Guarding America’s nuclear arsenal
Underground, on constant alert, airmen hope never to have to fire
— Andy Parthum spends his workday 18 metres below ground awaiting the order he hopes never arrives: to launch the most powerful weapon ever devised by man. He is a nuclear “missileer” — an airman who does his duty not in the air but in a hole in the ground.
On both counts — the possibility of firing weapons that could kill millions, and the subterranean confinement — a missileer lives with pressures few others know.
It’s not active combat, although the air force calls them combat crew members. Yet no one can exclude the possibility, remote as it may be, that one day a president will deliver the gut-wrenching order that would compel a missileer to unleash nuclear hell.
“Absolutely, it weighs on your mind,” Parthum, 25, said on a recent afternoon at Juliet-01, a Minuteman 3 missile launc hsite near Minot Air Force Base, whose 91st Missile Wing controls 150 of the nation’s 450 Minuteman missiles.
It may come as a surprise to some that the air force still operates intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. And therein lies part of the problem for missileers, who feel underappreciated in a military that has long since shifted its main focus to fighting small wars, striking with unmanned drones and countering terrorism and cyberattacks.
Parthum, however, says he takes pride in his role.
“It’s sobering. It’s not something that’s taken lightly by anybody,” Parthum said as he and his crewmate, 23-yearold 2nd Lt. Oliver Parsons, showed visitors around the small launch control centre where they were several hours into a 24-hour watch over a group of 10 missiles.
It’s a sometimes tedious duty the air force calls “standing alert.” Some say their biggest challenge is staying alert.
Missileers, typically 22- to 27-year-old lieutenants and captains, work in pairs, with a relief crew arriving every 24 hours. A missileer generally does two “alerts” a week. It was Parthum’s 118th. (He keeps track.)
It’s not hard to see why some missileers find it hard to adjust to life there. A blast door seals their launch control centre from a potential incoming nuclear detonation. Twice last year, launch officers were disciplined after admitting they left the blast door open while a crewmate was asleep — a security violation. That and other lapses in discipline, training and leadership were documented by The Associated Press over the past year, prompting Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel to declare that “something is wrong.”
The ICBM launch control centre is actually two separate structures. An outer protective shell is made of reinforced concrete lined with a steel plate. A smaller, boxlike enclosure where the missileers work, eat and sleep is suspended inside the protective shell by pneumatic cylinders called “shock isolators” attached to the shell’s ceiling by heavy chains; the isolators are designed to keep the space stable if there is a nuclear blast.
These underground command posts have changed relatively little since they were built in the early 1960s, although the air force recently committed to refurbishing them to make a missileer’s life a bit easier. Juliet-01, the command post a reporting team was permitted to visit, had just been repainted and spruced up to remove corrosion caused by water intrusion, giving it what one officer called “that new car smell.”
The launch centre is accessible only from an aboveground building that resembles a small ranch-style home. An access shaft descends from a vestibule inside the building, which is controlled by a security team and surrounded by alarms and a chain-link fence.
The U.S. has never fired an ICBM, other than for flight testing. Their stated purpose is to help deter nuclear war by convincing a potential attacker that it would have more to lose than to gain.
ICBM duty is far removed from the glamour, guts and glory associated with the air force. It not only falls short of the image of a fighter or bomber pilot streaking across enemy skies, it requires sitting, unseen and largely unappreciated, in a stuffy capsule to babysit missiles.
Upward of two-thirds of missileers were “volunteered” for the job after gaining their officer commission. Once they complete basic ICBM training, they are sent on four-year tours to one of three missile bases: Minot, Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, or F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.
The responsibility is enormous, the cost of mistakes potentially colossal, ranging from environmental damage to inadvertently triggering a nuclear war.
Over time, with the passing of the Cold War, the air force lost focus on its nuclear mission. It also lost a good deal of what remained of the allure of serving as a missileer.
Starting in October, the air force will offer entry bonuses to newly trained missileers, as well as “duty pay” for security forces, missileers and others who operate in the missile fields.