Death waiting under the plains

Missiles lie below

The park service experience does not end at the Badlands National Park boundary. 

At the same exit as Badlands' east entrance, where fields of pronghorn graze, there lies the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, one of three units between Interior and Wall that the story of how hundreds of nuclear missile silos sat below the prairie in South Dakota and other Mountain West states.

Death on the plains surrounded many generations of summer travelers. All it required was the word from Washington and the Great Plains would erupt with its unseen crop, the vast fields of Minuteman missiles stored beneath. Several patches of silos from Montana south to Colorado were ready to counter any Soviet mission attack at a moment’s notice. 

The museum details placement of the missiles across the plains during the Cold War. 

The site can boast living history if you encounter the right ranger, which we did. One of the park rangers told us he worked at the site for four years. A South Dakota native, his father had worked for Strategic Air Command as well, so the land of the missile silos ran deep for him. They might have been part of decisions that would have been catastrophic. 

Growing up in the 1980s, I remember that fear. There were movies, there was hard talk between Reagan and the Soviet Union. There were duck and cover drills in schools that would have done nothing. In a book we read in 9th grade English, Alas, Babylon, South Dakota got wiped out because of Strategic Air Command and the missile fields. Fortunately, we stepped back from that. 

There are still missiles under the plains. Not as many as during the Cold War, but they are still ready to launch. Between the war in Ukraine, nuclear Iran, and saber-rattling from North Korea, the possibility of a launch still seems too plausible. We can hope that those missiles never break free of the Great Plains.