Underground Prairie

Missile Silos and Continuity of Government

The GPS stops working reliably in certain zones across the northern prairie, particularly around Minot, North Dakota, where the Air Force maintains nuclear missile fields. Cell towers thin to nothing. Dating apps show no matches for extraordinary distances.

This calculated isolation protects the Minuteman III missiles scattered across thousands of square miles of wheat fields and ranch land, each one nestled deep underground in reinforced concrete silos built to withstand everything but direct nuclear impact.

The young airmen and women who maintain these weapons live in towns that progress forgot, places where the newest building might be decades old, where Friday night means the VFW or nothing, where marrying your high school sweetheart becomes mathematically probable given the population density.

The officers who command these missile alert facilities spend twenty-four-hour shifts underground in capsules designed during the Kennedy administration, updated with technology that feels ancient by Silicon Valley standards, maintaining weapons that could end civilization using systems that predate the internet. Above them, wheat grows. Cattle graze.

The wind pushes clouds across a sky so vast it seems to curve at the edges. Below, they run practice drills for launching nuclear weapons, following procedures written during the Cold War, updated for enemies that might not be nations, might not even exist yet. The prairie’s emptiness makes this possible. No one protests what they cannot see. No one fears what seems like farmland.