A look inside North Dakota Minuteman Missle site

In 2001, Mark Sundlov was in command of a U.S. Air Force launch control center near Max, N.D. It was an underground capsule connected by a direct phone line to four similar posts in rural North Dakota, each connected to 10 Minuteman nuclear missiles.

A fellow commander came on the line one Tuesday morning and told Sundlov to check the news. The date was Sept. 11.

Moments later, Sundlov saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and it wasn’t long before the tone and purpose of military communications he was receiving became more serious.

It was Sept. 11, 2009, the eighth anniversary of the attacks, when I met Sundlov at the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site near Cooperstown, N.D. He is the site supervisor there, meaning he is in charge of a decommissioned facility not unlike the one he commanded as a captain in the Air Force.

When it was active, the site was the Oscar-Zero Missile Alert Facility in the 321st Strategic Missile Wing. It was built in the mid-1960s as a part of the U.S.’s nuclear deterrence effort against the Soviet Union and was one of 15 such facilities in eastern North Dakota between Interstate 94 and the Canadian border.

Oscar-Zero went offline in 1997 when the wing was closed because of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. All the 321st’s missile facilities and launch facilities, which held the missiles, were either destroyed with explosives or filled in, Sundlov said, except for Oscar-Zero. It remained mostly intact, although sensitive items were removed, so the State Historical Society of North Dakota could use it to teach future generations about the work that went into fighting the Cold War.

Except for some carpeting for high-traffic areas, some security cameras and a few ramps to make the facility accessible to wheelchairs, Oscar-Zero is virtually the same as when it was an active facility. Outdoor and news magazines from 1997 stand in the racks in the recreation room — one asks if the U.S. would ever get Saddam Hussein — and the wallpaper and framed prints of wildlife on the walls are the same as they were more than a decade ago.

“The feeling you get is ... they grabbed their personal bags and went out the door,” Sundlov said.

Above ground, the facility has space for enlisted men who provided security for the facility and traveling teams based out of Grand Forks Air Force Base that did maintenance on the missile system. Sundlov said there were usually about eight men living up top.

Sixty feet below ground are two massive concrete capsules where the floors are suspended from the ceiling by massive shock absorbers and the doors more than a foot of steel and concrete in thickness. These two rooms are meant to survive near-miss nuclear blasts, but not direct hits.

One of the capsules is the equipment room, which contained a diesel generator, air filtration machines and other equipment. Sundlov told me that, in the event of a nuclear attack, the enlisted men up top would take supplies and cots into the equipment room with them and seal the door with a hand pump.

I don’t know how eight men could have lived in that room and kept their sanity.

The other capsule is the launch control center, where sets of two officers — known as “missileers” — would take 24-hour shifts behind another heavy door. A warning above the door declares it a “No-lone zone,” meaning no one was to be in the capsule on his own, to prevent anyone from tampering with the equipment.

Inside were two chairs, one for the commander and one for a deputy, and two stations. I watched as Sarah Meester, a tour guide, described the process for launching a missile to a tour group.

Orders would come, Meester said, and if the two missileers agreed a launch had been ordered, they would each retrieve their keys from a red safe, insert them into their stations and turn them simultaneously. The stations are too far apart for a human to touch both keys at once, and they had to turn at the same instant to be effective.

On top of that, two other missileers in one of the four launch control centers linked to Oscar-Zero also had to turn their keys to send a launch command to the missile. That meant it took at least four officers agreeing to a launch before a missile could be used.

“Somebody couldn’t come in here after a bad day and launch a missile,” Meester said.

The control center was even more claustrophobia-inducing than the equipment room, even though it was larger. Both were big enough to hold a school bus, but they contained so much gear it was easy to feel trapped.

I noticed several bits of graffiti underground, including a painting of Bugs Bunny on a beach next to where the commander would vote to launch a missile and a space on the wall by the door where missileers would sign their names on the wall. Several also left their names on the elevator shaft.

Sundlov pointed out a hatch in the wall that led to a sand-filled tube that led to the surface. Had the nation come under nuclear attack, the missileers would have had supplies to last them nine weeks, he said. After that, they would dig their way to the surface.

Back above ground, Sundlov showed me the security station where airmen would keep watch over the surrounding prairie and a map of where all the missile system’s components were located. There were also examples of the very thick cables that connected all the stations, which he said were mostly dug up and sold as scrap metal years ago.

I left Oscar-Zero and drove south toward Cooperstown. The dreary, rainy morning had given way to blue skies with pretty white clouds. About two miles north of town I noticed some hills to the west that seemed to beckon toward me. I turned right onto a section road and drove out a mile or so.

Every time I crossed another hilltop, there was another beautiful scene to photograph. It was like the area was made for landscape photography, and I stopped several times to get out and snap more frames.

Content with the scenery, I headed into Cooperstown for dinner. I parked downtown and walked around pondering my options before choosing the Coachman’s Inn Bar & Cafe.

I started off with an order of “Reuben Bites” as an appetizer — the little fried balls of corned beef, sauerkraut and cheese sounded so funny I just had to try them. It sounds silly, but I can’t argue with how good they tasted.

My main course was the Inn’s take on broasted chicken, and it was fantastic. There was a nice saltiness to the crust, the french fries were cooked very well and the coleslaw was crisp.

After lunch, I walked about, stopping in a few shops to browse. There were several places well suited for anyone looking for antiques or interesting gifts.

There was certainly more to be found in Cooperstown, but that’s all I’ll can tell you, for now. If you want to know any more about this town of about 1,000 people 45 miles northeast of Jamestown, get on the road and “Discover Dakota.”

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