(uneasy music) - You know, to come here to Oscar-Zero, you know, you have this long travel time out here to kind of a remote area of the United States.

We like to think we're not too remote, but just the feeling out here is the feeling of awe that you have this house behind me here, and then there's a hardened nuclear bunker beneath it that's one of the toughest nuclear bunkers that were ever built by the United States that we're aware of.

My name is Rob Branting.

I'm the historic site supervisor of the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic site.

The November 33 launch facility and the Oscar-Zero Missile Alert Facility were Cold War installations of the US Air Force supporting the Minuteman Missile Program.

These sites were built out here north of Cooperstown, North Dakota, between 1964 and 1966, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

We are at Oscar-Zero and we're about an hour and a half northwest of Fargo from here.

- This is our protagonist, Minuteman.

A new muscle in this country's armament of peace-preserving force.

(anxious music) - So at this stage of the Cold War, we're looking at a little bit of a stabilization of the American Nuclear Strategic Deterrent where the American nuclear force is stabilizing, whereas the Soviet force is still growing a little bit.

But both sides are realizing during the 1960s, because of the instant retaliatory capability of the Minuteman Missile Force, and then later on with the Soviet nuclear forces, kind of on the opposite side, there was no win scenario about attacking a nation that could utterly destroy them.

(explosion booming) North Dakota in the early days of the Cold War, there wasn't a lot of prominence up here, but the air defense mission during the 1950s is what really put North Dakota into the spotlight.

They started out with Air Force stations near Finley, Fortuna, and Minot.

Beyond that, they went to interceptor bases up there at Minot and Grand Forks Air Force Bases.

At the same time in the late 1950s, Strategic Air Command was looking to disperse their bomber fleet.

They pretty much had a too many eggs in one basket type of scenario.

And then the US Air Force realizes North Dakota is an ideal location for locating the Minuteman Missile Force.

(elevator whirring) They really wanted to make the Minuteman force well protected.

So they wanted it to last a little longer during a nuclear conflict.

So you're looking underground here.

You're 50 feet underground.

You have these thousand pound per square inch over pressure protected buildings.

They wanted to ensure that if you had this stable nuclear force, you can commit to what was known as a second strike, that if even under surprise attack conditions the retaliatory force could still fly and basically avenge a nuclear attack.

Now, at the time, there were normally 10 people here.

There could be more with remain overnight crews, with maintainers and extra security forces.

On top side, you had a facility manager, a cook, and then two teams of security personnel.

So their average day, they might be responding to alerts.

Other times, they're doing maintenance and basically getting ready to support the missile crews downstairs as needed.

(uneasy music) So if a launch was ordered by the president, essentially it's coming down the channels of nuclear command and control.

Telephone lines, if the telephone lines are not working, they had satellite communications, radio, a number of ways to get the message.

So you're down there in the launch control center.

Many alarms, many printouts are going on at the same time, but they're going through the paces to authenticate that message, to unlock the missiles, and then go about the launch sequence.

We still actually don't know where these missiles are headed.

A lot of that targeting information is still classified as far as we know.

The though here though is that some of these Grand Forks sites were the closest minuteman installations to the Moscow region.

So the thought is many of these missiles were probably landing in the Soviet Union.

(rocket humming) The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991, there's a decision on both sides that inspectors will be sent to both nations to see, oversee, you know, kind of the drawdown of nuclear forces at the end of the Cold War.

So in 1997, this site closed down.

The missile wing was deactivated in late 1998.

But in 2008, the State Historical Society of North Dakota negotiated basically a deal with the US Air Force to take this site on as a historic site.

And by July of 2009, they were already starting to give tours out here.

We've had a lot of interesting visitors over the years.

We've had folks from Norway come through.

We had a gentleman from the Netherlands.

We've had tours from Russia.

They've been very interesting to engage with the conversation about, you know, looking at these sites and realizing maybe they might've been pointing the missiles at them.

When we have international visitors, they're kind of just interested a lot of times in just the wide spaces of North Dakota, of course.

But then they come out here to Oscar-Zero and they're really amazed to see how the American Nuclear Deterrent worked, especially folks from Western Europe who understood that they stood underneath the American nuclear umbrella, and this is the home base of it.

We feel it's important to preserve this facility because we like to think this facility out here in North Dakota represents kind of a history of just that second half of the Cold War period where things are starting to stabilize, at least, in terms of strategic nuclear weapons.

You know, I'm out here sometimes by myself in the wintertime, and it's still awe-inspiring to go underground to see these launch control centers, to see where the launch keys were, and to understand the consequences of that key turn, that luckily that never happened.

We tried to get across the notion that, of course, if these missiles were ever used, that represented mission failure, they're here to preserve the nuclear deterrent, the status quo of the Cold War to try to keep the peace between the major world powers.

We still live in relative peace between the major powers today, but these weapons ultimately represented a cataclysm that we never wanted to see.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer] Funded by the members of Prairie Public.