Missouri’s nuclear weapon legacy and the mess it left behind
by michael boyer and sam mosher
Missouri’s Cold War legacy - 150 missiles left in the ground
Missourians share memories of civilian life during the nuclear Minuteman era
Even during the Cold War, Rodney Wesner chuckled at the idea of a nuclear attack.
“I always wanted to be standing by a concrete wall, so when a blast went off, my silhouette would be burned into this concrete wall,” he said with a laugh. “Survivors would come by and ask, ‘I wonder what he was doing?’”
Wesner’s sense of humor may seem surprising. He has lived in Windsor, Missouri, all his life, and during the Cold War, he lived about only two miles from a 60-feet-tall intercontinental ballistic missile known as a Minuteman.
Missourians do not share a common feeling toward the Minuteman project. For some, it brought good business and protection. For others, it was a source of fear. Wesner reflects one emotion surprisingly held by many who lived near a Cold War nuclear weapon: indifference.
“We just went along with it every day. If you can’t do anything about it, why worry about it?” he said.
The Minuteman project began development in the 1950s as part of the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. The U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command oversaw 150 Minuteman missiles across rural Missouri that became active in 1964. Whiteman Air Force Base, located about 10 miles from Warrensburg, was the headquarters for the SAC in Missouri. According to David Grisdale, director of historical properties at Whiteman Air Force Base, the missiles deterred a Soviet missile attack.
The project was a huge national ordeal, costing about $285 million in 1962 alone. In total, 800 Minuteman missiles were active by 1965, located in Missouri, Montana, North and South Dakota and Wyoming. The Minuteman was lower in cost and safer due to its solid fuel compared to the liquid-fuel Atlas and Titan missiles, which preceded the Minuteman. The project involved many contractors, such as Boeing for the construction of the missiles and silos and ITT Kellogg for the installation of communication cables.
Residents say Missouri benefitted from the Minuteman project.
Greg Cecil grew up in Sedalia. He remembers a two-to-three year boom in town when contractors and their families moved to town. He said “several hundred” people moved to Sedalia in the early ‘60s for the Minuteman project, and many had to live in a trailer village. His father’s TV and bicycle shop saw a huge influx in profit during this period.
“New people came into town, so [business owners] liked that because they were buying,” he said.
The Minuteman project also brought small improvements to rural Missouri. Cindy Walters grew up in Hartwell and Minuteman construction workers paved roads, sidewalks and driveways in her small town.
“Those were unexpected improvements. As a child, I probably didn’t appreciate them until I got roller skates for Christmas and I had somewhere I could actually roller skate,” she said.
But the presence of nuclear missile silos also haunted Walters.
“I just dreamed about convoys coming down the road and shooting at us,” she said. “I remember one really vivid dream. I was carrying my baby brother and I got shot in the back. That’s not something you forget in a lifetime. It still gives me cold chills even just thinking about it.”
For others, the silos made them feel protected. When Steve Barber was 16, his family moved from Warrensburg to a farm in Centerview with a silo on its property. He found the Minuteman project to be “reassuring.”
“I felt safe when I was working the fields and saw that military police truck drive by,” he said. “We weren’t fearful.”
Bruce Uhler was raised in Warrensburg and observed a proud feeling amongst farmers who were asked to have silos installed on their property.
“It was a very patriotic thing for the farmers to say, ‘Yeah, you need that for a missile silo? Absolutely,’” he said, noting the farmers were compensated for giving up some of their land.
Melany Laws grew up watching her parents build a fallout shelter in her home’s basement in Warrensburg. Even under fearful parents, Laws found the prospect of Minuteman missiles to be “exciting.”
But about two decades later, in 1983, ABC aired the TV movie “The Day After.” The film, about an actual nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, showcased a missile strike in rural Missouri. Laws said the film cast her childhood in a different light.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that could have been when I was a kid. What if that would have happened?’” she said. “If I had seen that back when I was a kid around there or still living in Warrensburg, it would’ve really scared me.”
Despite his jokes, even Wesner knew the reality of an attack.
“We were at the center of what would be a nuclear war. The survival rate for Henry County in this area was zero,” he said.
Fortunately, that statistic never became reality. The U.S. and Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991. The Air Force took the Minuteman missiles off active alert and in 1995, the missiles were removed.
Today, more than 20 years later, the thought of a Cold War nuclear attack is a distant memory for native Missourians. For some, the thought is even something that can make them laugh.
