As the Cold War developed, nuclear silos cropped up across the American West, from Montana down to Texas. These installations contained intercontinental ballistic missiles with their noses pointed toward the Soviet Union. From the first Atlas sites in Wyoming, constructed under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959, the arsenal has expanded to encompass thousands of silos and hundreds of command sites. The logic was as follows: if the Soviet Union were to launch an attack on the United States, they would no doubt target US missile sites to preempt retaliatory strikes — and the United States could make such an effort far more difficult by dispersing its nuclear arsenal across the heartland.

In the years before nuclear submarines, the Great Plains seemed like the perfect place for such a deployment. It is less densely populated than the rest of the country, far from coastal submarine launch sites, and yet close to the Soviet Union via the North Pole. And so the West was transformed into a vast farm in which Atlas, Titan, Minuteman, and Peacekeeper missiles were planted like seeds. In 1978, the air force chief of staff referred to this expanse as a “great sponge,” for it would “absorb” Kremlin strikes. To destroy a buried missile silo, each of those strikes would need to be equivalent to 100,000 tons of TNT; successful ones would trigger nuclear explosions that would virtually vaporize everything in their vicinity and send radioactive mushroom clouds miles into the western sky.

Today the nuclear sponge remains intact in the heartland. While it may have theoretically deterred a large-scale nuclear attack during the Cold War, it has made an accidental nuclear holocaust far more likely: the entire arsenal remains on perpetual high alert, ready to be deployed on the president’s orders at any moment — and manned by airmen who have been busted for, among other things, operating a drug ring while deployed to Minuteman silos in Wyoming.