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Summary: the afterlife of decommissioned military base in the hands of a pacifist religious sect. Fantastic photographs at the link.
The pyramid at the end of the world
In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history. The long shadow cast by nuclear weapons and the Cold War is not as far in the past as we might like to think… By Elmo Keep - 10/28/16 2:05PM
Should you find yourself with time on your hands, you might board a plane in New York, fly five hours to Fargo, rent a car and drive 280 miles to Nekoma, North Dakota (population 49), where you will find this:
According to various people on the Internet, the Pyramid on the Prairie was built by the Illuminati. It was modeled on an ancient Mayan burial temple. The government ran top-secret human experiments inside it. It was the property of a pacifist religious sect who bought it for a large sum of money.
Only the last is true and not completely. The Pyramid is part of the Stanley R Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, a long decommissioned military base in the middle of practically nowhere. Once armed with dozens of nuclear warheads, it’s been sitting abandoned for 40 years, now a place of interest mainly to Cold War tourists, urban explorers and conspiracy theorists.
If tensions between the U.S. and Russia had continued to escalate in the 1970s, fifteen of these uncanny structures would have dotted the country, forming the largest defensive nuclear complex in the world. But thanks to the SALT Treaty between the U.S. and Russia, Safeguard would turn out to be the only one ever completed.
A forgotten relic of the nuclear arms race might seem just a strange curio from the distant past. But the threat posed by nuclear arms never truly went away, not even in the wake of non-proliferation. In 2016, presidential nominee Donald Trump is talking about deploying nuclear weapons, advocating for countries including Japan and South Korea to be armed, and hinting that the U.S. might drop nukes on ISIS strongholds.
Forget the past, as it goes, and we are condemned to repeat it.
+ + +
Nekoma is in Cavalier County (population: 3896) in the heart of North Dakota’s lush farmlands. A quiet, agrarian community with harsh winters and brutally hot summers prone to tornados, not a whole lot out of the ordinary happened there until April of 1970. That’s when the U.S. government decided it was the best place from which to defend America from Russian nuclear attack.
Welcome to the deranged thinking of mutually assured destruction.
North Dakota and South Dakota were home to America’s mighty Minutemen nuclear missiles (“holding the power to destroy civilization”), all aimed at the USSR; Safeguard was built to defend the Minutemen from Soviet attack. Nekoma was in the geographically perfect position to host a base with radar array to intercept missiles if they were launched over the North Pole. Its warheads would intercept and destroy Russia’s incoming missiles in the atmosphere, clearing the way for the Minutemen to destroy Russian civilization.
Welcome to the deranged thinking of mutually assured destruction. The terror of the existential nuclear threat—to destroy vast swathes of the planet and wipe ourselves out as a species with tools of our own making—kept the world teetering in an uneasy stalemate through the decades of the Cold War.
Mercifully, Armageddon was somehow avoided and non-proliferation treaties were signed between the superpowers. That was good news for the future of the planet, but bad news for the Pyramid on the Prairie. It had cost the U.S. government $5.7 billion to build it, but in February 1976, after just three months of full operational capacity and a year of active work, it was decommissioned.
The Doomsday Clock, a symbolic timepiece created by the Board of the Atomic Scientists to track the planet’s proximity to destruction, was then set to twelve minutes to midnight.
Per the limited armament agreement between America and Russia, the Pyramid’s weaponry was carted off to El Paso and destroyed, its silos poured with concrete and welded shut, and the hundreds of people who worked there reassigned or dismissed. Contractors stripped the Pyramid of anything inside of value, leaving an empty concrete shell. Its blast-proof perimeter fence was locked, sealing the whole place firmly in the past.
For forty years it stood decaying. Its drainage pumps turned off, the site slowly filled with water, turning it into an environmental wreck. The missile silos had been lined with lead paint and were brimming with poisoned water needing to be dredged.
For a short time in the 1980s the barrack buildings on the site were turned into a youth camp until the Reagan administration cut the funding.
Then in 2012, Safeguard was auctioned off by the federal government. Decommissioned military bases are popular among wealthy preppers—people who believe the world as we know it will imminently end, and that they will need ultra secure safe holds in which to wait out the collapse of society.
But no preppers won the auction. Instead the top bidders were Cavalier County, which offered $500,000 in hopes of preserving history and turning the town into a revenue-generating tourist destination; and a Hutterite community, an insular, pacifist religious sect living 250 miles away in South Dakota, largely cut off from the modern world. The Hutterites’ offer of $530,000 for the Pyramid won.
