The photos were taken from an aerial view via drone, and show the nearly perfect rectangular plots of land where the silos used to be. Hofer’s photo series “One and a Half Acres” documents what the sites look like nearly three decades after they were decommissioned. So these were instances in my mind where a nuclear agreement worked.” “The other reason I find them interesting is because those had to be decommissioned through the START missile treaty. “The reason I’m principally interested in those (missile silos) is because, first there’s so many of them,” Hofer said. What’s left is a collection of land that shows how far the country has come from the brink of nuclear war. The land was sold back to the owners for as little as $600 to as much as $12,000. The missiles were shipped off to a base in Utah, and the silos were destroyed. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed the START Treaty in 1991. These sites stayed active until President George H.W. But the military moved them further north to locations in Missouri, Montana, South Dakota and North Dakota so they could reach their targets in Russia and China, while still staying away from highly populated areas. These new missiles were originally supposed to be further south, in states like Texas, Georgia and Oklahoma. The Minuteman missiles replaced Atlas and Titan missiles, some of which were located in Kansas. That was probably about as far as my thinking went, honestly, as a kid.” There are some people who protest against them. “There are some people who think they’re necessary. “As a kid, you’re thinking about these rockets that are in the ground in the Midwest,” Hofer said. ![]() He was raised in a part of the country that was home to about 450 missiles during the time. He was born in Nigeria, but soon his family would return to the states, and settle in Eudora, Kansas. Nate Hofer’s father was a Mennonite teacher in Nigeria. Each of these sites housed underground nuclear missiles during the Cold War, part of an effort to hide our doomsday arsenal in the middle of the Great Plains. This is Charlie-03, one of more than 150 retired Minuteman II sites in Missouri. ![]() It’s hard to believe that this remote parcel was once home to a weapon powerful enough to wipe out an entire civilization, buried deep underground. Farm equipment also juts into the plot, taking up nearly a quarter of the perfect rectangle of land fenced off from the rest of the world. On a farm near Boonville, Missouri, a dog house sits on the north side of a grassy field. All Minuteman LCCs operated under a policy requiring two people in the control center at all times.Sponsor Message Become a Flatland sponsor They're also shielded against an electromagnetic pulse and designed to be self-sufficient for at least long enough to launch their missiles if they were required to do so. The bunkers are hardened against everything but a direct nuclear hit. The underground facility is not only larger, but also features HVAC equipment and a generator that at Delta-One are on the surface. This was the Oscar-Zero Missile Alert Facility, which had a newer design than Delta-One. Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Siteįarther to the north, in central-eastern North Dakota, is the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site. Much of the equipment dates back much further than that, with teletypes and banks of computers that have less processing power than your phone. ![]() Both the topside facility and the Launch Control Center look just as they did when the site was decommissioned in the 1990s.
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