There’s A Creepy Yet Amazing Military Base Hiding Underground In North Dakota
There is a time capsule buried underground in North Dakota, but it is not the kind you are thinking of. This one in particular lies under an area near Cooperstown, North Dakota, and it is ginormous. It has been around since the Cold War and has barely changed since, and today you can take a tour of it to see what the tensions of that time looked like in a place that could have saved our entire country. It is truly an experience, both fascinating and a bit unnerving.
This site is known as the Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile Site, and consists of both the above ground site - Oscar-Zero - and the underground site - November-33.
These sites were established in 1965. Oscar-Zero is the main site where a team both live and worked, being alert and ready for any potential attack. The site was made to deter nuclear missiles, using what were known as minuteman missiles that would be launched and sent to the incoming missiles with the goal of destroying them before they ever got near the US.
60 feet below the surface at Oscar-Zero is the very place these missiles would have been launched from.
After taking an elevator ride down, you will go behind multiple huge, thick blast doors to a room where round the clock teams of two would be stationed.
Seeing this place is kind of surreal. The control panel and different contraptions you can see down here could have been activated and saved the lives of thousands of people, while also possibly being the start of a huge nuclear war. Luckily, the facility never had to do anything and as the Cold War dwindled down, the site was decommissioned in 1991.
Everything remains as it was, from the papers on the desks to the technology that is a bit dated today. You can even see the very launch ignition panel that would have launched the missile below:
The missile silo at November-33 had the missile removed, then filled, when the site was decommissioned and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was put in place.
This photograph taken in the 1960s when the facility was being built is the interior of the huge missile silo, going down deep underground. Today, you can still see the top part of the silo on the surface when visiting this historic site.
We’re lucky that this site never had to come into use, and today is only registered as a historic site in North Dakota. You can tour the site for yourself by visiting. To learn more and plan a potential visit, click here.
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Leah moved to North Dakota when she was 12 years old and has traveled from the Red River Valley to the badlands and many places in between. She loves small-town life and currently enjoys living on a small farm in the ND prairie. She's always had a passion for writing and has participated in novel writing challenges such as NaNoWriMo multiple times. Her favorite part about this job is recognizing small businesses that deserve a boost and seeing the positive affect her articles can have on their traffic, especially in rural areas that might have otherwise gone overlooked.
