Days 73 and 74 - Badlands to Rochester, Minnesota

We are on the home stretch as we come across the country. On Monday we drove from the Badlands to Sioux Falls and on Tuesday we drove to Rochester, Minnesota. We did take the opportunity to visit the Minuteman Mission Control Historical Site. From 1960 to 1993, the US had 1000 nuclear missiles across the Plain states. In the 1990s, the US government decommissioned about half the missiles. They turned one of the missile silos and mission control centers into a historical site. We toured both. What struck me about these sites is that they are within plain view of the interstate. If you are ever on Interstate 90 in South Dakota, you really need to take a tour of the mission control center. You get to go down into the bomb proof capsule that held the two missile officers. At any given moment they were ready to launch 10 missiles from that capsule.There were many other capsules around the west with direct control of the other missiles. Each missile had the power of 60 percent of the total firepower used in world war two. With 1000 missiles, major destruction could have taken place. Thankfully, not a single USSR or USA missile was fired.