I think he either wanted to turn it into a real cool man cave or something, but you know they flooded those things up.”Īccording to the Kansas City Star, in 2017 the hollowed out silo was going for $325,000.Ī look inside the Oscar-01 launch facility at the Whiteman Air Force Base. “The DNR and several other people were out there and wanted to see what he was getting into. “You weren’t allowed to re-enter these facilities, but after long they were just like, ‘yeah go ahead’,” Grisdale said. One of the launch sites located outside of Holden, Missouri, was actually dug out and put up for sale on Ebay in 2017. Mike-11 in Centerview, Missouri, has overgrown greenery lining a plot of land, rounding out the edges of the fencepost that once cut it off from the rest of the field around it. At the Alpha-11 site in Blackburn, Missouri, there are now the dead bodies of old cars, trucks and vans. In Kingsville, Missouri, what once was the location of Mike-09, now is home to a Seventh Day Adventist Church. There is a wide variety of uses for the old land. “And as the Cold War ended, and this stuff is talked about less, I kind of forgot about it, and then reconnected with those fears as an adult.” “These things were cocked and loaded in the ground ready to go,” Hofer said. Hofer’s photo series was inspired by arms race tensions between the U.S., Russia, North Korea and China in the 21st century. The key would have been used in the Cold War to launch Minuteman II missiles. “They’re pretty scary, and it connects back to anxieties I had as a kid growing up during the Cold War in the 80s.”Ī close-up shot of the launch key at the Oscar-01 facility at the Whiteman Air Force Base. “The older I become as an adult, the more I see that my personal view is that these weapons of mass destruction, as I think of them, are just not needed,” Hofer said. Some even still have the original fence line put up by the military. The photos were taken from an aerial view via drone, and show the nearly perfect rectangular plots of land where the silos used to be. Hofer’s photo series “One and a Half Acres” documents what the sites look like nearly three decades after they were decommissioned. So these were instances in my mind where a nuclear agreement worked.” “The other reason I find them interesting is because those had to be decommissioned through the START missile treaty. “The reason I’m principally interested in those (missile silos) is because, first there’s so many of them,” Hofer said. What’s left is a collection of land that shows how far the country has come from the brink of nuclear war. The land was sold back to the owners for as little as $600 to as much as $12,000. The missiles were shipped off to a base in Utah, and the silos were destroyed. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev signed the START Treaty in 1991. These sites stayed active until President George H.W. But the military moved them further north to locations in Missouri, Montana, South Dakota and North Dakota so they could reach their targets in Russia and China, while still staying away from highly populated areas. These new missiles were originally supposed to be further south, in states like Texas, Georgia and Oklahoma. The Minuteman missiles replaced Atlas and Titan missiles, some of which were located in Kansas. That was probably about as far as my thinking went, honestly, as a kid.” There are some people who protest against them. “There are some people who think they’re necessary. “As a kid, you’re thinking about these rockets that are in the ground in the Midwest,” Hofer said. He was raised in a part of the country that was home to about 450 missiles during the time. He was born in Nigeria, but soon his family would return to the states, and settle in Eudora, Kansas. Nate Hofer’s father was a Mennonite teacher in Nigeria. Each of these sites housed underground nuclear missiles during the Cold War, part of an effort to hide our doomsday arsenal in the middle of the Great Plains. This is Charlie-03, one of more than 150 retired Minuteman II sites in Missouri. It’s hard to believe that this remote parcel was once home to a weapon powerful enough to wipe out an entire civilization, buried deep underground. Farm equipment also juts into the plot, taking up nearly a quarter of the perfect rectangle of land fenced off from the rest of the world. On a farm near Boonville, Missouri, a dog house sits on the north side of a grassy field.
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