![]() ![]() He mentions the pair of shotguns, since removed, that the missile maintainers were to employ if attacked. ![]() He points out the ballistic activator, which could blow off that 90-ton silo cover in a bit more than a second. He leans through a window in the launch tube-a metal inner lining, unconnected to the concrete wall-to describe the various sections of the green-and-white 58-foot missile: the three solid-fueled rocket stages, poised to propel it on its way the guidance and control section, programmed to tell it where to go and, at the top, the blandly named "reentry vehicle." On an active Minuteman II, which this of course is not, the reentry vehicle held a 1.1-megaton nuclear warhead, with roughly 20 times the destructive power of the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima. Inside, at the foot of a 20-foot ladder, is a warning painted in bright red letters on the wall: "No Lone Zone-Two Man Concept Mandatory." Nobody was allowed to wander around down here by himself. He switches on the hydraulic system that lifts-very slowly-the 13,000-pound steel and concrete "personnel access hatch" through which Air Force maintenance workers could enter the Delta Nine silo to make repairs. And Pavek, who remembers lying in bed as a boy in Rapid City and wondering if the distant rumble of the B-52s taking off from Ellsworth meant that the world was about to come to a fiery end, unexpectedly found himself a point man in the preservation effort. The site would also include a "launch control facility"-one of the manned complexes, miles away from the silo, from which young Air Force officers in hardened underground capsules were to unleash the missiles in case of war. Well before then, however, the Air Force and the National Park Service had jointly concluded that it might be a good idea to hang on to at least one silo as a potential national historic site. Seven years later, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the first President Bush ordered all Minuteman IIs withdrawn from alert, Pavek helped pull out the missiles and their warheads, and by the summer of 1994, he was helping blow the silos up. At first, his job was to help keep them up and running the system was already a couple of decades old, roughly twice its original life expectancy. "It would blow off, roll down the tracks to the south, and the missile would be launched in a northward direction over the pole."Ī soft-spoken, thoughtful 51-year-old civilian engineer at Ellsworth Air Force Base, just east of Rapid City, Pavek has been working on Minuteman missiles since 1984. "The launcher closure door was always pointed south," he says. ![]() Pavek walks over to the 31/2-foot-thick, 90-ton silo cover, recently fixed in a half-open position so future Cold War tourists will be able to peer at the missile inside. You can find a small band of the bisons' descendants in Badlands National Park, a few miles to the south, but here at the Delta Nine Launch Facility of the Air Force's now-deactivated 44th Strategic Missile Wing, you're more likely to see grazing cattle or antelope, or to hear a meadowlark sing. Save for the occasional truck on Interstate 90, half a mile away, the landscape outside the fence looks much as it must have when herds of bison darkened these plains: wild and stark and wide. He's standing inside a chain-link fence, enclosing roughly an acre and a half, that's bordered on all sides by open grassland. ![]() The blasts that followed were puny, by the standards of the nuclear age, but they did the job, and that was how 149 of the 150 Minuteman II silos in western South Dakota were destroyed.Įvery silo, in other words, except the one that Pavek is showing off right now. It brought demolition experts who drilled deep holes in the nine-yard-thick concrete walls of the launch tubes and packed them with ammonium nitrate. It brought crews of recyclers who pulled out the nonferrous metals-the cables, the aluminum equipment racks-and hauled away the steel. The end of the Cold War brought asbestos workers, Tim Pavek explains, who came to clear the deadly fibers from the missile sites. ![]()
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