The Missile Prairie

:Nuclear Warheads Beneath the Wheat

Four hundred Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles sit in underground silos across Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska. Each can deliver nuclear warheads to targets six thousand miles away in under thirty minutes. Above them, farmers plant wheat and soybeans.

Cattle graze. The same families who have worked this land for generations harvest around chain-link enclosures that mark each site. The American prairie hosts the land-based leg of the nuclear triad, making these rural counties strategic military assets.

The farmers who own land above these silos receive annual easement payments from the Air Force for the acre or so each installation requires.

They work around the sites, avoiding the access roads that military contractors use for maintenance. After decades, most treat the missiles as permanent fixtures, no different from power lines or county roads. The weapons have integrated into prairie infrastructure to the point of invisibility.

Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, and Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota each oversee their designated missile fields. Launch control centers sit sixty feet underground, where pairs of officers work twenty-four hour shifts in windowless capsules.

These missileers maintain constant readiness to execute launch procedures if ordered. Buried cables connect their stations to the silos scattered across thousands of square miles of farmland and ranches.