SPECIAL FOCUS: MISSLE SILOS
Witness to a Demolition
At the CLUI, we receive many requestes for
information about missile silos. It seems everyone is interested
in them - as well they should be. Of the thousands across the
country, most are imploded and lie buried beneath the surface.
Some have been restored and have been reused in fascinating
ways. One is a museum (the Titan Museum, in Arizona), and another,
a more modern Minuteman silo in South Dakota, is a planned museum.
Of course, many hundreds still remain on line, ready to deliver
their charge on a moments notice...
In the small farming village of Cooperstown, N.D.,
roughly an hour and a half from Grand Forks, the Cold War is
still ending.
On the main street of Cooperstown, which bills
itself as "Tree City U.S.A.," there is an unmarked, nearly empty
storefront, nestled between a theater (showing Mission Impossible
2) and a quaint drug store, in whose window appears a single
photograph. The picture shows what looks like a sandy brown
tornado touching down on one of the state’s endless green
horizons. What the picture actually depicts is the implosion
of one of the state’s 150 Minuteman missile silos, those
atomic-age fortresses that for years stood silent sentinel beneath
the whistling prairies, scattered across some 7500 square miles
— from Valley City, N.D. to the Canadian border —
evident only by their three-phase power poles and, if one looked
carefully, small brown signs attached to nearby "Stop" signs
— with designations such as "C-28" and "D-15" — that
pointed the way to missile installations.
The office belongs to Veit Demolition, a Minnesota-based
firm that in September of 1999 was awarded the $12.1 million
contract to demolish North Dakota’s silos in accordance
with the 1991 START treaty. Over the course of the last year,
the Veit crew has been removing the last vestiges of the Cold
War from the North Dakotan fields, generally at the rate of
two per week — weather permitting.
And so on a clear July morning I meet with Donald
Speulda, point man on the project for the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, Omaha District. We climb into his white Cherokee
and drive to site M-22, near the town of Hope. Like all of North
Dakota’s silos, there is not much to see aboveground, simply
a fenced square in the middle of a bean field, out of which
sprouts a handful of power poles and a variety of what looks
like abstract yard art. Upon arrival, a Veit employee hands
me a hardhat and a small box connected to a wire. On the count
of five I am to press the button. As I do, there is a geyser-like
eruption a football field away, a funnel of rocks and dirt,
and a low, flat whump that shakes the soft grass. A few spectators
clap as the dust settles. Drive another nail into the coffin
of nuclear proliferation.
Walking toward the wreckage, a Veit employee named
Pat Hockett, a recent graduate of North Dakota State University,
explains the process. "First we have our salvage company come
in and strip all the salvageable material," he says. "The computers,
the compressors, the brine chillers." He continues: "Then we
come out and drill 69 holes, anywhere from three to twenty-two
feet. It’s about two days work. Once the holes are drilled
we’ll come in and fill them with dynamite and ampho —
it takes about 200 pounds of dynamite, and 600 pounds of ampho."
As we stand at the precipice of the former silo,
where smoke hisses from a chasm and the acrid smell of ammonium
nitrate is unavoidable, I ask Veit’s demolition expert,
Roger Livesy, to explain what 800 pounds of TNT means. "We would
use 200 pounds of TNT to take down a 10-story building. Here,
we use 800 pounds to go down 20 feet," he says, as we hear in
the background the groan of a piece of metal as it collapses
into the hole. Given that the silos were meant to presumably
withstand a near-miss from an incoming ICBM, the arithmetic
seems strangely comforting. Shortly, another crew will come
along and begin to extract the tangled webs of No. 18 rebar;
then a concrete cap will be placed six meters down to prevent
further sinking, as well as a "geomembrane" (a fabric used to
line asphalt roads) to prevent seepage. A separate observation
hole is dug to allow compliance monitoring by Russian satellite
for 90 days. The hole will then be covered, the land returned
to the farmers whose plots already creep up to the very fenceline,
and this segment of North Dakota’s massive nuclear arsenal
— the old saw went that North Dakota was the world’s
third-largest nuclear power — will again turn into just
another plot of agricultural landscape. No plaques or markers
will speak to its invisible legacy.
This is not the end of North Dakota’s nuclear
power, of course. Near Minot, traveling down TK, one can see
an active Launch Control Center for the still-active squadron
of Minuteman III missiles. Located a hundred yards from the
road, the otherwise unremarkable ranch house features several
Humvees parked in the front yard, a massive American flag flying
overhead, and an array of antenna far more exotic than the satellite
TV variety. Beneath there will be a two-man squad going through
the motion of what all American missileers have done for the
past four decades, watching and waiting.
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...and after.
Tom Vanderbilt photos. |
