This is part of a small Cold War exhibit at the ND State Heritage Center. It’s nothing on the scale of the National Atomic Museum I wrote about,but is tailored toward a North Dakota audience.

Here’s a list of Soviet missile targets in North Dakota. The list was released by FEMA in 1990, after the fall of the Soviet Union. I suppose it’s only fair, as North Dakota had a lot of really nasty firecrackers pointed in their direction as well! Mutual Assured Destruction, and all that…

Here’s one of those targets: MAFB missile facilities. Unlike the movie War Games, where the launch control center is disguised as a farm house, we’re actually pretty open about where our stuff is at. As those joker peaceniks found out a while back, we have plenty of men & women ready to defend those facilities. As far as who kept throwing jackrabbits over the fence line to trip the sensors at the silo sites, well…I have no idea who that could be!

At the end of the exhibit, visitors are invited to leave a Post-It with their impressions of the display. Mine said something to the effect of, “We won the Cold War nearly twenty years ago, and the liberals are STILL trying to surrender.” I’m sure it wasn’t long before some career academic came by and made it go away, but I exercised my right to free speech.

I’m not sure how long this exhibit is scheduled to be in the Heritage Center; in fact, I took the pics over a week ago. It doesn’t show up on the State Historical Society web page, but that doesn’t look like it’s updated very frequently. If you’re interested in this exhibit, hang a sharp right as soon as you enter the Heritage Center. It is (was?) in the gallery room preceding the door to the library of the state archives.