Ed Butcher, 78, kicked mud off his cowboy boots and walked into his house for dinner after tying up his horse. He had been working on the ranch for most of the day and he asked his wife, Pam, what he missed. As Pam took their dinner out of the oven, the TV commentator said that Russia's aggression had gone from scary to terrifying. The Washington Post has a newsletter for important and interesting stories. The commentator said that they were talking about a war that involved a very unstable nuclear power. The commentator said that it could explode. Ed turned the TV off and looked out the window, where the wind blew dust clouds across Butcher Road. Ed and his family have been on this land since his grandparents homesteaded here in 1913, but rarely had life on the ranch felt so precarious. Ed wondered what else could go wrong, as he looked at the land that had been dried up by a record-breaking dry spell, neglected by a work shortage, and now connected in its own unique way to a war across the world. Pam asked if they would ever shoot it up into the sky. I used to say no, Ed said. The launch site for the Minuteman III missile has been on their property since the Cold War, when the Air Force paid $150 for one acre of their land as it installed an arsenal of nuclear weapons across the rural West. The missiles are ready to launch at a few seconds notice in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska. There are bison preserves and Indian reservations where they are located. They sit across from a national forest, behind a rodeo grandstand, down the road from a one-room schoolhouse, and on dozens of private farms like the one belonging to the Butchers, who have lived for 60 years with a nuclear missile as their closest neighbor. It is buried behind a chain-link fence and beneath a door of concrete and steel. It is 60 feet long. It's 78,332 pounds. It has a greater power than the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people. An Air Force team is ready to fire a missile at any moment if the order comes. In 3.4 seconds, it would tear out the silo and go above the ranch at 10,000 feet per second. It was designed to rise 70 miles above Earth, fly across the world in 25 minutes and blow up within a few hundred yards of its target. Within a half-mile, every person and structure would be destroyed. The buildings would be destroyed by the blast. The US military has referred to it as "total nuclear annihilation" due to the spread of fires and fatal doses of radiation. Ed thought it would fly over the living room. We would hear it. Pam said that the whole house would be shaking. Ed said that if we are shooting off missiles, you can bet some of them are headed back toward us. Over the years, they had to contend with every conceivable threat to their land. The soil was killed by the weather. The crops were destroyed. The cattle were attacked by wolves and mountain lions. The sheep werebombed by the eagles. The prairie was littered with animal skulls when dozens of newborn calves arrived each spring. The Butchers' oldest son died suddenly of an asthma attack. The sixth generation to be born onto the property had just delivered a great-grandson in the bunkhouse. The idea of man-made, mass nuclear destruction was made more unimaginable by the fact that ranch life brought him closer to the natural cycles of life and death. Ed said they would head for the storage room. Pam said to make a few goodbye calls. Please pray. Ed got up to clear his plate. It is only there for deterrence. It will never explode. Pam said that it wouldn't happen. Almost definitely not. * Even though it was on their ranch, they had never been allowed into the missile silo. Sometimes they saw convoys of humvees and a wide-load semi traveling on their dirt roads toward the launch site, and once Ed had glimpsed part of the Minuteman III as it was being lowered into the ground, with its black-and-white painted warhead and rocket The missile on their land was classified. The 80 foot Bunker was a place of imagination for them. One of the 52 active nuclear missile sites was known as Launch Facility E05. The center of Montana was chosen as a nuclear hot spot in the 1950s because of its proximity to Russia and the fact that it could act as a sponge in the event of a nuclear attack. The idea was that an enemy would have to use some of its missiles to attack the silos surrounding the town of Winifred, Mont., home to 35,000 cattle and 189 residents. The Butchers spent most of their time on the ranch with their children and grandchildren, but they went for church on Sundays and for mail delivery on Wednesdays. They had 12,000 acres to manage and no paid employees, so Ed was still helping to mend fences two decades into retirement. Pam asked him if he was heading out today on the horse, knowing he still liked to ride up to 20 miles a day. He said that he was a fair-weather cowboy. I will take the four-wheeler. He put on his work gloves and drove onto the ranch, bumping over fields of sagebrush and dry creek beds as he turned away from the silo and neared the ponderosa pine forest on the south end of the property. He passed the old bunkhouse of his grandfather, the first hunting cabin of his father, and a dozen hills and landmarks named after family friends and dead pets. The