In response to recent bluster from North Korea, the Defense Department announced plans to deploy one billion dollars worth of additional missile interceptors along the Pacific coast. By 2017, the number of intercept sites is expected to grow from 30 to 44. This will be the latest development in a long history of missile defense systems deployed by the United States, the least known of which is also one of the most advanced ever deployed — the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex outside Nekoma, North Dakota.
Missile Defense systems in the United States began with systems like the Nike, originally deployed in an era when our greatest fears were of a “grand tour” attack by Soviet bombers, air-dropping nuclear weapons on American cities. When ICBM technology became the norm, the Nike systems were upgraded and eventually replaced with more advanced anti-ballistic missile systems like Sentinel and Safeguard.
A Safeguard system was planned for Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, and another was partially constructed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, but in the end, the Nekoma Safeguard complex shown here was the only one that ever achieved operational status, granting North Dakota a unique legacy in the history of the Cold War.
This installation harbored 30 Spartan and 16 Sprint nuclear-tipped missiles. The envisioned functionality was dual phase: the Spartan missiles were long range and intended to intercept incoming Soviet ICBMs in space. Any ICBM that made it past the space defenses would have been intercepted as it approached North Dakota air space by the shorter range but higher speed Sprint missiles.
Thankfully, the Soviets never launched an ICBM attack over the North Pole, and the Nekoma Safeguard system was never put into use. The system was deactivated in 1976 for a variety of reasons, including treaty obligations, operational cost, and questionable effectiveness. And that last bit — questionable effectiveness — is a concern even today.
Anti-ballistic missile technology is a high-cost, low-percentage game. The best missile intercept systems today might successfully destroy twenty-percent of incoming targets, and that’s on a good day. Even in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (better known as the Star Wars missile defense shield) was a household name, few knew about the gaping vulnerabilities of missile defense. Shooting down missiles with missiles is hard.
In that context, it’s not hard to see why the site shown here is now vacant.
In August of 2011 I visited Nekoma with my business partner and fellow photographer, Terry Hinnenkamp, with the intention of photographing the site. When we arrived, the gate was standing wide open. We drove in with the thought that we would try to find someone and we could ask permission to take some photographs, but no matter where we looked, we couldn’t find anybody. A flag was flying over one of the workshops, a garage door was open, a light was on, but we didn’t see anybody around. It was as if everyone had just vanished.
We wandered around for about forty-five minutes taking photos before we were thrown off the property by an angry man in a black truck. On the way out, we realized we had missed one ‘No Trespassing’ sign which was mounted on the gate — but because the gate was open, the sign was partially obscured by a fencepost. Whoops.
It seems wide open gates and partially obscured no-trespassing signs suffer from questionable effectiveness, too.
~Troy Larson is a radio industry professional from Fargo, and co-founder of GhostsOfNorthDakota.com. His first book, Ghosts of North Dakota: North Dakota’s Ghost Towns and Abandoned Places, is available now exclusively at GhostsofNorthDakota.com ~