It’s been a couple of days since I’ve posted anything, mainly because I’ve had very marginal phone coverage, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been busy!  I left Sioux Falls and drove almost straight west across the Great Plains of South Dakota.  As I think I’ve established, I love mountains, but I’ve surprised myself by also kind of falling in love with these rolling grasslands!  This is the area that’s always called the breadbasket of the country, and I could see why, with all kinds of crops planted in huge fields that stretched to every horizon.  I’m not really familiar with farming techniques here, but I never saw any irrigation equipment, so don’t know if it’s used — perhaps there’s enough rain?  I’m also no expert when it comes to identifying crops, but I know that I saw wheat, corn, and a dark green crop that might have been soybeans.  And there were sunflowers!  Field after field of millions, trillions, oceans of sunflowers!

I had to stop for a look.  The sun was shining, a cool breeze was blowing, and I was wandering through fields of sunflowers!  Wow.  My life is pretty good, isn’t it?!

There are a lot of billboards along the highway in South Dakota trying to lure the traveller into tourist attractions, but I wasn’t so much interested in those.  Although I have to admit that when I saw a sign advertising “Claw Antler Hide — Fur all your critter parts!” I had to think that a foreign tourist here would find the US very confusing!  Critter parts…!

But the place I wanted to stop wasn’t advertised by any signs, and was hardly even on my maps — the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site.  I made the mistake of believing my GPS, and so ended up completely lost.  I resorted to Google Maps, only to find that Google and Garmin couldn’t even agree on where I was, much less where I should go.  So I opted to trust Google, telling me that the fastest way to get to my destination was 20 miles down a farming road.  So I flipped the FJ into 4H and let her rip.  Sure enough, Google was right.

There were only a few other people there, but I’m very glad I went.  The entrance reminded me of the Cold War policy of MAD — mutually assured destruction.  The idea that the best defence is a good offence, even if it means your entire population living in fear.

I grew up about 20 miles down the road from a nuclear air base, and I clearly remember doing air raid drills in school, crawling under my flimsy desk, as if it was somehow going to protect me from 10 megaton Russian nuclear bombs.  Even then I remember being skeptical of the staying power of plywood desks in that scenario, and thinking that it might just be better to tell me that I was toast if the local base was attacked.  Interestingly, these ‘duck and cover’ drills were one of the most common memories of the people at the site when I was there.  I suppose it was because that was the way the Cold War was really personal to us.

The interpretive information there was quite interesting, and explained the approval process for launch, the year by year buildup of weapons in the US (blue bars below), and the USSR (red bars below), and also showed that there are now fewer nuclear weapons in the world than there has been at any time since about 1960.  You can see where the red bars spike up — that’s about the time when I was relying on my school desk to protect me.

Part of the madness of MAD was brought home to me by another display, though.  It shows the times that the world almost came to an end, through misunderstanding, machine error, human error..

About 15 miles down the road from the interpretive site is a missile silo that’s been decommissioned and opened to the public, although, once again, there are no signs to lead you there if you don’t already know what you’re looking for, and I imagine that many people just drive by never knowing.

The 50 foot Minuteman II missile in its silo is still an impressive sight.  At the peak, there were about one thousand of these scattered across the plains.  I understand that there are currently 450 Minuteman III missile silos still on the Great Plains.

Visiting this site left me with mixed feelings.  As an engineer, I love the machinery and design of it all, and yet..  I lived through the Cold War.  I was deployed to a war zone and lived at a Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan.  I attended a ramp ceremony there where the remains of two young soldiers that had been killed by an IED were loaded on a plane to be returned to their families — I still think about those unknown families.  While my base was bombed and my helicopter was shot at, I still saw the destruction caused in the lives of the average people in Afghanistan who, like most of us, just wanted to live a normal and safe life.  Some of my closest friends have been in the military, and I’ve worked for the military much of my life.

I’m not exactly a pacifist, but I believe in the lasting power of diplomatic solutions over military ones.  And I believe that war will always be most destructive to the average person, and good for corporations.  And yet.  And yet… MAD worked, didn’t it?  We scared ourselves silly with our own power, and in the end refused to use it.  I see kids today being concerned about climate change and terrorism, and they seem to almost uniformly have the impression that if they try hard enough, they can indeed do something about it, they can save the world.  I don’t mean to downplay them, but these are slow tragedies, solvable problems, not cataclysmic single events.  Not mushroom clouds and nuclear fallout.  Not one or two people with their fingers on the buttons that will end us all.  Americans (and, I imagine, Russians) of my generation have burned into our psyches that, yes, the world can come to an end.  We have the power to destroy ourselves if we’re mad enough to use it.  But we didn’t.  And that gives me a bit of faith in us all.

So should we plant more sunflowers and get rid of the missiles?  I don’t know.  The world and the people in it don’t always act the way I think they will.  I don’t have any answers.  Maybe there just aren’t any.  Maybe what’s most important is that we think about these things, we learn from them, and we keep asking questions.  Don’t forget, but don’t live in fear either.

But in the mean time… isn’t the world a beautiful place?