horses ran over to greet him, and he said that he had no treats today. He watched the calf fall over. He turned off the engine and watched as the calf got back on its feet. He went to college in Montana and then went to work as a professor in North Dakota. His mother called to say she was going to sell the ranch unless he moved back to Montana, because his father had died of a heart attack. He was their only child. The Wickens and the Wallings and the other original homestead families had the same name as the Butcher. He moved back with Pam to take over the ranch even though he loved teaching. Their soil was usually too dry to grow food. Ed taught himself and his three children to get fat off the scenery because it was not a way to get rich. He watched the snow melt off the Judith Mountains and the clouds roll across the sky as he drove. A herd of animals raced across the prairie and a mammal crossed the road in front of him. He said that not much has changed in a hundred years, and then drove over the hill to the silo, which was a few miles from their house. The Air Force had put up a fence and portable bathroom on the one acre of land that the government owned, but the yellow grass on the rest of the Butcher ranch was the same. There was a metal manhole cover behind the fence, a small circle of concrete in the ground, and a small sign. He saw the launch site as a symbol of federal government overreach and as a potential intrusion when he was a teenager. He drove a Volkswagen bus with a peace sign painted on the rear window as a college professor and Pam attended a protest against the Minuteman missiles in North Dakota. They moved back to the ranch because they were expecting to see some of the nuclear drama they had heard about at other silos: toxic chemical leaks, accidental near-explosions, Russian spies or groups of nuns who chained themselves to the silo fence in acts of protest. Each time Ed went to check on the silo, he found nothing but wind and sky and sometimes a cow in the fence. The original Minuteman missile was replaced by a Minuteman II and then a Minuteman III. The Butcher ranch had better dirt roads built by military crews. They plow those roads. They created jobs for electricians and contractors. As far as Ed could tell, nothing happened when they worked on the launch site under the cover of night. The missile was not launched. The nuclear apocalypse did not happen. The silo began to feel less threatening to Ed than it did before. It was a relic of the Cold War. Ed thought it was one acre out of 12,000 when Russia invaded Ukraine and then put his nuclear weapons on high alert. Ed said that Russian satellites were counting the hairs on his head. He pulled his hat down as he looked up at the sky. He turned away from the silo and went back to check on the cows. * Instead, at that moment. The launch facility has motion sensors that are 100 yards from it. Military helicopters were patrolling for suspicious activity at all 450 active missile sites in Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado. Two members of the Air Force team were starting another 24 hour shift in a small room reinforced with four-foot concrete walls after taking an elevator 60 feet below ground. They had a small bathroom. They had a bed. There was an escape tunnel. They had a control panel where they could key in an eight-digit code to launch their nuclear missiles. Ed's youngest son was at the county courthouse helping to work on the next generation of America's nuclear arsenal a few miles further down the road. As the military began replacing the Minuteman IIIs with a new and more efficient nuclear weapon, one of the three elected Commissioners in Fergus County was responsible for coordinating with the military. The military sent letters and power point presentations to the county about what to expect during the next 10 years of nuclear improvements to enhance our national defense, after the Air Force had ordered 642 of them from the same company. Ross flipped over to the next slide after reading one slide about a complete renovation to all launch facilities. Thirty-one new towers. There are eight more control centers. There are hundreds of miles of underground wiring. There are two workforce hubs with thousands of employees. Ross said that they were talking about adding almost 50 percent to the population. The military had found little resistance to the idea of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a fleet of nuclear weapons that the government hopes will remain underground until they eventually expire. The local economy received more than $375 million from the Air Force Base. The towns of rural Montana named their school teams after the Minuteman and the county built a monument to the missile in a city park. Ross went to meetings across central Montana to talk about the impact of the new missile, and he made the case that Fergus County was both economic and patriotic. No country had fired a nuclear weapon in the 53 years he had lived on his family's ranch. He told county officials that Nukes are a part of our global reality. We need to show that a bully can push us. The last piece of information the Air Force sent to Fergus County was about the projected lifetime of the missiles. It said that there was strong deterrence