Living next to the doomsday machine
For 50 years, Ed Butcher has worked the ranch right above a nuclear missile launch site, said in These days, the danger feels closer than it has in decades.
W78, tied up his horse, kicked mud off his cowboy boots and walked into his house for dinner. He’d been working on the ranch for most of the day, miles away from cellphone range. “What did I miss?” he asked his wife, Pam, as he turned their TV to cable news. “What part of the world is falling apart today?”
“Russia’s aggression has gone from scary to terrifying,” the TV commentator said, as Pam took their dinner out of the oven.
“We’re talking about a war that involves a very unstable nuclear power,” the commentator said, as they bent their heads over the venison casserole to say a prayer. “This could escalate,” the commentator said. “It could explode beyond our wildest imaginations.”
Ed turned the TV off and looked out the window at miles of open prairie, where the wind rattled against their barn and blew dust clouds across Butcher Road.
Ed’s family had been on this land since his grandparents homesteaded here in 1913, but rarely had life on the ranch felt so precarious. Their land was parched by recordbreaking drought, neglected by a pandemic work shortage, scarred by recent wildfires, and now also connected in its own unique way to a war across the world. “I wonder sometimes what else could go wrong,” Ed said, as he looked over a hill toward the west end of their ranch, where an active U.S. government nuclear missile was buried just beneath the cow pasture.
“Do you think they’ll ever shoot it up into the sky?” Pam asked.
“I used to say, ‘No way,’” Ed said. “Now it’s more like, ‘Please God, don’t let us be here to see it.’”
The missile was called a Minuteman III, and the launch site had been on their property since the Cold War, when the Air Force paid $150 for one acre of their land as it installed an arsenal of nuclear weapons across the rural West. About 400 of those missiles remain active and ready to launch at a few seconds’ notice in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado, and Nebraska.
It’s buried behind a chain-link fence and beneath a 110-ton door of concrete and steel. It’s 60 feet long. It weighs 79,432 pounds. It has an explosive power at least 20 times greater than the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima.
An Air Force team is stationed in an underground bunker a few miles away, ready to fire the missile at any moment if the order comes. It would tear out of the silo in about 3.4 seconds and climb above the ranch at 10,000 feet per second. It was designed to rise 70 miles above Earth, fly across the world in 25 minutes and detonate within a few hundred yards of its target. The ensuing fireball would vaporize every person and every structure within a half-mile. The blast would flatten buildings across a five-mile radius. Secondary fires and fatal doses of radiation would spread over dozens more miles, resulting in what U.S. military experts have referred to as “total nuclear annihilation.”
“I bet it would fly right over our living room,” Ed said. “I wonder if we’d even see it.”
“We’d hear it. We’d feel it,” Pam said. “The whole house would be shaking.”
“And if we’re shooting off missiles, you can bet some are headed back toward us,” Ed said. “I guess we’d head for the storage room,” Ed said.
“Make a few goodbye calls,” Pam said. “Hold hands. Pray.”
Ed got up to clear his plate. “Good thing it’s all hypothetical. It’s really only there for deterrence. It’ll never actually explode.”
“You’re right,” Pam said. “It won’t happen. Almost definitely not.”
KNOWN TO THE government as Launch Facility E05, the silo on Ed’s ranch is one of 52 active nuclear missile sites on the old homestead farms of Fergus County. The government had chosen to turn the lonely center of Montana into a nuclear hot spot in the 1950s because of what was described then as its relative proximity to Russia, and also because the region could act as what experts called a “sacrificial nuclear sponge” in the event of nuclear war. The theory was that rather than unloading all of its missiles on major U.S. cities, an enemy would instead have to use some of those missiles to attack the silos surrounding Winifred, Mont., home to 35,000 cattle and 189 residents whose birthdays and anniversaries were all printed on the official city calendar.
Ed had only lived away from the ranch once during his life, when he went to college in Billings and then started a career as a professor in North Dakota. He’d been on his way toward a doctorate in U.S. history when his father had a heart attack, in 1971, and his mother called to say she was planning to sell the ranch unless he wanted to move back to Montana. He was their only child. The Butcher name was on the road, just like the Wickens and the Wallings and the Stulcs and all of the other original homestead families. Even though he loved teaching, he moved back with Pam to take over the ranch.
When the military built the launch site during Ed’s teenage years, he’d seen it mostly as a potential intrusion, a symbol of federal government overreach and what he called the “insanity of the nuclear arms race.” As a college professor, he’d driven a Volkswagen bus with a peace sign painted on the rear window, and Pam had attended a small protest against the Minuteman missiles at a federal building in rural North Dakota. They’d moved back to the ranch expecting that they might see some of the nuclear drama they’d heard about at other silos: toxic chemical leaks, accidental nearexplosions, Russian spies, or groups of nuns who chained themselves to the silo fence in acts of protest.
But, instead, each time Ed went to check on the silo, all he found was wind and sky and occasionally a cow entangled in the
the Air Force had sent to Fergus County promised.
At the ranch, Pam Butcher had begun to wonder if mankind would survive that long.
“Everywhere I look, it’s like humanity’s moving toward its final hours,” she said, because that’s how she interpreted the recent wildfires, the droughts, the political instability in Europe, the erosion of American democracy, the inflation of the U.S. dollar, the coronavirus pandemic, and also the series of tragedies that had devastated her family in the past few years. Her brother and his wife had recently been killed in a collision with a semitruck. Her son-in-law had died of the coronavirus in 2021. And Trevis, her eldest son, had that included evaporated soup and freezedried meals.
THAT NIGHT, THE temperature dropped below freezing, a snowstorm rolled in from the mountains, and Ed awoke to the sound of an emergency call. His grandson, Josh, had gone to check on the cattle a little after 3 a.m., and he’d found the second calf of the season lying motionless at the bottom of a ravine. The calf was only a few hours old, and it had stumbled away from its mother and fallen into the frozen creek bed. Josh had picked up the calf, carried it to his truck, and turned up the heat. He’d driven back to the house and put the calf into an electric warming bed, but it was still cold and
mostly unresponsive.
“I think we’re going to lose this one,” Josh told Ed, but when they checked on the calf a few hours later, it had opened its eyes. It was sluggish but not dead, so they decided to drive it back onto the ranch to see if it could somehow reunite and bond with its mother.
Ed’s daughter-in-law drove the pickup truck past the missile silo and out toward the cow pasture. His 4-year-old great-granddaughter held the calf in the passenger seat, trying to hug it back to warmth. Ed and Josh sat in the bed of the truck, and then they dropped the calf in the field and tried to call over to its mother.
“Mooo,” Josh yelled. On the first try, the cow ignored them. But after Ed and Josh mended a nearby fence and started heading back toward the truck, Ed called out “Mooo!” one more time, and the cow looked at him and then stood. She walked in the direction of her calf. She looked at it and eventually licked its head. She lay beside the calf and shielded it from the wind as the sun started to break through the clouds.
Ed stood next to his great-granddaughter and watched for another few moments, until finally the cow prodded the calf onto its feet and led it back toward the herd. “How great is this?” Ed asked his great-granddaughter. There were no predators circling the cow pasture, no military helicopters patrolling above the ranch, no explosions coming from the silo over the hill. For the moment, it was just sky and wind and another new life awakening on the Butcher family ranch, where the missile was still buried below ground.
A version of this story originally appeared in The Washington Post. Used with permission.