Grand Forks Air Force Base Painted Murals, Missile Alert Facility Hotel-Zero, Grand Forks, Grand Forks County, ND

Significance: Beginning with the end of World War II and continuing to the present, the Cold War and the resulting arms race between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) has formed an overarching theme for the cultures of both countries. The United States has based its foreign policy of strategic deterrence on an arsenal of nuclear weapons based from submarines, airborne bombers, and on land. As the land-based leg of the United States triad, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) armed with nuclear warheads represent the definitive technological refinement for weapons of mass destruction. They reflect the philosophy of a contemporary military establishment that hold high technology, rather than brute force, as the ultimate extension of military power. Since their inception in the 1950s, ICBMs have undergone a continuing evolution of form and function, as the Air Force has refined both the warheads and the delivery systems to make them more lethal and more accurate. The liquid-fueled Atlas and Tital missiles and the solid-fueled Minuteman missiles each represented technological improvements over their predecessors. The missiles themselves, and the...
Survey number: HAER ND-13-L