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 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. 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 From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s there were 1,000 Minuteman Silos and 100 corresponding Launch Control Facilities for command and control. 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.

I would recommend planning a minimum of 2-3 hrs total. During the summer, the visitor center and Delta-09 are open to the public Wed-Sun from 8am-4pm. Due to its solid fuel technology, the missiles could be mass produced. There are three NPS sites located along a 15-mile stretch of I-90W: a visitor center, Delta-01 launch control facility, and Delta-09 missile silo. The most common sites have been the Minuteman. 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. 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 Aerial view of the Delta-09 launch facility view towards southwest, 1992.

Minuteman missile silo tickets