Minuteman Missile National Historic Site

From the early 1960s until 1991, 150 Minuteman missiles stood on alert under the grassland of western South Dakota, each in its own fenced silo, spread across some 13,500 square miles and controlled from fifteen launch control centers buried beneath ranch houses that looked like any other. Travelers on I-90 drove past them for nearly three decades without knowing. The missiles belonged to the 44th Missile Wing at Ellsworth Air Force Base, one wing of the thousand Minuteman missiles the Air Force spread across the northern plains.

Delta-01, near exit 131, was one of those launch control centers. Two officers at a time, the missileers, sat their shifts in a capsule some thirty feet below the surface, hung on shock absorbers, with the keys and codes to launch ten missiles. Delta-09, about fifteen miles west near exit 116, held a missile from 1963 until the force stood down.

In September 1991, as the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty took shape, President George H. W. Bush took the nation's Minuteman II missiles off alert; the first of Ellsworth's was pulled from its silo that December 3, and the wing was inactivated on July 4, 1994. The Air Force blew up the other silos and buried the control centers, but kept these two, and Congress made them a national historic site on November 29, 1999. At Delta-09 a glass roof now covers the open silo, and a replica missile stands inside. Rangers lead small groups down into the Delta-01 capsule, and the visitor center at exit 131 tells the story of the Cold War on the plains.