Minuteman Missile National Park

Today we visited the Minuteman Missile National Park. This is a new park opened up only two years ago. As of now the two hour tour is free. It is a misnomer that the missiles were a secret; their locations could be seen from the highway and by satellite if the Russians or anyone else wanted to look. This missile, the Minuteman II could be deployed in remote unstaffed underground silos and launched by crews stationed at launch control facilities miles away. They were designed to travel over the North Pole and arrive at targets thirty minutes after the launch command was given, its 1.2 megaton warhead carried the explosive equivilent of over one million tons of dynamite. This facility is set up to preserve Delta-09 - launch facility and Delta-01, a launch control facility. Our tour guides were two men who had worked at the site when they were in the airforce.