American Gam

“The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used.” ~ President Ronald Reagan

Like poker players in a high-stakes game, back in the 1960’s, the United States and the USSR had a contentious relationship, otherwise known as the “Cold War”, which climaxed again during the 1980’s during the Reagan presidency. Both sides developed ICBM’s, or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles to try to be the dominant superpower on the planet.

To compete with the Soviets, the United States developed the Minuteman II ICBM, named after the famous Minutemen of Massachusetts who were always ready to fight in a minutes notice should the British Redcoats attack.

Here at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site just east of Wall, South Dakota, the land is eerie. On the surface, no weapon is visible. But beneath the empty prairie is an apathetic missile ready to bring holocaustal destruction to some pre-selected target on the other side of the planet. At the height of the Cold War both sides had over fourteen hundred of these annihilative weapons ready to launch from land, ship and submarines. They have since reduced their numbers down to five hundred on each side.

Here at Delta-09 you can see the ninety -ton blast door is retracted to reveal the missile silo. At eighty feet deep it seems to drop away endlessly, but the sunlight illuminates the white fifty-six-foot Minuteman II missile protruding up from the dark shaft. The missile’s shape resembles a series of stacked cylinders, each containing one of three motors to launch the missile toward its target. When an order is received from the control center, the blast door at the surface, three and a half feet of steel and concrete protecting it from nearby nuclear attack, would have slid off in seconds to allow the missile to launch. Within three minutes, the three-stage booster engines would propel the missile and its warhead to seven hundred miles above the Earth. Bursting through the atmosphere to a speed fifteen thousand miles per hour, it could hit any target within the Soviet Union in thirty minutes or less.

Sealed inside the missile’s narrow green tip is a 1.2 megaton nuclear warhead, which is equal to 1.2 million tons of trinitrotoluene, otherwise known as TNT. That makes the warhead of the Minuteman Il seventy times more explosive than the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan! 💥

Inside the Minuteman Museum are displays and dioramas of propaganda and statistics from that time period. They also show you what life was like for the soldiers that manned the controls of the missiles.

Though the Soviet Union no longer exists it still seems that the Cold War with a Putin-controlled Russia remains chilly, at best. Perhaps in the future we will no longer need these weapons of mass destruction since neither side would win this high-stakes poker match.

I hope these weapons are never deployed.

The gam continues…