in the northern part of the United States, which was closer to the Soviet Union. The Air Force initially considered putting Minuteman missiles as far south as Georgia, Texas, and Oklahoma. The silos were separated from the launch control facility and from each other by a distance of several miles. Each squadron was further subdivided into five smaller units, called "flights." A flight consisted of a single, manned, launch control facility, linked to ten, unmanned, underground, missile silos. Each of the missiles is a Minuteman III - two generations advanced from the Minuteman I that was in the Lima-02 silo in 1964. However, the Air Force soon determined that "for reasons of economy 150 launchers should be concentrated in a single area, whenever possible, and that no area should contain fewer than 50 missiles." Consequently, the Air Force organized the Minuteman force into a series of administrative units called "wings," each comprised of three or four 50-missile squadrons. Although South Dakotas Minuteman missiles now belong to history, the United States still has 400 Minutemans ready to launch from silos in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska. The Air Force wanted to deploy Minuteman as a single, immense, "missile farm," equipped with as many as 1,500 missiles. All Minuteman LCCs operated under a policy requiring two people in the control center at all times.The six Minuteman missile fields were located in the states of Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Missouri. They're also shielded against an electromagnetic pulse and designed to be self-sufficient for at least long enough to launch their missiles if they were required to do so. ![]() The bunkers are hardened against everything but a direct nuclear hit. The underground facility is not only larger, but also features HVAC equipment and a generator that at Delta-One are on the surface. This was the Oscar-Zero Missile Alert Facility, which had a newer design than Delta-One. Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Siteįarther to the north, in central-eastern North Dakota, is the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site. Much of the equipment dates back much further than that, with teletypes and banks of computers that have less processing power than your phone. Both the topside facility and the Launch Control Center look just as they did when the site was decommissioned in the 1990s.
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