Originally Posted by
MSPeconomist
Autocorrect strikes again, but I assume that there's indeed a fare to enter the fair. Otherwise it just wouldn't be fair at all.
Some of the missile silos look awfully isolated; they're scattered over the landscape. There's at least one that's maintained as a historic site. I went down to see the living quarters and equipment, which was very interesting. It seemed like a time warp from around 1960.
Which was done on purpose so that one incoming missile couldn't take them all out. The missiles are spread all over the upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain states (our missile bases are F.E. Warren AFB in Cheyenne, WY, Malmstrom AFB in Great Falls, MT, and Minot AFB in ND). But the crews are often flown out to the missile sites via helo. Many of the silos are often in the middle of someone's farmland too. And some of the farmers are known, not in negative way, to refer to them as "their missiles".
Originally Posted by
mattp1987
Yes, you're correct that Minot was a SAC base. The host wing is Global Strike Command now, and it hosts both a Bomb Wing and a Missile Wing. This is all publicly available information pulled from the
Minot AFB Wikipedia page if anyone wants to learn more. There are also
fact sheets about the units, aircraft, and missiles that discuss their history.
There were a ton of SAC bases, particularly for B-52s, all over the country during the height of the Cold War. The B-52s were spread out across multiple bases for a similar reason that the missiles are spread so far apart. After the Cold War, B-52 ops have been consolidated to Minot AFB and Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, LA. Two reasons not to be a B-52 crew member.
Many of the bases are still active in some capacity and have had their mission reset (e.g: Fairchild AFB in Spokane is now a KC-135 base - it was a B-52 base during and just after the Cold War). Others have been completely shut down or are used in other civilian capacities but not necessarily militarily anymore though you can sometimes still see remnants of the base via Google Maps, such as the Christmas tree alert ramps near the runways.