When the missile fields came to the ranches and wheat farms of western South Dakota, the neighbors had opinions. Boone tells the story of the landowners who lived on top of the Cold War, and how it ended.
What would you pay to get a nuclear missile out of the middle of your wheat? One man offered the Air Force his land for free, if they'd only move it to a corner, and they turned him down. The Air Force had a hundred and fifty silos to place across western South Dakota in the early nineteen sixties, and Gene Williams, who grew up on a ranch east of Wall, said most of the landowners were patriotic people, fresh from the war. They were told they had no recourse anyway. So they formed the Missile Area Landowners Association, with dues of one dollar, mostly for postage, and for their dollar they got called unpatriotic, which you might take hard if you'd come home from that war. As late as March of nineteen sixty-one, the Park Service's study found, Congress hadn't finished funding the program, so those ranchers weren't the ones holding it up. Williams was a boy. His folks left him with his grandmother and went to court over the silo in the middle of their field, and as he recalled it they won some money, and the silo stayed, and he figured it took a month out of his life, working around the four extra corners. You learn early on a farm, he said, that "anything that can go wrong will go wrong," and here was a thermonuclear device a half mile from the house, and if somebody turned the wrong key, "the thing could go boom and you're just vapor." The Husteads' drugstore in Wall opened at four-thirty in the morning to pack lunches for the construction crews, and at one launch center somebody painted a pizza box on the blast door. "World-wide delivery in thirty minutes or less, or your next one is free." The arms treaty ended it, and the Air Force came to tear it out, and the ranchers feared for their wells, and Williams, the boy who'd been left with his grandmother, started the association up again. They won first refusal on their silo sites, and because South Dakota's missiles were the first to go, that rule set the standard for the country. They even asked to keep the silos for grain, and the arms treaty said no. One last offer came to many of those landowners, the chance to push the button that imploded the silo beside their own land. Would you have? Thirty years of extra corners, under one thumb.
Photo: National Park Service, no photographer named, public domain · Public domain