![]() The missile roared powerfully out of the silo, a trail of flames and rocket exhaust arcing behind it in the night sky. Simultaneously, they each turned keys on their underground consoles, sending an electronic signal to the 79,432-pound weapon: ignition. It would be a full month later, just after midnight, when missile launch officers would issue a command to open a 110-ton door over the test silo. Once at the test base in California, two officers from Malmstrom were assigned to an underground launch control center that resembles their actual launch facility in Montana - and the preparations began. (The missile housed in Foxtrot 2 had clocked 32,500 on its guidance system by the time it was extracted and shipped to Vandenberg.) The missiles wait in their underground silos with the gyroscopes spinning inside their guidance systems around the clock, ready to launch in minutes if the president orders a nuclear strike. Unlike the moon rockets, the ICBMs are still at work. ![]() aerospace industry built the Apollo spacecraft that took men to the moon. The missile hardware dates to the 1960s, the same era when the U.S. Once there, the test missile was reassembled, inserted into a silo and powered up. The missile was transported by truck to Vandenberg, where the Air Force has been testing its ICBMs for more than half a century.Ī dozen launch officers and maintenance men and women from the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana left their Arctic-like conditions and drove to Vandenberg for a visit that would span more than two months. Stoss recalled that when it was his turn to select a missile, it took him a couple throws to even hit the list - a fact not to be taken as predictive of the Air Force’s actual targeting capabilities in the event of nuclear war. Fred Stoss, operations commander for the Global Strike Command. “We can’t think of a more random method than that,” said Maj. The dart hit Foxtrot 2’s location, about 22 miles northeast of tiny Augusta, Mont., sometimes called the “last original cow town in the West.” The missile selected for testing had been chosen randomly in an improbable but apparently long-standing Air Force tradition: A map of missile sites was put on a wall and an officer was selected to throw a dart at it. The tests, which cost $18 million each, not only give the Air Force crucial data on the function of its aging missiles, but send a clear international signal, complete with high-definition photography, of America’s continued ability to launch a nuclear strike. The aging missile had been selected for a test-fire, to prove it still worked and could hit a bull’s-eye - within several hundred feet, anyway - on a target in the South Pacific, 4,200 miles away.Ībout four times every year, the Air Force goes through the exercise of pulling an ICBM out of a silo, removing its nuclear warhead and sending it to Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc for a test launch. That mission ended in February, when an Air Force crew ventured out onto the frozen Great Plains with a special crane and pulled it out of the hole. ![]() ![]() A Minuteman III missile inside the silo known as Foxtrot 2 in Montana was on alert for nearly half a century, ready to fire a more than 300-kiloton hydrogen bomb to an adversary anywhere in the world in about 30 minutes. ![]()
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