Why Are 400 Nukes Still Buried in American Farmland?

Right now, under farm and ranch country in five states, 400 nuclear missiles are standing on their tails, each one in a silo behind a chain-link fence, a few miles from somebody's kitchen table. In the early 1960s the Air Force paid one Montana ranch family $150 for an acre of their land and put a Minuteman missile in it. The Cold War ended more than thirty years ago, but the missiles are still out there. And this year the Air Force broke ground on a test silo for the missile that will replace them. So why are America's nuclear missiles still buried in farmland? And what were the families who live next to them signed up for? In this video, we follow the story of the missile fields: from the rush to dig a thousand silos across the Great Plains, and the first Minuteman going on alert in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the warhead that fell 75 feet to the bottom of a South Dakota silo in 1964, the Titan II explosion near Damascus, Arkansas that, local historians say, threw a 740-ton door into the air, the night in 1991 when President Bush stood the Minuteman II force down, the ranchers who were handed the button to blow up the silo next door, and the plan to build 450 brand-new silos under the same farms. 🔔 Subscribe so you don't miss the next one 🔔