John Hooks Korda says that the rationale that the military and the government came up with was this idea of a nuclear triad basically, that America needs to have nuclear capability from air, land and sea, with the ICBMs being the land portion. Matt Korda I'm a senior research associate project manager for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. Matt Korda Counterintuitively, the weapons came first and then the questions of how and when to use them came second. At that time, the focus was on building as many missiles as we could, as quickly as we could. John Hooks Sputnik kicked off a whole new phase of the conflict and triggered a deluge of military spending to ramp up our own missile technology in competition with the Soviets. And the origin of those dates back to the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and '60s, specifically the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957. The weapons here in Montana are intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBMs. John Hooks Well, first we got to dig into how they got here in the first place. John Hooks That's because our listener question this week is why? Why are there so many nuclear missiles scattered over central Montana?Īustin Amestoy Okay, so where do we start? But why are we talking about them for this episode? The areas in black denote deactivated missile wings, the areas in red denote the active missile wings.Īustin Amestoy So I remember hearing a lot about these missile sites during that whole recent Chinese balloon debacle. National Park Service Map showing the areas of the six Minuteman Missile wings on the central and northern Great Plains.
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