Deep underground, missileers watch over America’s nuclear weapons
In a secured room at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, a Monitor journalist and photographer are getting ready to launch a nuclear missile.
It takes two to launch. The training console before them has four screens, its updates appearing in a kludgy old font. There are too many keys.
Three Air Force officials are calmly walking them through the steps to fire off intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). It’s a thicket of acronyms and codes.
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U.S. Air Force missileers have their hands on the triggers of nuclear-armed missiles. Our reporter and photographer participate in a training drill, and report their experience.
The journalist feels herself smile. It’s a common reaction when she’s both panicked and being watched. She cannot stop smiling as her fingers lag behind commands. The Monitor colleagues fail to synchronize and must try again.
Do missileers know what they’re targeting, when ordered to launch? she asks aloud. No clear answer comes from the men behind her. The photographer, in hindsight, will note how the focus on being precise left little room for mulling what’s at stake.
Another try. The journalist puts her left hand on a switch. Right hand on a key. The photographer has his own two switches to grip. The pair count down. Two sets of wrists turn right.
This time, they’re in sync. The ground would tremble now as a 110-ton launcher closure door opens and the engine ignites.
Today is a simulated show-and-tell. A real ICBM launched cannot be recalled.
Missileers are “consequential, influential people”
Donald Trump is once again the only person in the world who can launch U.S. nuclear-armed ICBMs. Or rather, as president, he’s the only one who can put the order in.
It would then come down to missileers, men and women of the Air Force, to launch those spears of war. On 24-hour shifts, every day, each year, they rehearse for a reality they hope will never come. Readiness is the engine of deterrence.
The role of the missileer rose from the Cold War as the United States and Soviet Union began to build warheads en masse. A new kind of warrior was born, with the power to kill millions with turns of keys.
At the same time, a “ban the bomb” movement was born, as students, artists, intellectuals, and world leaders cried out against this new weapon that could end the world.
But as this bipolar world of competing nuclear powers broke down in the 1990s, these weapons seemed to fade from the awareness of most Americans – along with the role missileers play.
Yet missileers are still “consequential, influential people,” those who are the last step before a nuclear missile is launched, says Mackenzie Knight, a senior research associate at the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project.
Many Americans might consider them relics of history, she says. Or might not know that “Missileers still very much exist.”
There are up to 400 nuclear-capable missiles lying in the ground and “on alert.” The 90th Missile Wing, based at F.E. Warren, oversees 150 of these across Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado.
A warhead launched on an ICBM today could yield an explosive force some 20 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
And according to Air Force Global Strike Command, no: Missileers won’t know what their missiles target if told to launch.
“Missileers do not receive specific details about weapon targets at the time of execution,” writes spokesperson Charles Hoffman in an email.
Nevertheless, they’re “always ready,” he says. Airmen face routine checks to ensure they’re mentally fit for the job.
Two other missile wings sit deep underground in rural swaths of Montana and North Dakota.
The airmen stationed in these facilities include “maintainers” and “defenders,” who keep the weapons viable and safe as they work with the missile combat crews.
Those missileers are sitting underground right now. Ready.
Inside Missile Alert Facility Echo-01
About an hour’s drive east of the base, past the Nebraska state line, there’s a beige building called Missile Alert Facility Echo-01.
Just like at the base in Wyoming, the journalist must leave behind her cellphone and keys with a fob. She’s chaperoned by Air Force public affairs personnel.
Prepared by a topside chef, a chicken sandwich is making its slow descent down an elevator, carried by an official who joins the reporter and her chaperones.
Sarah Matusek/The Christian Science Monitor
They reach the launch control capsule, which is as deep as 80 feet underground. The plate is lunch for 1st Lt. Trevor Straub.
Lieutenant Straub is a launch control capsule commander with the 319th Missile Squadron. He and another Generation Z missileer, 2nd Lt. Jacob Baughman, a deputy commander, have just begun to “pull alert” for a 24-hour shift.
The underground capsule is part of the base’s 9,600-square-mile missile field. Out here, strong winds sweep across farmland. Tan-backed antelopes graze, and rabbits scampering too close to missile sites are known to trigger alarms.
Beyond the console and other mission-critical machines in the capsule underground, there’s a bathroom, a microwave, and a bed.
“I sleep like a baby,” says Lieutenant Baughman. Not all can.
The cramped quarters here were built in the 1960s; some mint-green fixtures remain. Outdated technology involves cables that must be dug up from the earth to be tested. And for a time, the missileers say, crews have used actual floppy disks.
Suddenly, the system beeps.
“Oh, um, actually, if we could have you step out,” says Lieutenant Straub. The Monitor journalist steps behind a curtain as directed. The wait is brief.
“Just an update,” Lieutenant Straub explains. He won’t share more.
And no, Lieutenant Straub says in response to a question. He doesn’t give much thought to missileers in Russia.
