In N.D., silos offer a look at risks past
Put current woes in perspective
COOPERSTOWN, N.D. - In a time of uncertainty, upheaval and catastrophic risk, there's nothing like a missile silo.
You may have no idea what your 401(k) will be worth, or your house, or whether your kids will be able to go to college. Eighty feet below the plains of North Dakota, however, these concerns magically evaporate.
Take a slow, loud elevator cage down into the depths of Oscar Zero, as it is called - the launch control center for what used to be a bevy of Minuteman III nuclear missiles aimed at the late, great Soviet Union - and return now to those days of the Cold War when, unlike today, even when things were bleak, they were at least clear.
"In the movie 'WarGames,' we were the first to go," Delore Zimmerman, a Grand Forks economic development specialist, recalls cheerfully.
When you're surrounded by 150 Minuteman III silos, with 400-plus warheads, spread out geometrically across eight very large counties from the Canadian border to Interstate 94, you have an extremely clear idea of what the end of the world looks like. Kind of consoling, actually, in its lack of ambiguity.
Today is harder.
Oh, sure, the Cold War end-of-the-world scenarios had plenty of stress overload, especially in how they would start. What if the Israelis were to start losing a Middle East war, for example, or what if the North Koreans disappeared up their own corkscrew logic?
But the Cold War scenarios were by several orders of magnitude the most excruciatingly studied futures that never came to pass. Today, we have survived as a species and even thrived sufficiently to create credit default swaps that possibly will do what the Soviet nuclear targeters failed to do: bring us to our knees.
You think about this at the bottom of Oscar Zero.
Its portion of the actual missile fields that made North Dakota one of the world's great nuclear powers has been gone for a decade, destroyed as part of an agreement between the United States and Russia. Oscar Zero, however, has been preserved in the hope that the State Historical Society will one day reopen it as a museum. Such an attraction is seen as an economic development opportunity, bringing in tourists. Oscar Zero is not yet open to the public, but if you've got friends in the economic development community, it's possible to find someone with a key who will show you around.
That would be John Clark, a Cooperstown native who maintains the place just as it was on July 17, 1997, the day the nuclear warriors stood down. When Clark was in the Air Force, he served as a "nuclear weapons specialist." He would test the cone-shaped warheads electronically to make sure they would work. You ask him if that was spooky. More in hindsight than at the time, he says.
How are your retirement funds doing? you ask Clark, 58, your tour guide who still works in maintenance at the local hospital. "If there's anything I could go back to school for, it would be economics," he says, without the slightest hesitation. "I don't understand it, I guess."
He shakes his head so rapidly it's like a shiver. 