The obsessive missile hunter,
KANSAS CITY, MO.— Not worth it.
This quixotic mission to dig up an entombed Minuteman II Cold War missile facility — two months into the hard labour — is nothing but a muddied mess.
“If I knew then what I know now . . .” says Russ Nielsen.
He’s 66. He’s some 2,900 kilometres from his California home and his wife of 45 years. He’s got the screaming roar of an industrial vacuum truck still punishing his ears as workers, hacking11metres down into the Earth, feed a sucking tube with the quasicement and rock and water that was meant to foil anyone as crazy as him.
He’s twice over what he budgeted, and way beyond any concept of how long this would take after spending the past two years generating 10 work plans to satisfy the relentless requirements of state and federal environmental regulators.
To date, he and the hired crews have only jackhammered their way through the concrete cap and dug through the fill dirt and debris the military dumped into the elevator shaft when it decommissioned all of the Missouri intercontinental ballistic missile sites some 20 years ago.
What he really wants — access to the complicated den where missileers stood with the launch keys to 10 of the 150 underground missiles in Missouri — lies beyond a still-blocked blast door. Its steel is some 60 centimetres thick. “What if it won’t open?” Nielsen says. “Then all I’ve got is a shaft.”
He sits in a folding chair on the asphalt that serves as his patio beside a borrowed camper, not looking like a man at the end of his rope. He’s toughing this out.
“My father was a gambler,” he says. “My grandfather was a professional gambler.”
From the air, Missouri’s two dead missile sites look like tiny barren scars. Less than one hectare each, solitary, innocuous. Typically nothing around them but a lone country lane or open highway.
But they add up. The remnant outlines seen in aerial photos reveal the unwavering pattern of a military that marched — and built — to strict and consistent orders.
“Harden and disperse,” says retired U.S. Air Force Col. Joe Sutter, describing the hallmarks of the ICBM system: hard enough to take a nuclear strike, and dispersed across the Plains so the Soviet Union couldn’t take out more than one at a time.
It was secret only up to a point. Plenty of people who grew up in rural Missouri had seen the military vehicles roll by into those small, high-fenced, identical plots of land.
Terry Jennings was one of those people who re- membered. In 2012, when he bought a deer hunting lease in this rural piece of Missouri, he recognized the surface signs of the U.S. missile defence system.
“I’m an air force brat,” he said. “I saw this and I said, ‘That’s military.’”
It was available for sale and he thought of Nielsen, his rapid-fire real estate friend.
They had met in Las Vegas when Nielsen and his wife were taking advantage of a housing boom in the desert. But would he want to buy this?
There were 1,000 Minuteman missiles in all, buried in the American plains from Missouri to Montana, primed to send their nuclear payload into the air within 30 minutes, by order of the president. First the Minuteman I, and then the refined Minuteman II, in its time the most deadly precise generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles in America’s Cold War arsenal.
The earlier generation of nuclear missiles were massive, expensive to maintain, volatile because of their liquid fuel and in need of constant security, said Gretchen Heefner, an assistant history professor at Northeastern University in Boston and author of The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland.
But the Minuteman came aboard in the 1960s, seen as “a technological marvel,” she said. They used solid fuel and were built so they could be stored and left alone for decades, forever ready to launch.
And 450 of the missile’s current version, the Minuteman III, remain on alert in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.
The first generations of U.S. missile sites, once decommissioned, were often left uncovered and sold for civilian use, some stripped for scrap metal, some converted into subterranean homes.
The missiles were removed and the silos themselves were imploded, never to be used again. The launch centres were cleaned out and then plugged with the residential and security building above them left behind.
The pre-Minuteman missiles were decommissioned before the 1970s and before the Environmental Protection Agency and the nation’s awakening to the soil and water dangers in industrial waste.
It didn’t take long for Nielsen to begin accumulating a file box of documents, plans and rewritten plans.
He was dealing first with the Air Force, but then and going forward with the EPA and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.
First he had to get the government to ease the deed restriction that had prohibited any deep digging on the property. The environmental agencies kept rejecting his work plans for dealing with the excavated materials, but they also kept suggesting ways he could comply.
And once the digging began, the crews soon discovered that the elevator shaft was plugged not just with the flowable cement-like fill, but hundreds of chunks of concrete that had to be hoisted out by bucket.
The property came somewhat cheap — $80,000 — but Nielsen doesn’t want to say how much he’s poured into the excavation.
He was supposed to be home at least a month ago. His wife, Val, understands what he’s gotten himself into, he says, but he adds with a laugh, “She’s not as enthusiastic about this as I am.”
His last conversation with her had come with him still not knowing what would come of that blast door excavation.
But at the moment, 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 6, he’s sitting by his camper, back on the phone with the familiar voice of his DNR Department of Natural Resources contact, when one of the excavation crew from Action Environmental of Kansas City is standing over him.
“The blast door is opened,” he says. “It opened on its own.”
For a moment Nielsen’s cellphone hangs in his hand at his ear. He’s looking at the face of the crew member.
“I’ve got to interrupt,” he says to the state official on the phone.
“I just got word they opened the blast door.”
It takes another day before the excavation crew thinks the cavern is safe and the water level low enough to go in, but by then a welder has installed a ladder at the top, so at least Nielsen and the crew don’t have to be hoisted down by harness anymore.
It had been waterlogged for much of the past 22 years. It looks to him as he imagines a sunken submarine would look once lifted from the sea.
No furniture was left behind. No computers. No missileer keys.
Whatever is to come of it still means a lot of work ahead, whether it is on Nielsen, or another investor, or a history buff, or someone looking to shore up a sure bunker to survive the end of the world as we know it.
The whole thing was still too hard. Still probably not worth it. But now, with great relief, Nielsen said, “At this point, I’m happy I did it.”