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Continue reading →: North to Nekoma: 50 Years After the Deactivation of SafeguardDriving in Eastern North Dakota during the dead of winter is pretty much what you make of it. Some might be bored by the mostly unchanging surroundings and sea of white that extends to the horizons all around you, but on the other hand, it can allow you to consider…
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Continue reading →: The Basics – Discussing the Cold War-era Minuteman Weapon SystemBy July 1967, the Minuteman missile represented a thousand-strong force of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that formed the backbone of the American strategic deterrent force. How and why did Minuteman become such a successful and long-term program for the United States? By the end of the Cold War, did it…
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Continue reading →: What Color Is Your Fallout Shelter? Constructing a history lesson about nuclear preparednessDuring the Cold War, particularly from the period 1961 to about 1968, the United States began a program of identifying public shelter spaces for millions of Americans to protect them from the possibility of nuclear fallout. Fallout itself only achieved wide-ranging public understanding after the disastrous results of the 1954…
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Continue reading →: Now What? The Post-AttackIn any case, the U.S. military made wide-ranging plans to ride out a nuclear war and emerge from the first blows with a readiness to continue the fight as long as possible. There are two notable dramatizations of this. In 1958’s Power of Decision, strategic warning aids commanders of Strategic…
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Continue reading →: Fish Out of Water: Missile Silos and Coastal DefensesAs a person who grew up on the Great Plains, the concept of coastal fortifications and a Navy are sometimes astounding to consider when you’re standing there next to the ocean. Unfortunately, there just aren’t that many Essex-class aircraft carriers you can tour in North Dakota. Climbing aboard a ship,…
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Continue reading →: The Casual, The Morbid, and the Strangelovian: An Evolution in Interpreting Nuclear WarGoing on 9 years of interpreting the Cold War missile story for public tours (not including previous work at Minuteman Missile National Historic Site and with a lifetime hobby of Cold War history involving Atlas missile sites), you really see and learn a lot as far as the visitor experience…
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Continue reading →: Answering the Unanswerable: Personal Preparedness in the Nuclear AgeWhen wondering through an antique mall, the sight of anything marked “Civil Defense” attracts me like a magnet. Sure there are things online you can buy, but its tough to beat the feeling of a real Cold War artifact score – especially when it was cheap. Personal Preparedness in the…
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Continue reading →: The Nukes Up The Road: A Trip to Minot
Traveling US Highway 2 in North Dakota is an experience you will not get elsewhere. When I first moved here, I was very surprised to note that the highway is four-lane across almost the entire state – from Grand Forks to Rugby, Minot to Williston. This was built before the…
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Continue reading →: How I learned to stop worrying, and finally watch When The Wind BlowsI’m not quite sure how true this is, but it sounds as though many if not most Americans were introduced to British media through PBS. When I was younger, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was not necessarily a constant on the channel (of which we picked up well on antenna), but…
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Continue reading →: Ironically Close in the Isolated Nuclear West: End of the Quiet Season, Again.
“Long thoughts of the West. How impossibly fast it was discovered and settled. How quickly it matured and grew old. My mind drifts away from the ghost towns and empty ranches to the present, to my own work. I, who wrote books about atomic weapons, find myself writing one about…
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Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site
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