CONTINUED AT LENGTH WITH GREAT ILLUSTRATIONS:
http://fusion.net/interactive/361728/north-dakota-pyramid-on-the-prairie/
The pyramid at the end of the world
In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history. The long shadow cast by nuclear weapons and the Cold War is not as far in the past as we might like to think… By Elmo Keep - 10/28/16 2:05PM
Should you find yourself with time on your hands, you might board a plane in New York, fly five hours to Fargo, rent a car and drive 280 miles to Nekoma, North Dakota (population 49), where you will find this:
According to various people on the Internet, the Pyramid on the Prairie was built by the Illuminati. It was modeled on an ancient Mayan burial temple. The government ran top-secret human experiments inside it. It was the property of a pacifist religious sect who bought it for a large sum of money.
Only the last is true and not completely. The Pyramid is part of the Stanley R Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, a long decommissioned military base in the middle of practically nowhere. Once armed with dozens of nuclear warheads, it’s been sitting abandoned for 40 years, now a place of interest mainly to Cold War tourists, urban explorers and conspiracy theorists.
If tensions between the U.S. and Russia had continued to escalate in the 1970s, fifteen of these uncanny structures would have dotted the country, forming the largest defensive nuclear complex in the world. But thanks to the SALT Treaty between the U.S. and Russia, Safeguard would turn out to be the only one ever completed.
A forgotten relic of the nuclear arms race might seem just a strange curio from the distant past. But the threat posed by nuclear arms never truly went away, not even in the wake of non-proliferation. In 2016, presidential nominee Donald Trump is talking about deploying nuclear weapons, advocating for countries including Japan and South Korea to be armed, and hinting that the U.S. might drop nukes on ISIS strongholds.
Forget the past, as it goes, and we are condemned to repeat it.
+ + +
Nekoma is in Cavalier County (population: 3896) in the heart of North Dakota’s lush farmlands. A quiet, agrarian community with harsh winters and brutally hot summers prone to tornados, not a whole lot out of the ordinary happened there until April of 1970. That’s when the U.S. government decided it was the best place from which to defend America from Russian nuclear attack.
Welcome to the deranged thinking of mutually assured destruction.
North Dakota and South Dakota were home to America’s mighty Minutemen nuclear missiles (“holding the power to destroy civilization”), all aimed at the USSR; Safeguard was built to defend the Minutemen from Soviet attack. Nekoma was in the geographically perfect position to host a base with radar array to intercept missiles if they were launched over the North Pole. Its warheads would intercept and destroy Russia’s incoming missiles in the atmosphere, clearing the way for the Minutemen to destroy Russian civilization.
Welcome to the deranged thinking of mutually assured destruction. The terror of the existential nuclear threat—to destroy vast swathes of the planet and wipe ourselves out as a species with tools of our own making—kept the world teetering in an uneasy stalemate through the decades of the Cold War.
Mercifully, Armageddon was somehow avoided and non-proliferation treaties were signed between the superpowers. That was good news for the future of the planet, but bad news for the Pyramid on the Prairie. It had cost the U.S. government $5.7 billion to build it, but in February 1976, after just three months of full operational capacity and a year of active work, it was decommissioned.
The Doomsday Clock, a symbolic timepiece created by the Board of the Atomic Scientists to track the planet’s proximity to destruction, was then set to twelve minutes to midnight.
Per the limited armament agreement between America and Russia, the Pyramid’s weaponry was carted off to El Paso and destroyed, its silos poured with concrete and welded shut, and the hundreds of people who worked there reassigned or dismissed. Contractors stripped the Pyramid of anything inside of value, leaving an empty concrete shell. Its blast-proof perimeter fence was locked, sealing the whole place firmly in the past.
For forty years it stood decaying. Its drainage pumps turned off, the site slowly filled with water, turning it into an environmental wreck. The missile silos had been lined with lead paint and were brimming with poisoned water needing to be dredged.
For a short time in the 1980s the barrack buildings on the site were turned into a youth camp until the Reagan administration cut the funding.
Then in 2012, Safeguard was auctioned off by the federal government. Decommissioned military bases are popular among wealthy preppers—people who believe the world as we know it will imminently end, and that they will need ultra secure safe holds in which to wait out the collapse of society.
But no preppers won the auction. Instead the top bidders were Cavalier County, which offered $500,000 in hopes of preserving history and turning the town into a revenue-generating tourist destination; and a Hutterite community, an insular, pacifist religious sect living 250 miles away in South Dakota, largely cut off from the modern world. The Hutterites’ offer of $530,000 for the Pyramid won.
CONTINUED AT LENGTH WITH GREAT ILLUSTRATIONS:
http://fusion.net/interactive/361728/north-dakota-pyramid-on-the-prairie/
