![]() ![]() ![]() Once in South Dakota, Cabrera was assigned to the 67th Strategic Missile Squadron for the first two years as a Missile Combat Crew Commander, then transferring to the wing staff as an Emergency War Order (EWO) instructor for his final two years. Air Force in the Accounting and Finance field. After graduation from college as a member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) in 1967, Cabrera entered the U.S. Blackhurst is one of only a few missile field personnel to ever work in both topside and underground operations in 44th Missile Wing.ĭennis Cabrera was career Air Force and "involuntarily" transferred into the 44th Missile Wing at Ellsworth Air Force Base in 1974. His main duty station as both a missileer and facility manger was at Launch Control Facility India-01. Blackhurst went to topside operations as a facility manager. In 1974 he joined missile operations as a Missile Crew Commander. Blackhurst came to Ellsworth Air Force Base to fly B-52 bombers. Blackhurst began his Air Force career as a pilot where he flew missions over North Vietnam. The areas in black denote deactivated missile wings, the areas in red denote the active missile wings.David Blackhurst was born in West Virginia and grew up in central South Dakota. Map showing the areas of the six Minuteman Missile wings on the central and northern Great Plains. United States Minuteman Missile Wings - 272KB PDF For instance, from Launch Facility (Missile Silo) Delta-09 to Moscow was approximately 5,100 miles.Ģ) Protection - Minuteman sites away from America's coastlines meant more warning time if submarines launched from off the coasts.ģ) Far Away From Population Centers - Minuteman sites on the sparsely populated Great Plains meant less lives were directly at risk from nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. The following are considered the three major ones:ġ) Distance - The shortest distance to the Soviet Union - the United States main opponent during the Cold War - was over the North Pole. There was a multiplicity of reasons that Minuteman's were sited in the Great Plains region. Why Minuteman sites were constructed on the Great Plains From the mid-1960s until the early 1990s there were 1,000 Minuteman Silos and 100 corresponding Launch Control Facilities for command and control. They could also be remotely controlled from Launch Control Centers miles away from the actual silos, allowing sites to be dispersed over a wide geographic area. Due to its solid fuel technology, the missiles could be mass produced. ![]() The most common sites have been the Minuteman. Since that time there have been hundreds of Atlas, Titan, Minuteman and Peacekeeper sites constructed all the way from Texas to North Dakota, New Mexico to Montana. The first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silos arrived on the Great Plains in 1959 when Atlas sites were constructed in Wyoming. ![]() "A nuclear missile silo is one of the quintessential Great Plains objects: to the eye, it is almost nothing, just one or two acres of ground with a concrete slab in the middle and some posts and poles sticking up behind an eight-foot-high cyclone fence: but to the imagination, it is the end of the world." Ian Frazier, Great Plains, 1989 Aerial view of the Delta-09 launch facility view towards southwest, 1992. ![]()
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