Nuclear Tourism: How I Got Interested in Cold War History

On the surface, this just looks like a ranch-style house. But what's underground could destroy civilization.

September 29, 2011—Rapid City, South Dakota. My family was wrapping up a two-week driving vacation. We’d just visited some of the most amazing landscapes in the American West—Rocky Mountains, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone National Parks. I wanted to spend as much time hiking wilderness trails as possible, so I was a little disappointed when Dad decided at the spur of the moment to make an unplanned stop on our way to Badlands National Park.

“We’re going to the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site,” he told us. I didn’t know what that was, but Dad was really excited about it, so I dutifully followed the rest of the family into the small visitor center building to get our tickets. Then I saw the displays and realized what the Minuteman missiles actually were—nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union, over a thousand of them, each with a warhead hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All buried in the Great Plains. Okay, that wasn’t boring!

We hopped back in the minivan, crossed I-90 on an overpass, and parked in front of a nondescript ranch-style building with a basketball hoop out front. The only clue that this wasn’t just somebody’s house was that it was surrounded by an eight-foot-high razor wire fence. Our tour guide—a former missile launch commander—met us at the gate and let us in.

Cafeteria at the launch complex, Minuteman Missile National National Historic Site.

The aboveground part of the building was fairly normal. It had bunks for 19 men, a kitchen, a cafeteria, and a television that could only get one station because this was literally the middle of nowhere. Everything was in familiar 1970s-era décor. Then the seven of us crowded into a tiny cage elevator, and that’s when things got weird. Deep beneath the South Dakota prairie, we walked through a huge, foot-thick blast door that was painted with an imitation of the Domino’s Pizza logo and the ominous words, “World-wide delivery in 30 minutes or less—or your next one is free.” Not pizzas. Nuclear missiles.

Dark parody of the Domino's Pizza logo--painted on the blast door to the launch control chamber.

The blast door led to the command center of the missile launch complex, which was always manned by two people, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, ready at a moment’s notice to launch the missiles that would destroy the Soviet Union—assumedly because the Soviets had already launched the missiles to destroy America. The command center and missiles were buried in hardened underground silos so that they could still be launched even if an enemy missile landed nearby. In a nuclear war, the people who launched the missiles would be the ones most likely to survive. Few civilians had that kind of protection.

This command center to launch nuclear missiles is buried deep beneath the South Dakota prairie.

Standing there deep underground in that cold concrete chamber was a life-changing experience for me. This is real, I thought. This isn’t a movie set. This is what everyone was afraid of. Now I understood where the fear came from. I had felt it myself, even though I was born in 1992, after the Cold War officially ended. Fear that the world was ending took different guises—environmental pollution, overpopulation, peak oil, climate change, Left Behind. But the existential threat that could destroy civilization predated and influenced all those secondary fears. It was the nuclear missiles buried right there in the Great Plains.

Oh, and by the way—they’re still there. The US and Russia still have enough nuclear missiles to destroy each other. The threat is still real. And every day I learn more about how that constant menace of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) shaped our modern world.