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Missile Silo

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1960s. 5 miles northeast of Keota at junction of Weld County 104 and Weld County 11

Power lines and a 12-foot-high chain-link fence around a cement pad with a weather station give away the location of one of many nearby underground missile silos built and filled with a deadly payload during the Cold War. About fifty MX and Minuteman III underground missile silos were constructed in Colorado by the U.S. Air Force 90th Strategic Missile Wing. Each silo contains a precast cement canister 100 feet long planted into the ground atop a shock absorber, then filled with a missile and capped with a cement lid 12 feet in diameter. In the underground command center, the “umbilical cords” have been cut since the end of the Cold War to defuse these instruments of Armageddon.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Thomas J. Noel
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Data

What's Nearby

Keota

Citation

Thomas J. Noel, "Missile Silo", [Grover, Colorado], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/CO-01-WE26.

Print Source

Buildings of Colorado, Thomas J. Noel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 247-247.

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