Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 55 T HANKFULLY, THE COLD WAR NEVER HEATED UP. Aside from Truman, no President ever pressed the fabled big red button. But if one had, Montanans would have witnessed the terrible beauty of the ground opening up and issuing hundreds of Minutemen missiles. People would have pointed at the sky, tracing rocket exhaust, watching as the warheads set out for their journey across the north pole. Eventually the rockets would pound into Moscow, Leningrad, Beijing, Warsaw, and East Berlin. Yet more missiles would have fallen on cities the average Montanan has never heard of: Barabinsk, Krasnoyarsk, Chita, and hundreds of oth- ers. Some targets included bases, industrial and manufacturing centers - places of strategic impor- tance. Others would have targeted population centers; the aim was obliteration, pure and simple. Meanwhile, in the United States, we can imagine where they would have targeted in turn: New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles. But while the Cold War never escalated beyond proxy wars and nuclear proliferation, it did change Montana, and the landscape of the West, forever. As author Ian Frazier writes, the nuclear missile silo has become "one of the quintessential Great Plains objects," along with the American bison, the prairie dog, and the outhouse. Missile sites in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska and Texas were selected, in part, so that a Russian (or Chinese, or North Korean—pick your poison) strike against our missile sites would result in a minimum of civilian casualties; in the calculus of strategic thinking, the United States could, in the event of a nuclear exchange, afford to lose a few cowboys, farmers, ranchers, and railroaders. It's oddly sobering to think that, even as the Western and Eastern seaboards would have been pulver- ized, a dozen or so Soviet R-9 Desnas might have flown for Great Falls, Montana as well. Malmstrom Air Force Base, constructed during WWII, was particularly important to Strategic Air Command when they found that the first model of ICBM, the Minuteman IA, had a defective swivel nozzle. Crucial to the missile's guid- ance system, the flaw meant that the effective range of the weapon was only 4300 miles instead of the project- ed 5000. This meant that proposed missile bases in Georgia, Texas or Oklahoma would no longer be able to reach targets in the Far East. Russia would be in range if launched from Montana, however. Soon there were 150 warheads at Malmstrom, the very first ICBM base in the Air Force, thus earning it the moniker "Wing One." Yet Malmstrom AFB was not always intended as a nuclear deterrent to Soviet Russia. In the beginning, in fact, the base actually supported Russia as part of the wartime lend-lease agreement signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At the time, some $50 billion of weapons, planes, and oth- er materials of war were siphoned to our allies, particularly Mother Russia. Malmstrom, then called Great Falls Army Air Base, established a supply line between Montana and Ladd Field in Fairbanks, Alaska that would channel more than 1.5 million pounds of supplies to the Soviets. Following the war, the base was renamed for Colonel Ein- ar Axel Malmstrom, a P-47 Thunderbolt Pilot and one-time commanding officer of the 356th Fighter Group. Captured by Nazi forces after being shot down over France in 1944, he spent the last year of the war as a POW in Stalag Luft 1. After it was liberated in May 1945, he was awarded the Bronze Star. He would go on to serve at the 312th Base Unit in Barksdale, Louisiana and the 19th Tactical Air Command in Biggs, Texas, before being reassigned to what was then called Great Falls AFB in February of 1954. He was designated Deputy Wing Commander of the 407th Strategic Fighter Wing but, sadly, MALMSTROM AIR FORCE BASE Scan the QR code to see more about... Montana's Malmstrom Air Force Base www.distinctlymontana.com/coldwar212 DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL COURTESY OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

• Cover