The areas in black denote deactivated missile wings, the areas in red denote the active missile wings. Map showing the areas of the six Minuteman Missile wings on the central and northern Great Plains. United States Minuteman Missile Wings - 272KB PDF Bring Minuteman Missile to the classroom or the classroom to the park. For instance, from Launch Facility (Missile Silo) Delta-09 to Moscow was approximately 5,100 miles.Ģ) Protection - Minuteman sites away from America's coastlines meant more warning time if submarines launched from off the coasts.ģ) Far Away From Population Centers - Minuteman sites on the sparsely populated Great Plains meant less lives were directly at risk from nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. What did it take to build the 54 Titan II missile silos around the United States during the 1960s Watch this to find outThanks to Whitesand for the backg. A ranger-narrated Cell Phone tour explains the history of Minuteman Missile silos on the Great Plains. The following are considered the three major ones:ġ) Distance - The shortest distance to the Soviet Union - the United States main opponent during the Cold War - was over the North Pole. There was a multiplicity of reasons that Minuteman's were sited in the Great Plains region. Why Minuteman sites were constructed on the Great Plains It was destined to be eclipsed in its role by the more advanced Titan and Minuteman systems to follow.

From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s there were 1,000 Minuteman Silos and 100 corresponding Launch Control Facilities for command and control. Though first, the Atlas was never intended to be the only American strategic missile. They could also be remotely controlled from Launch Control Centers miles away from the actual silos, allowing sites to be dispersed over a wide geographic area. Due to its solid fuel technology, the missiles could be mass produced. The most common sites have been the Minuteman. For example, Minot AFB is the MSB for the 91st Missile Wing. Since that time there have been hundreds of Atlas, Titan, Minuteman and Peacekeeper sites constructed all the way from Texas to North Dakota, New Mexico to Montana. All LCCs are dependent on a missile support base (MSB) for logistics support. Download this stock image: United States, North Dakota, Cooperstown, Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site, ICBM missile silo, November-33. The first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silos arrived on the Great Plains in 1959 when Atlas sites were constructed in Wyoming. 'A nuclear missile silo is one of the quintessential Great Plains objects: to the eye, it is almost nothing, just one or two acres of ground with a concrete slab in the middle and some posts and poles sticking up behind an eight-foot-high cyclone fence: but to the imagination, it is the end of the world.' Ian Frazier, Great Plains, 1989

Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site. Aerial view of the Delta-09 launch facility view towards southwest, 1992. The topside appears exactly as it did during its existence as an active launch facility.

Minuteman missile silo diagram