Their weapon, the Sarmat, is named for centuries-old nomads who traversed the steppe on horse. American ICBMs are currently personified as Revolutionary War “minutemen.” The Minuteman III, in service for over 50 years, will be replaced by the Sentinel.
It is the human beings – missileers – with the weapon in their name.
They often etch their presence onto these old subterranean walls. Dates and names and inside jokes. On the day he first pulled alert three years ago, Lieutenant Straub made his mark above an entryway in permanent black ink: “Straub was here.”
There are downsides. Stress, a wonky schedule. The job has also taken hits to its reputation. Concerns linking missileer service and cancer have led to an ongoing Air Force study.
There have also been reports of low morale. And there was a cheating scandal a decade ago involving proficiency tests. Several leaders were dismissed.
The men in Echo-01 recognize the destructive power of their roles. Much of the job comes down to trust.
“Trusting the people above us,” says Lieutenant Baughman.
“I wouldn’t say ‘pressure,’ but …” His voice trails off in search of words. “We understand the weight of what we’re executing – if it comes down to it.”
Calculating nuclear risk in a 21st-century world
Pressure is building above ground, however.
Last November, Russia declared it had lowered the threshold at which it would consider launching nuclear weapons. An arms-reduction agreement between Moscow and Washington is set to end a year from now.
China is expanding the number, and quality, of its nuclear warheads. Iran has been stockpiling enriched uranium that approaches weapons-grade levels, the United Nations nuclear watchdog reports.
The hands of the Doomsday Clock, meanwhile, point to 11:58:31 p.m. – or 89 seconds to midnight. That figurative clock estimates how relatively close we are to a global catastrophe. It’s the “closest it has ever been,” the scientists and security experts who publish the clock said in January.
Still, many analysts call nuclear war unlikely, due to what has long been called “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD.
Based on game theory, MAD describes a theoretical equilibrium in which nuclear-armed actors will not launch a preemptive attack because it would be an act of certain self-destruction.
Threats are currency in a nuclear world. Misunderstandings or mistakes, however, could spell catastrophe.
Yet the risk of nuclear weapons today is less about surprise attacks than about an escalation of conventional war, says Scott Sagan, co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
If, during a conventional war, one country is standing on the brink of defeat, he says, that country could resort to first use of nuclear weapons. “That’s uncharted territory,” Dr. Sagan says.
But it is the daily duties and readiness of missileers that ensure the deterrence embedded in MAD.
Despite the job being “thankless,” as several say, and often mundane, their compliance keeps weapons on alert. And that readiness keeps allies assured and adversaries at bay.
The morality of being a missileer – and minister
David Feddern was also a missileer here in Echo-01. He arrived toward the Cold War’s end.
He’s now the pastor of Zion Lutheran Church in Hampton, Nebraska. He grew up on a hog farm in the state, raised as a patriot who stood, hand on heart, whenever he saw the flag.
Courtesy of the Rev. David Feddern
But after he became a missileer, the Rev. Feddern says he began to wrestle with meshing his job and his Christian faith.
Take the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” But weren’t some wars led by the government just? The missileer eventually told himself he could serve his country honorably and pray the order to launch would never come.
Both the military and ministry are about service, he says. Both require sacrifice and a faith, in one sense, in a higher power. “You can live in both kingdoms,” the Lutheran pastor says.
Several years ago his role as a pastor led him to ponder his career as a missileer anew. He was brought to talk and pray with a World War II pilot before he died. The veteran pilot said he had flown over Hiroshima, shortly after the blast, to gather reconnaissance photos.
“He was having trouble reconciling the brutality and the depravity of World War II, and the Japanese, and his military service as a Christian,” Mr. Feddern recalls. The pastor knew the inner quarrel well.
“I said, ‘Well, you would be surprised, then, to hear what I did while I was in the Air Force.’”
In 1989, Mr. Feddern was one of a few missileers to launch an actual ICBM. Such routine tests of unarmed missiles continue at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. (An ICBM test launch took place the evening of Election Day last November.)
He says this launch of a real missile felt different from rehearsals on base after two years of training. “Reverence and awe” are the words that come to his mind. He has a photo of that ICBM blasting into the air with a gray-white plume.
He calls the missile a bird. Because, he says, it flies.
Why this journalist became interested in nuclear missiles
My interest in missileers was piqued, fittingly, underground. In a stranger’s basement in Colorado Springs.
An estate sale in this basement in 2023 was selling a trove of military papers, manuals, and plaques. For a dollar, I bought a thin 1984 workbook for Air Force Academy students. A cadet’s pen marks remain.
I read in-class exercises:
“Intelligence sources have learned that Middle East terrorists have acquired an ICBM and are planning on destroying St. Louis (40N,90W). The terrorist’s launch site is known to be at 35N,40E.”
