12/29/2022 0 Comments Missile silo![]() ![]() Crews dug five silo emplacements at one time. Despite extreme cold, high winds and heavy snowfall over the winter of 1961-62, men worked seven days a week, three shifts a day. Work began in September 1961 with a groundbreaking ceremony complete with the Sturgis High School band. Their bid was $56 million, nearly $10 million below government projections. Omaha's Kiewit Construction company got the contract to actually build the silos and the underground control and support pods. By June 1961 - within six months of the proposal to build the missile complex - defense contractor Boeing was building mobile home camps and cafeterias to service more than 3,000 anticipated construction workers. Yet, the association took care to assure the public that they would "not necessarily slow the national defense effort."Īs soon as real estate negotiations started, the South Dakota highway department spent $650,000 in federal funds to improve 327 miles of roads leading to the proposed missile sites. (The first Minuteman site was at Malmstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Montana.) Even before the South Dakota site was authorized by Congress, local ranchers organized into the "Missile Area Landowners' Association" to make sure that they got a fair price when the government bought their land. Often, land had to be purchased from farmers and ranchers.įor instance, western South Dakota was chosen as the site for the second deployment of Minuteman missiles. It was easier to build missile silos where the government already owned the land. They also chose sites mostly in the West were there was a lot of public land available. Military planners explicitly decided to build most of the land-based missile complexes in rural areas away from population centers. A map of where underground missile complexes were located is further down this page. Both the Titan and the Minuteman missiles were deployed in 1962, with the mobile Peacekeeper in 1986. The Polaris was deployed on missile submarines in 1960. The first Atlas missile silos were operational in 1959. So, a crash research program was funded to develop solid fuel rockets - the Minuteman for the Air Force and the Polaris for the Navy. Both Atlas and Titan rockets were liquid fuel designs that had to have fuel loaded on the rocket just before it could be launched - a two-hour process. The first ICBMs to be deployed were Atlas rockets based on old German V-2 designs. It was an effort that involved billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of workers, thousands of acres of land and more than 2,000 companies across America. To keep up with a perceived "missile gap" with the Soviet Union, the Air Force was working feverishly build underground launch complexes and get missiles in them. Air Force was planting a new crop - Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs, tipped with nuclear warheads. In farm fields all across rural America during the late 50s and 60s, the U.S. Planting ICBMs in Farm Fields during the 50s ![]()
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