Gretchen Heefner

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Gretchen Heefner | Missiles and Memory: Dismantling South Dakota's Cold War | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.2 | The History Cooperative

Missiles and Memory: Dismantling South Dakota's Cold War

For much of the cold war, 150 Minuteman missiles dotted South Dakota's western plains. Today the warheads are gone, but one silo remains as the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. This article considers South Dakota's relationship with the Minuteman—from deployment to preservation—in order to examine the domestic cold war and the creation of a national cold war narrative.

IN THE LATE 1960S, NEWLY PAVED INTERSTATE 90 was a welcome addition for families participating in the latest great American pastime: the road trip. Taking advantage of the federal government's preoccupation with freeway expansion and nearly 42,000 miles of new blacktop, families could travel faster and farther than ever before. In step with their exploration was the relentless onslaught of fast food chains, billboards, service stations, and chain motels. I-90 through South Dakota would soon be littered with them. And while it was possible to get through the state in one long day of driving, I-90 also provided a number of tourist stopping-off points: Mitchell's Corn Palace, Wall Drug, Badlands National Park, the carved faces of venerated presidents in Mount Rushmore, and the sacred Black Hills.

But the same roads that promised much-coveted tourist dollars also sowed the seeds of the area's own demise. It is no mistake that the interstate system was renamed the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate & Defense Highways; it was designed to provide an efficient means of moving large numbers of military personnel and huge quantities of military equipment and supplies. Much of that equipment, unbeknown to most 1960s recreational drivers, was deposited on the plains of western South Dakota. Indeed, as American tourists stopped for coffee (free for veterans and honeymooners) at Exit 110 in Wall, the U. S. Air Force was busy constructing and maintaining 150 Minuteman Missile silos, some less than a mile away. Each missile carried a 1.2-megaton nuclear warhead that could reach its target in under thirty minutes. In all, South Dakota's western plains hosted three thousand times the destructive power of "Little Boy," the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. For thirty years South Dakota was a crucial, but silent, player in the cold war.

South Dakota's nuclear invisibility was pierced only in the 1990s when the START I Treaty required that South Dakota relinquish its Minutemen. But they did not go out as silently and quickly as they had come in. The removal of South Dakota's missiles actually accentuated the region's role in the cold war. On one hand, area landowners raised concerns about how the silos would be demolished and how those lands would ultimately be disposed. On the other, National Park Service and Air Force personnel wanted to somehow preserve this part of South Dakota's past.

Ten years later, in 2003, that vision became reality when the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site (MIMI) opened for limited tours. Today, tourists on I-90 can stop off at Exit 116 and peer over the edge of a silo to see, for the first time, the green tip of a Minuteman pointing up into the air.

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