One question asks cadets to determine the minimum time from launch to impact. Another asks, “If the ICBM lands short of St. Louis, where will it land?”
I grew up in St. Louis. I moved west to Colorado during the pandemic. But I never knew the history or logistics of the United States’ land-based nuclear arsenal, and their impact on both states. Like Colorado today, Missouri once siloed nuclear-armed missiles across its plains, until a drawdown 30 years ago.
I was born in 1991, the year the Cold War ended. It bugged me that, perhaps like many Americans, I hadn’t known about the patchwork of missile silos across the American West – and the people who stand ready to launch nuclear weapons.
Maybe because these weapons have never been used? Maybe because deterrence worked?
But would I be willing to turn the key?
The bleak bargaining chips of deterrence
In 2005, Thomas Schelling won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for enhancing understanding of conflict and cooperation through game theory analysis.
A progenitor of nuclear deterrence, he said:
“The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger,” he said in his acceptance speech. “What a stunning achievement – or, if not achievement, what stunning good fortune.”
No country has used nuclear weapons since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. Several nations, however, have acquired them. These state actors arguably “use” their nukes, without detonating them, as the bleak bargaining chips of deterrence.
Defenders say the absence of nuclear war proves the weapons’ worth – and the need to maintain them. Others take a step further, calling for their expansion. These include the author of a Heritage Foundation report that calls for “road-mobile” nuclear missile systems.
ICBMs are the land-based leg of what is known as the U.S. nuclear triad. There are also bombers and submarines with nuclear-armed missiles. It’s generally understood that, in response to an incoming nuclear attack, the land-based ICBMs could be first to launch.
In part because, for decades, foreign adversaries have known exactly where U.S. silos are. A declassified Air Force memo from 1963 bemoans the freedom afforded Iron Curtain attachés to “reconnoiter our missile sites.” (Espionage concerns endure. Last year, Nebraska lawmakers signed off on bills to deter land sales to foreign adversaries.)
There remain people and groups who say Earth would be safer if stockpiles of these weapons were reduced. The group Global Zero says they should be dismantled once and for all. (Global Zero was co-founded by the late Bruce Blair, a veteran missileer and military command and control expert.)
America’s new Sentinel ICBM program, behind schedule and over budget, is costing more than $140 billion. The military and its supporters argue it’s key to keeping deterrence “credible” by updating the aging arsenal, in a world becoming less stable.
Women in command
Maj. Gen. Stacy Jo Huser, commander of 20th Air Force, Air Force Global Strike Command, is the first woman to oversee the nation’s ICBMs.
When she was a missileer herself earlier in her career, Major General Huser says, she sometimes struggled to find her “why.” She says that’s not true for airmen today.
This moment in history “does seem exceptional, and I think it seems that way to our airmen as well,” she says during an interview at the base. They don’t have to “remind themselves why what they’re doing is important. … It’s on every news channel, what our adversaries are doing.”
Major General Huser isn’t afraid to hug. Or to say she’s putting people first, ahead of the mission. That involves making sure her airmen and their families feel cared for, she says.
“Is their spouse able to find employment? Do they have child care issues that need to be resolved?” she says. “If our airmen and their families are not concerned about those things, then they can focus on the mission.”
“I think we are attracting the type of force that we need,” she says. “My big concern is, How do we retain that force, especially a diverse force?” As of December, the Air Force reports that 71.6% of its nearly 800 missileers are male. An identical share identifies as white.
Women became eligible for missile combat crews in 1978. But it took a decade for women and men to serve together during shifts underground. Keeping women in the service long-term, amid family demands, is another priority of Major General Huser’s.
When Capt. Euleeondra Haughton joined the military, she followed in the footsteps of her grandfathers, uncles, and father.
It’s a “thankless job,” says the nuclear and missile operations officer with the 319th Missile Squadron. Missileers are often lower-rank airmen – and therefore younger.
Yet the young Black flight commander says she is not seeking thanks. She’s clear on her mission.
It’s as her colleague, Capt. Gramm Roberts, an Emergency War Order planner, says. Whenever a shift passes without a call to launch, “It’s always a good day.”
That makes me imagine a bad day.
An ICBM launched cannot be recalled
It begins with a beep.
The order appears on the higher-authority screen. If an airman has been napping, the nap is over now.
Two missileers rush to the console; strap into their seats; notice their hearts are racing but choose to ignore that; whip out classified codebooks; chip away at a decryption to confirm the command; think of loved ones above off to school or home from work; steady frantic fingers; wake silos from their sleep; place a left hand on a switch and a right hand on a key (if the commander); place two hands on two separate switches (if the deputy); focus on the mission, the mission, the mission; and should one missileer object, two other crews, miles from here, will step in and authorize the launch.
The commander counts down. Two sets of wrists turn right.
The bird flies. An ICBM launched cannot be recalled.
