Research Catalog

Title

The missile next door : the Minuteman in the American heartland / Gretchen Heefner.

Author

Heefner, Gretchen.

Publication

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, c2012.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

294 p., [18] p. of plates : ill., maps; 22 cm.

Summary

Between 1961 and 1967, the United States Air Force buried 1,000 Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in pastures across the Great Plains. This book 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. The author argues that this subterfuge was necessary 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.

Subjects

• Military history
• History
• Great Plains > History, Military
• West (U.S.) > History, Military
• Cold War > Social aspects > West (U.S.)
• Intercontinental ballistic missile bases > United States > History
• Minuteman (Missile)

Genre/Form

• History
• Military history

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction: A strange new landscape -- Ace in the hole -- Selling deterrence -- The mapmakers -- Cold War on the range -- Nuclear heartland -- The radical plains -- Dismantling the Cold War -- Conclusion: Missiles and memory.

ISBN

9780674059115 (alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2012003666

OCLC

774147921

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library