Nuclear material in St. Louis reflects Missouri’s greater history of wartime waste
History of nuclear waste in St. Louis shows pattern of carelessness
Sledding in the summertime seemed too good to be true. The activity and season usually don’t get along, but that’s exactly what compelled some children in St. Louis to sled down piles of “fine, granulated residue” in the summer of the late 1960s. Sure enough, the activity was too good to be true because those small sledding hills were actually “radioactive stockpiles,” Bruce Munholand said. He is the program manager for the cleanup of nuclear waste in the St. Louis area for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
This story reflects the city’s messy history with nuclear waste. During that period, the government and its business partners mishandled their nuclear waste. Their recklessness not only resulted in problems like children sledding on radioactive material but problems that still loom over the area today.
St. Louis first became involved with nuclear material in 1942, when the Mallinckrodt Chemical Plant began processing uranium and radium for nuclear weapons. Mallinckrodt was under contract for the Manhattan Engineer District and the Atomic Energy Commission until the late 1950s. The production happened “in the heart of” industrial downtown St. Louis, Munholand said. Mallinckrodt worked with uranium ore from the Belgian Congo, and according to Munholand, it was the richest in the world. He said they were not prepared to work with it.
“Very little was known about uranium and radioactivity and how it could be handled or not handled and how humans would react with it,” he said.
Radioactive byproducts from production were stored near the city’s airport. However, this waste was stored sloppily, and rain and wind carried the waste to Coldwater Creek and nearby baseball fields. The Army Corps of Engineers is still testing these sites for radioactivity.
When production ended downtown, the Atomic Energy Commission wanted to sell the leftover waste. The residue contained some copper, so Colorado mining company Cotter Corporation purchased the waste in 1966 and moved it a few miles away from the airport to Latty Avenue. But the purchase did not go as planned.
“[Cotter] went back to the U.S. government, where they bought the waste from, and said, ‘Can we please have your permission to dump this?... This is more radioactive than we thought. It’s turning into being a problem,’” Dawn Chapman said. Chapman is the co-founder of Just Moms STL, a non-profit organization that fights to see all nuclear waste cleaned up in the St. Louis area.
Cotter’s original deal stated the government would help provide a dumping site for the waste if Cotter wished to dispose of it. However, the government backed out of this part of the deal. So, to solve their waste problem, Cotter lied to the owners of the West Lake Landfill by offering truckloads of dirt to cover its trash, failing to mention that it contained nuclear contamination.
“We can all say naughty Cotter. Shame on you for illegally dumping this waste, right?... The fact that our government went back on that deal, shame on them. And that's what led ultimately to the West Lake situation,” Chapman said.
Not only did Cotter dump nuclear waste in a landfill, but their methods for dumping were careless. Cotter paid B&K Construction to dump the waste, which took a total of 2,600 dump trucks from July 31, 1973, to October 31, 1973. Waste was not properly stored in the trucks and it blew from them to the side of the road. Waste was also poorly covered at Latty Avenue, which led to further contamination of Coldwater Creek and other parts of North County. At night, after each day of dumping, B&K washed its trucks out in Coldwater Creek, but this contamination could have been prevented if B&K told its drivers that the dirt contained radioactive waste.
That waste remains in West Lake today, where there has been an underground fire on the opposite side of the landfill since 2010. Chapman said the waste, especially with a nearby fire, is a major threat to her community, and it is not lost on her how this chain of contamination started.
“This was military. It was a war effort and to some extent, it's unfortunate that was the price our city paid and is still paying and will still pay for that effort,” she said.
Steve Mahfood, former director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, said the government is responsible for the nuclear waste problems of St. Louis.
“We were very, very careless of how we handled things. There really was no reason… for what's happened to [West Lake] Landfill,” he said.
Ed Smith, policy director for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, recognizes that St. Louis tries to hide this part of its history.
“It's a dirty secret, if you will, in St. Louis, that not a lot of people like to address,” he said.
But activists like Chapman brought awareness to St. Louis’ history of nuclear waste. In September, the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans for a 70 percent cleanup of radioactivity at West Lake.
Chapman said she is pleased the government is making amends for its history of nuclear waste.
“We dug it out of the ground. We made weapons out of it. We've put it places it didn't belong. It exists. It's real. We have to have a discussion on how to clean it up because we can't go back in time and not do it,” she said.
The EPA expects its cleanup of West Lake to take about four and a half years.