How A Montana Community Learned To Live With The Bomb
January 28, 2025 by Allen Stein
The landscape is stark and unforgiving, typical of deep winter in rural Montana.
The snow-covered Judith Mountains rise majestically in the distance, while vast fields of dormant wheat, hay, and barley stretch beneath a gloomy gray sky blanketed in white.
Ed Butcher, 81, peered through the cracked windshield of his red Honda all-wheel drive, which had been struck by a bird a few days earlier.
At the end of an eight mile gravel road, two miles east of the family homestead in Winifred (population 174), he could see his destination.
The one-acre plot is secured by a chain-link fence, complete with surveillance cameras, motion sensors, and barbed wire.
On the fence hangs a sign that reads “Restricted Area,” warning that anyone who breached the fence could be subject to the authorized use of lethal force.
“This is it—the grand tour,” Butcher exclaimed as he parked the vehicle and stepped outside into the biting cold wind and tundra.
He pointed through the fence and said, “There’s the missile.”
Beneath tons of reinforced steel and concrete inside the Hatch Launch E05 facility, the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) has remained on alert for a nuclear attack for 60 years.
In 1964, when Butcher was in high school, his father sold a one-acre plot to the Air Force for $100, allowing it to house this single missile with a nuclear warhead, sitting thousands of miles away from a potential target.
The Minuteman missile system is a powerful weapon system, developed in the late 1950s and deployed a decade later at strategic locations across the United States.
It was a groundbreaking development at the time, combining speed, mobility, and reliability to achieve nearly a 100 percent alert rate—two launch crew officers provide around-the-clock alert ability in the launch center, according to the Air Force.
The missile stands 59 feet tall and weighs 79,342 pounds. It can travel up to 8,700 miles at speeds reaching 15,000 miles per hour outside the atmosphere.
As a weapon of mass destruction, it can deploy up to three Mk12A nuclear warheads, each with a yield of 300 to 350 kilotons of TNT.
Each warhead is more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, which resulted in the deaths of 140,000 people.
Butcher, a former Montana legislator, recalled a period of nuclear brinkmanship based on the principle of mutually assured destruction when the Minuteman missile first arrived on the family ranch.
This was during the peak of the Cold War, following the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the United States and Soviet Union closer to nuclear war than ever before.
Everyone was anxious about a potential nuclear exchange, Butcher recalled, and “duck and cover” drills were routine in schools.
Despite the context, Butcher adapted to living near the missile. He never truly feared a nuclear attack on “Missile Country.”
Logic told him that the Minuteman III would be launched long before any Soviet missile could reach its target.
Butcher, a fifth-generation rancher with 400 to 500 cattle, remarked: “They'd be hitting an empty hole.”
The 12,000-acre cattle ranch has been in the Butcher family since 1913 when Ed’s grandparents first settled there.
Missile County
Fergus County, Montana, approximately the size of New Jersey with a population of 11,772, is home to 52 operational nuclear missile silos. Lewistown serves as the county seat.
The 341st Missile Wing stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in nearby Cascade County. The base is one of three—located in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota—that utilize the Minuteman III land-based missile system.
Butcher said that he had observed the Minuteman III missile outside the hatch at least once during scheduled maintenance.
“I was counting cows out in the pasture,” and the security gate to the missile silo was open, Butcher said. “One of the cows got inside near the missile.”
Butcher said he entered the secure area to fetch his cow. He was immediately confronted by an armed military guard.
“Sir, you can’t be here,” the soldier said.
“I own this place,” Butcher responded. “These are my cows.”
The guard persisted, so Butcher replied, “Then you chase her out.”
The soldier’s eyes got “really big,” Butcher recalled. “He looked at the cow. He looked at me.”
“He finally decided it was OK for me to come riding in. He didn’t want to chase after a cow.”
His father, who was a licensed pilot, would also check on the cattle from the air.
“He’d always turn before he got to the missile [silo],” Butcher said. “ He didn’t want to be flying over if they decided to set it off. That was the closest thing Dad had for concerns” about nuclear missiles.
“Other than that, he didn’t care.”
Three Legs of Deterrence
The Minuteman III weapon system completes America’s nuclear “triad,” which includes submarine-launched ballistic missiles and strategic bombers.
The Sentinel ICBM program is set to replace the 400 missiles and 450 launch facilities of the aging Minuteman III weapon system by 2038, providing capabilities until 2075.
In September 2020, the Air Force awarded Northrop Grumman a contract worth $13.3 billion to design and build the Sentinel program.
However, on Jan. 18, 2024, the Air Force announced that the project’s costs had reached a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach, which is when initial estimate thresholds are exceeded by 25 percent or more, triggering a review.
The cost of the Sentinel program is now estimated at $140.9 billion, representing an 81 percent increase from the program’s 2020 budget.
According to the Nunn-McCurdy review, the command and launch segment accounts for the majority of this cost growth.
In a statement, the Air Force indicated it is developing a comprehensive plan to restructure the Sentinel program, focusing on the root causes of the breach and establishing a suitable management structure to control costs.
“Our U.S. nuclear forces are ready, as they have been for decades, to deter our adversaries and respond decisively should deterrence fail,” said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin in the January 2024 statement.
“We face an evolving and complex security environment marked by two major nuclear powers that are strategic competitors and potential adversaries,” Allvin said.
“While I have confidence in our legacy systems today, it is imperative that we modernize our nuclear Triad. A restructured Sentinel program is essential to ensure we remain best postured to address future threats.”
Lewistown and Great Falls, 116 miles northwest, will be most affected by the Sentinel project in Montana.
The project will involve removing all 45 missile alert facilities from the missile fields and building launch centers in at least 24 locations.
It will include renovating all 450 existing launch facilities to a “like-new” condition.
The Sentinel project also involves the construction of 3,100 miles of new utility corridors while using 4,900 miles of existing corridors and easements.
Good reminders we live on a Prison Planet Earth. @ Edwin
What a story Edwin .