and protection into the 2070's and beyond. * At the ranch, Pam Butcher wondered if mankind would survive that long. Her brother and his wife were killed in a collision. Her son-in-law died of the coronaviruses. After working 16-hour days on a ranch in dust and wildfire smoke, Trevis had an asthma attack that killed him. At the time of his death, he was in good health and had become a leader within the state Republican Party. Pam could only make sense of his death by thinking that God needed Trevis to help get things in order for a monumental event. Pam thought that God might be preparing for the rapture. She started to get ready herself, storing several years of extra food in the cellar and ordering dozens of books and DVDs from a Christian website. They sat in piles around the living room. Pam flipped through the stack and held up her newest DVD to show Ed. The cover had an image of a desert landscape, a nuclear firebomb, three men wearing hazmat suits, and a crumbling Statue of Liberty. Pam asked if you would sit and have a piece of cake with her. Ed walked to his desk and shook his head. I will answer some emails. She sat in front of the TV and started the DVD. The screen flashed with disconnected images from around the world, including an empty reservoirs, a famished child, a group of rioters breaking the windows of a car, a screaming woman, a military helicopter, and a cloud of smoke. The narrator said that the horsemen from the Book of Revelation are now riding. Pam turned up the volume as she said Amen. The narrator asked if you were prepared for the worst. Pam had a plan to go to the cellar, where she would have enough supplies to be self-sufficient for a few years. They had a freezer full of meat and thousands of rounds of military-grade bullets to shoot the deer on their land. They had a generator, diesel fuel, and propane. They could use the central fireplace to heat their house and make flour from their wheat. More than a dozen survival kits, which included evaporated soup and freeze-dried meals, were purchased online by Pam. The narrator said that the earth was under attack. He said that everyone on the planet is in grave danger. China, Iran, and North Korea could all launch nuclear attacks. Russia is flexing its muscles. America should be prepared for an unimaginable threat. Pam imagined it. When she was 8 years old, her father woke her up in the middle of the night to watch the United States launch a nuclear missile in Nevada, not far from where her family lived in Utah. She watched the sky light up with a flash of orange light as the missile rose above earth and disappeared overhead, leaving behind a cloud of smoke. She began to think about what would happen when a missile fell. She had taken a tour of a nearby launch control center, sat in the Air Force team in abunker, and heard about the realities of nuclear war. The missile could destroy the entire city. The detonation of all 150 nuclear missiles in Montana could blanket the world in fire and smoke, block out sunlight, lower Earth's temperature, and lead to mass starvation and extinction. The narrator said that war is now inevitable as the camera shook and people wearing gas masks ran from the sound of machine guns. Pam was watching missiles and fireballs on her TV screen. After a moment, she said, and Ed looked up from his computer. He said "WOW." She asked him what he thought. He said he would be ready to go with the good Lord whenever he called. She said it feels like it could happen at any moment. There is a rating for this. Ed woke up to the sound of an emergency call after the temperature dropped below freezing. Josh went to check on the cattle after 3 a.m. and found the second calf of the season dead at the bottom of a ravine. The calf fell into the frozen creek bed after it stumbled away from its mother. Josh took the calf to his truck and turned up the heat. He drove back to the house and put the calf in an electric warming bed, but it was still cold and unresponsive. When they checked on the calf a few hours later, it had opened its eyes after Josh told Ed that he was going to lose this one. They decided to take it back to the ranch to see if it could somehow connect with its mother. The daughter-in-law drove the pickup truck past the missile silo to the cow pasture. The calf was held in the passenger seat by his great-granddaughter. Ed and Josh sat in the bed of the truck and tried to call the mother of the calf that they dropped in the field. Josh yelled. Mooo. The cow ignored Ed's call to come get your baby. This was her first calf and she had no experience with it. She chewed on the grass. She was laying down. She stood up, looked over at the calf, and then walked away. Josh said that she was shunning her. Ed said it was natural. Josh said, but the second calf. Ed nodded and said "I know." It hurts. Ed called out one more time, and the cow looked at him and then stood. She walked towards her calf. She licked its head after looking at it. As the sun broke through the clouds, she lay beside the calf and protected it from the wind. Ed stood next to his great-granddaughter and watched as the cow prodded the calf onto its feet and led it back to the herd. Ed asked his great-granddaughter how great it was. 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