The missile next door [electronic resource] : the Minuteman in the American heartland / Gretchen Heefner.
Heefner, Gretchen.
2012
UG1312.I2 H43 2012eb
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Title The missile next door [electronic resource] : the Minuteman in the American heartland / Gretchen Heefner.
Author Heefner, Gretchen.
ISBN 9780674067462 electronic book
0674059115
9780674059115
Imprint Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2012.
Language English
Description 1 online resource (294 p., [18] p.) : ill., maps.
Call Number UG1312.I2 H43 2012eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 358.1/75482097309045
Summary Between 1961 and 1967, the United States Air Force buried 1,000 Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in pastures across the Great Plains. This book tells the story of how rural Americans of all political stripes were drafted to fight the Cold War by living with nuclear missiles in their backyards -- and what that story tells us about enduring political divides and the persistence of defense spending. By scattering the missiles in out-of-the-way places, the Defense Department kept the chilling calculus of Cold War nuclear strategy out of view. The author argues that this subterfuge was necessary in order for Americans to accept a costly nuclear buildup and the resulting threat of Armageddon. As for the ranchers, farmers, and other civilians in the Plains states who were first seduced by the economics of war and then forced to live in the Soviet crosshairs, their sense of citizenship was forever changed. Some were stirred to dissent. Others consented but found their proud Plains individualism giving way to a growing dependence on the military-industrial complex. Even today, some communities express reluctance to let the Minutemen go, though the Air Force no longer wants them buried in the heartland.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Description based on print version record.
Available in Other Form Missile next door.
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Introduction: A strange new landscape
Ace in the hole
Selling deterrence
The mapmakers
Cold War on the range
Nuclear heartland
The radical plains
Dismantling the Cold War
Conclusion: Missiles and memory.

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