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"Heefner, Gretchen"
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The Missile Next Door
Between 1961 and 1967 the United States Air Force buried 1,000 Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in pastures across the Great Plains. The Missile Next Door tells the story of how rural Americans of all political stripes were drafted to fight the Cold War by living with nuclear missiles in their backyards—and what that story tells us about enduring political divides and the persistence of defense spending. By scattering the missiles in out-of-the-way places, the Defense Department kept the chilling calculus of Cold War nuclear strategy out of view. This subterfuge was necessary, Gretchen Heefner argues, in order for Americans to accept a costly nuclear buildup and the resulting threat of Armageddon. As for the ranchers, farmers, and other civilians in the Plains states who were first seduced by the economics of war and then forced to live in the Soviet crosshairs, their sense of citizenship was forever changed. Some were stirred to dissent. Others consented but found their proud Plains individualism giving way to a growing dependence on the military-industrial complex. Even today, some communities express reluctance to let the Minutemen go, though the Air Force no longer wants them buried in the heartland. Complicating a red state/blue state reading of American politics, Heefner's account helps to explain the deep distrust of government found in many western regions, and also an addiction to defense spending which, for many local economies, seems inescapable.
eBook
A Slice of their Sovereignty
Using the case study of Libya, this article examines how U.S. policymakers sought to rationalize their appropriation of sovereign territory for strategic needs in the 1940s. This article also demonstrates how scholars can use the often-overlooked infrastructure of the U.S. military to historicize the bottom-up construction of U.S. global power.
Journal Article
\A Fighter Pilot's Heaven\: Finding Cold War Utility in the North African Desert
During the Cold War, the United States constructed an unprecedented network of military bases around the world. This expansion forced US policymakers to rethink not only their strategic interests around the world, but also the environments they would encompass. Perhaps nowhere was this more obvious than in Libya, where in the late 1940s the US Air Force began building a massive installation on the shores of Tripoli. This is not, however, the now familiar story of how military bases impact ecosystems. Instead I am interested in the ways that US officials in Libya used ideas about this novel environment—the desert—to justify the appropriation of sovereign territory for military facilities. By comparing US and European views on the Libya environment, I argue that the Americans developed a utilitarian view of the desert that enabled ever-more militarization. By the 1960s, large swaths of the Sahara had been converted into testing and practice ranges. Similar to military facilities in the American West, the Air Force hid its Cold War installations away in the desert. So effective was this strategy, in fact, that the existence of these facilities remains difficult to uncover today.
Journal Article
Nuclear Accidents Will Happen
In January 2018, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ( BAS ) moved its Doomsday Clock closer to midnight: it now reads 11:58. The last time the minute hand was this close to the hour of Armageddon was 1953, just after the United States and Soviet Union tested thermonuclear bombs. Since then the stylized clock has ticked backward and forward, each year metaphorically registering civilization's proximity to global catastrophe. “To call the world's nuclear situation dire,” the group warned in its January statement, “is to understate the danger—and its immediacy.”
Journal Article
The missile next door : the Minuteman in the American heartland
In the 1960s the Air Force buried 1,000 ICBMs in pastures across the Great Plains to keep U.S. nuclear strategy out of view. As rural civilians of all political stripes found themselves living in the Soviet crosshairs, a proud Plains individualism gave way to an economic dependence on the military-industrial complex that still persists today.
eBook
The Missile Next Door
In the 1960s the Air Force buried 1,000 ICBMs in pastures across the Great Plains to keep U.S. nuclear strategy out of view. As rural civilians of all political stripes found themselves living in the Soviet crosshairs, a proud Plains individualism gave way to an economic dependence on the military-industrial complex that still persists today.
eBook
Missiles and Memory: Dismantling South Dakota's Cold War
For much of the cold war, 150 Minuteman missiles dotted South Dakota's western plains. Today the warheads are gone, but one silo remains as the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. This article considers South Dakota's relationship with the Minuteman-from deployment to preservation-in order to examine the domestic cold war and the creation of a national cold war narrative.
Journal Article
Introduction
On August 4, 1996, Paul Jensen did something he never thought he would do. He blew up a piece of his ranch land—the same land that his grandfather had homesteaded nearly 100 years earlier. It was a clear, crisp morning when he pushed the button that set off a large underground explosion. A few hundred yards away a plume of concrete dust spread into the air with a poof and then fell back to earth. The handful of men standing with Jensen cheered and applauded.¹
Technically Jensen was not detonating anything onhisland. More than thirty years earlier
Book Chapter
The Mapmakers
Gene S. Williams grew up next door to a nuclear missile. Born on his parents’ ranch in western South Dakota, Williams was a toddler in 1961 when the Air Force demanded a section of his family’s land—and not just any plot. What the Air Force wanted—and got—was a nice, flat, 2-acre piece of land in the middle of what the Williamses considered a good wheat field. Not what the family wanted to sell.
Gene’s father declared that having a missile on his best field was like having a 2-foot-square hole cut out of the middle of his
Book Chapter