March 13, 2011
Third Largest Nuclear Power: North Dakota and the Cold War
No state is more tied to the frontline of the Cold War than North Dakota. With two United States Air Force bases dedicated to a nuclear retaliatory strategy, the United States military held in North Dakota the power to destroy humankind many times over. From 1963 to 1998 North Dakota hosted three hundred nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and a classified number of nuclear bombs and, later, air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) to be delivered by Air Force bombers stationed at the two airbases. Additionally, for many years fighter aircraft sat readied and prepared to launch from the two airbases to shoot down Soviet bombers flying over Canada to attack the US. Radar sites and one short-lived anti-ballistic missile (ABM) site completed North Dakota's Cold War frontline.
The dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had changed the world forever. As has been often said, the Atomic/Nuclear Genie was out of the bottle. The advent of the Atomic Age coincided with a freeze in the relationship between the United States and its former ally, the Soviet Union. Never a warm relationship (the United States had a paranoid attitude towards communists since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917), the Americans had tolerated the Soviets only because they had a common enemy in Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany. With the defeat of Germany and, later, Japan, that paranoia bubbled back to the top of the American policy agenda. Originally, the US held a monopoly on atomic power and believed that for the foreseeable future it would continue to be the world's sole nuclear power. But that confidence was destroyed in 1949 when the Soviets exploded their own atomic bomb.
Three years earlier George F. Kennan had sent to his State Department superiors the Long Telegram, an excellently written analysis of Soviet leadership. Kennan argued persuasively that constant pressure against Soviet aggression was necessary to "contain" the Soviets from expanding beyond their borders—the intellectual foundation of the American policy of Containment. Although for the rest of his life Kennan argued that he didn't mean military confrontations to contain the Soviets, his argument was used loosely by Presidents to justify military interventions in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere around the world.
In 1947, the year after Kennan's telegram, the National Security Act created the United States Air Force in recognition of the role airpower had played in the defeat of America's former foes. Air Force leaders had all recognized the importance of strategic bombing to that success. In 1946 one of these leaders summarized how the world had changed with the atomic bomb when he wrote, "[W]e must have available a unit trained and capable of immediate retaliation against the aggressor nation with our most destructive weapon [that is, the atomic bomb] to effect as much or more destruction than we experienced." Only one such unit existed at that time, the 509th Bomb Group in Roswell, New Mexico, whose aircrews had dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From this unit would evolve the most powerful military organization ever seen in human history, the Strategic Air Command (SAC). And ultimately both Minot Air Force Base and Grand Force Air Force Base in North Dakota would be SAC bases.
Scholar Clay Jenkinson and President Larry Skogen will discuss the development of American nuclear power, the creation of SAC, and the establishment of two SAC bases in North Dakota. They both come to this topic with unique perspectives. Clay has conducted in depth research on Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, and does historical portrayals of Oppy. Larry served as a missile launch officer in the 509th Strategic Missile Squadron (successor of the 509th Bomb Group) and, later, as an operations officer in an ICBM squadron in Wyoming.