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Just One U.S. Reservation Hosts Nuclear Weapons. This Is The Story of How That Came to Be
15 nuclear missiles deployed in underground concrete silos across the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota. It took displacement and flood to get them there.
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November 17, 2023
Just One U.S. Reservation Hosts Nuclear Weapons. This Is The Story of How That Came to Be
15 nuclear missiles deployed in underground concrete silos across the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota. It took displacement and flood to get them there.
By Ella Weber edited by Jeffery DelViscio, Sébastien Philippe & Tulika Bose
[Timelapse of a lake with an overlay of animation of ICBM missiles on it]
Nina Berman. Dominic Smith/Scientific American
[Illustration of a Bohr atom model spinning around the words Science Quickly with various science and medicine related icons around the text]
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This podcast is Part 2 of a five-part series. Listen to Part 1 here. The podcast series is a part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.
Edmund Baker: Is it, is it true that out of all of these, though, we are the only reservation?
Sébastien Philippe: Yeah.
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Baker: Oh…we are….
Philippe: You’re the only reservation in the United States who hosts nuclear weapons.
Baker: Okay, guys, that’s a new perspective.
[CLIP: Music]
Ella Weber: In American history, certain stories remain untold, buried beneath the weight of oppression, neglect and exclusion.
How nuclear missiles ended up being deployed on the Fort Berthold reservation of the MHA Nation in North Dakota — also called the Three Affiliated Tribes — is one such story—a tale that epitomizes the troubled relationship between Native Americans and the U.S. government.
That, by the way, is Edmund Baker, environmental director of MHA Nation. He’s responsible for enforcing the Three Affiliated Tribes’ environmental protection code. He wasn’t exactly aware of the U.S. Air Force’s plan to modernize all of its existing nuclear missile silos, including the 15 on our reservation. But more on that in the next episode.
You are listening to Scientific American’s podcast series The Missiles on Our Rez. I’m Ella Weber, a member of the MHA Nation, a Princeton University student and a journalist. This is Episode 2: “After the Flood Came the Missiles.”
In the first episode, I explained how I came to learn that my tribe was hosting 15 nuclear missiles deployed in underground concrete silos across our reservation in North Dakota.
Today I want to dig deeper into this history. This is important because it’ll give you more context when we talk about the U.S. Air Force’s plans to refurbish these silos and deploy new nuclear missiles in them for the next 60 years.
[CLIP: Powwow sounds]
Weber: The silos are just a couple of miles away from my grandma Debra’s house and from the powwow grounds in Parshall, North Dakota. How on earth did these weapons of mass destruction end up on the reservation?
Weber: The silos are just a couple of miles away from my grandma Debra’s house and from the powwow grounds in Parshall, North Dakota. How on earth did these missiles end up on the reservation?
Debra Malnourie: I think I was at Wahpeton Indian School, because I really didn’t know anything about this stuff until I came back. I was maybe 18, 19. I had no clue. I know there was, there was, there was some sites, but I didn’t know what was in the sites.
Weber: The silos on the reservation were built between 1961 and 1963. Back then many of the residents of the Fort Berthold reservation were children. When I asked my grandma if she remembered the time when the silos arrived, she couldn’t.
Malnourie: I still don’t know what's in the sites, you know.
Weber: When MY Grandma came back from boarding school, the concrete was already poured, and the missiles were underground, out of sight. So I turned to historians and scholars to shed some light on this troubled story.
[CLIP: Cold war newsreel: “But after the Korean conflict, the Cold War went right on. All along, it had been only too obvious that ever since World War II, the Soviets had been building their military strength. Their threat of world domination was real, and it was increasing all the time.]
Weber: The late 1950s and early 1960s marked a period of intense cold war tensions. The Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 triggered the U.S. to build land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in 1958. The U.S. Air Force prepared to deploy 1,000 nuclear missiles, each carrying a high-yield nuclear warhead, in six bases across the Northern Plains, including 150 in Minot, North Dakota, next to our reservation.
David Stumpf: One of the criteria at the very beginning was: it needed to be located by a Strategic Air Command base. And so Minot and Grand Forks were already Strategic Air Command bases. Then for the initial deployment of Minuteman 1A, there was a range issue.
They also had to have the right soil. All of these sites were thoroughly surveyed for water table and ease and ease of excavation. But they also had to have enough space to put 150 silos. And that’s a lot of room. As noted in my book, that’s tens of thousands of acres and hours between the furthest-away sites and the base.
Weber: That’s David Stumpf, author of Minuteman: A Technical History of the Missile That Defined American Nuclear Warfare, published in 2020.
Basically, each missile silo field covers this really large area because each silo had to be several miles away from the next one. That’s because in case there was a Soviet nuclear weapon attack, the extra space would have prevented more than one silo from being destroyed.
By the way, the 150 silos at Minot cover an area of about 8,000 square miles.
That was all really important to know. But I specifically wanted to understand how some of the silos ended up on tribal land.
Weber (tape): Did you ever come across like, any, like, documents talking about that while doing your research?
Stumpf: Talking about what, being on a reservation?
Weber (tape): Mmm-hmm.
Stumpf: No, I never came across anything like that, which is an interesting question. But don’t forget, this is back in [the] 1960–1965 timeframe. So the sensitivity to some of this was possibly not as great as it is now. Doesn’t make it right—I’m just saying that that was more of a government ... there was an urgency to get these things built that may have overridden any concern about reservation property.
Weber (tape): I see….
Weber: For me, this resonated deeply. It was a familiar pattern of subjecting my tribe to land grabs and mistreatment.
From the 1850s to 1910, our tribe’s ancestral lands were diminished through a series of treaties, agreements, congressional acts and executive orders.
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