A Visit to the Nuclear Missile Next Door

78-year-old rancher Ed Butcher has, for 60 years, lived with a nuclear missile as his closest neighbor - an active U.S. government nuclear missile, buried just beneath his cow pasture. "Do you think they'll ever shoot it up into the sky?" asks his wife Pam, during a visit from the Washington Post. "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. They are located on bison preserves and Indian reservations. They sit across from a national forest, behind a rodeo grandstand, down the road from a one-room schoolhouse, and on dozens of private farms like the one belonging to the Butchers, who have lived for 60 years with a nuclear missile as their closest neighbor. 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."

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