The Missiles of
Oklahoma
This October marks the 60th anniversary of the
Cuban Missile Crisis. And as the world approached
the brink of nuclear war during those 13 days in October 1962, Oklahoma played
a prominent role in the nation’s nuclear deterrent.
In January 1960, Oklahoma’s U.S. Senators Robert S. Kerr
and Mike Monroney, along with Oklahoma Congressman Toby Morris, announced that
Altus Air Force Base in Jackson County would serve as the hub of 12 Atlas F
intercontinental ballistic missiles that would be housed at separate
communities within 40 miles of the base.
The Cold War was raging, and what ultimately became a
45-year ideological conflict between the United States and the Democratic West
on one side and the Soviet Union and the Communist East on the other had not
reached its midpoint in 1960. When the Soviets got the atomic bomb in 1949, the
Cold War intensified. When the Soviets tested their first thermonuclear device in
1955, it intensified again.
Then, in rapid succession in late 1957, the Soviets
launched the world’s first ICBM, then Sputnik, the world’s first artificial
satellite. Tremendous pressure was placed on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
administration to complete development of the first American ICBM.
And the Atlas missile was born.
Three operational Atlas models were created—the D, E and
F. The 577th Strategic Missile Squadron at Altus Air Force Base operated 12
Atlas F ICBMs.
A symbolic groundbreaking ceremony for the Altus-area
Atlas missile sites was held May 20, 1960, at Altus AFB. The mayors
representing Altus and the 12 nearby communities where the missile sites would
be located participated.
The sites chosen for the Atlas sites were Lone Wolf;
Snyder; Cache; Frederick; Fargo, Texas; Creta; Hollis; Russell; Willow; Hobart;
Manitou; and Granite.
The sites cost approximately $21 million to build.
Adjusted for inflation, the price tag would be about $180 million today.
The Atlas missile was 82.5 feet long and 10 feet wide. It
weighed 18,000 pounds empty and 267,000 pounds when filled with its liquid
fuel. The missile could fly 9,000 miles. If fired from their Altus-area sites,
the missiles would have arrived in the Soviet Union in less than 45 minutes,
inflicting massive destruction.
Each Atlas F missile carried an approximately 4-megaton
(equivalent to about 4 million tons of TNT) nuclear warhead that was more than
250 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on
the Japanese city Hiroshima at the end of World War II in 1945.
The Army Corps of Engineers oversaw construction of the
massive missile sites, an enormous undertaking. Each missile was stored
vertically in an underground silo that was 174 feet deep, 52 feet wide and
built of heavily reinforced concrete that was poured over rebar to withstand a
Soviet nuclear blast at the surface. Silo walls were nine feet thick at the top
down to 30 feet below ground surface where they began tapering downward and
were 2½ feet thick at the bottom.
Within each silo, a huge metal structure the equivalent
of a 15-story building called “the crib” was installed to support the missile
and allow for maintenance.
Each vertical silo included 65-ton hydraulic doors at the
top which were flush with the ground surface when closed.
A 50-foot tunnel connected each silo to the Launch
Control Center (LCC) where a five-person U.S. Air Force crew lived around the
clock. Outfitted with kitchens, showers and beds on one level and the
technology to fire the missile on another level, five-person crews would live
in the LCC working a 24-hour shift, then return to Altus AFB for 48 hours.
Building missile sites was dangerous. Oklahoma was one of
six states — along with Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and New York — to
house Atlas F missiles. Other ICBMs, such as the Titan, were also housed in
several states. Nationwide, more than 50 men died building ICBM sites.
Three men died building the Altus-area sites. Two men
fell to their death at the Cache and Fargo, Texas, sites, and a man was
electrocuted at the Hobart site on his first day of work there.
The sites were built with great speed to hasten the
American nuclear deterrent in a dangerous time.
In a 1961 speech to the United Nations, President Kennedy said, “Every
man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the
slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or
miscalculation or by madness.”
That thread was nearly cut in October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest that
the United States and Soviet Union came to nuclear war. When the Kennedy
administration learned that the Soviet Union was placing nuclear missiles in
Cuba that could reach most of the continental United States, all 12 Altus-area
Atlas F ICBMs were placed on alert for the first time.
Oklahoma and the world were spared a nuclear
conflagration, though Oklahomans near Frederick received a scare when the
missile there exploded May 14, 1964. Fortunately, the warhead was unaffected,
and there were no injuries or fatalities. But the force of the explosion
destroyed the site, and it permanently closed.
The following November, Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara announced that the Atlas program would be phased out by June 1965.
That quickly Oklahoma’s part in the nation’s Cold War
nuclear arsenal ended.
The Atlas sites were decommissioned and sold to private
owners. School districts at Snyder, Hollis, Granite and Fargo, Texas, own the
site properties at those locations today.
When President Kennedy went on national television the
evening of October 22, 1962, to tell the nation of the Soviet missiles in Cuba,
he issued a warning to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Kennedy looked into the camera and told Khrushchev that
the United States would “regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against
any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the
United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
That “full retaliatory response” would have included
firing the nuclear-armed missiles near Altus Air Force Base.
During the crisis, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev pleaded
with President Kennedy by letter that they must avoid nuclear war between their
countries, because “only lunatics or suicides, who themselves want to perish
and to destroy the whole world before they die,” could allow such a war to
happen. He knew the extent of the
American nuclear arsenal, which included missiles nearby.
Western Oklahoma’s ICBMs played an important role within
the nation’s nuclear deterrent during those 13 fraught days in October 1962 as
we approached the brink and the sword of Damocles came perilously close to
falling.
Landry Brewer is Bernhardt Assistant Professor of History for Southwestern Oklahoma State University at the Sayre campus, and he is the author of Cold War Oklahoma.
