N.D. nuke site may reopen as museum

0 Comments | USA TODAY, December, 2006 | by Judy Keen

COOPERSTOWN, N.D. -- The two keys that had to be turned simultaneously to launch Minuteman nuclear missiles were stored in a small red steel box secured with two combination padlocks. The keys are gone, but the red box is still here in one of the remaining relics of the Cold War, the tense era when the United States and the Soviet Union aimed nuclear warheads at each other.

This steel-reinforced launch control center is the last of 15 once scattered across eastern North Dakota. Until the doors here closed in 1997, Air Force officers were on duty around the clock, prepared to use secret codes and those keys to send missiles from underground silos on the prairie toward the Soviet Union. Now this facility could become a museum, but the State Historical Society of North Dakota...