Exploring The Parks: Minuteman Missile National Historic Site

If you are old enough to remember the Cold War with its “duck and cover” drills at school, or sweating it out with the rest of the nation as we watched anxiously to see if President Kennedy could make the Soviets back down during the Cuban missile crises, then you will surely remember the Minuteman nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile.

Minuteman missiles were part of a huge, complex, and very frightening weapons system designed to provide what was referred to as “Mutual Assured Destruction” in the years between the end of World War II, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991.

 

 

As tensions escalated between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union, U.S. military devised a plan to keep U.S. safe through deployment of so many nuclear-tipped Minutemen that it would be impossible for an enemy to neutralize all of them. For over 30 years, two Air Force officers (on rotating shifts with other duos) waited underground in all those control centers ready to turn the keys that would bring about the end of the world.

 

 

At Minuteman Missile National Site, you’ll have the chance to ride a small elevator down into one of those control centers. (Read More)