An unarmed Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile launches during an operational test at 1:00 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb., 19, 2025, at Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. (Joshua LeRoi/U.S. Space Force)
VANDENBERG SPACE FORCE BASE, Calif. (Tribune News Service) — In tight confines 60 feet underground, Air Force missileers rotate 24-hour shifts at ICBM missile launch control centers in pairs, waiting for a message they hope never arrives: An order from the president of the United States directing a nuclear strike.
For a small group of journalists touring the missile range at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California last week, Air Force personnel demonstrated the sequence of actions involved in launching a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.
The process is designed to eliminate the possibility of an accidental launch, involving an extensive checklist of actions confirmed verbally at each step, to verify the authenticity of a message and quickly confirm a launch command by a unanimous vote of multiple personnel. The mechanism to launch requires two operators to manipulate switches with both hands in unison.
The demonstration took place in a nearly exact replica of launch control centers overseeing an arsenal of 400 ground-based nuclear arms in Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota. That day, the range prepared to launch an unarmed Minuteman III on a test flight to Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 4,200 miles away from California’s central coast. The successful mission lifted off at 1 a.m. on Feb. 19.
Among the airmen and officers on base to witness the launch, there was an air of excitement prompted not only by the feat of engineering and admiration at the performance of a technology dating back to the 1970s, but of the human teamwork behind the mission.
The test was conducted by the Air Force’s 377th Test and Evaluation Group, part of the 377th Air Base Wing headquartered at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. Among the observers of the launch was Kirtland’s installation commander, Col. Michael Power.
ICBM test launches are scheduled three times per year, on dates selected five years in advance, which base officials said debunks any notion that the tests are ever a response to recent world events. As part of the process, an active missile from the arsenal is selected at random, disarmed of nuclear material, and transported to Vandenberg. The missile launched on Feb. 19 had been deployed at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.
At a missile processing facility, housed in a windowless building sitting behind a locked perimeter fence, Staff Sgt. James Harris was at work on a missile to be launched this summer. The Minuteman III is a three-stage rocket measuring 60 feet in length. Over a period of months, missile handling technicians will equip the rocket with telemetry equipment, redundant navigation systems and explosives to destroy the missile in case the mission needs to be aborted mid-flight. The process of outfitting the missile for a test launch takes months, Harris said. The missile that launched on Feb. 19 arrived at this facility last November.
The team preparing the missile will then transfer it to another team, the missile maintenance technicians responsible for transporting the missile from this building to a launch facility on the range on large, specially outfitted trucks.
The facility from which the Feb. 19 flight launched sits behind a fence close to a beach in waters patrolled by great white sharks. An occasional wave crashed against the rocks and onto the concrete near the portal through which the missile would emerge. The first visitors to the scene after launch would be firefighters to extinguish any fires ignited by the rocket.
Some visitors, military and civilian, observed the launch from an outdoor observation point at a distance overlooking the launch facility. Others observed it in a control room at the 377th Test and Evaluation Group’s headquarters on base, through video monitors. In that room, a large map showed the flight corridor defining the missile’s intended path up to the exosphere and down to the ocean’s surface near the atoll.
The mission involved extensive coordination with other branches of the armed forces to make sure the path was clear of boat and airplane traffic as well as satellites, space debris and the International Space Station.
The human coordination was highlighted by Gen. Thomas Bussiere, the Air Force’s Global Strike Commander, hours before the Feb. 19 flight in an interview with the Journal. He stressed that while the test launches are part of a nuclear deterrent strategy, its primary purpose was testing and evaluation of a weapons system more than 50 years old, to verify its reliability and accuracy. Then he turned focus to the airmen responsible for that technology.
“It’s all useless without our airmen,” Bussiere said. “The most valuable weapon system we have comes with a Social Security number, not a tail number; and that is the underpinning of our deterrence force.”
After a two-hour delay to assure its flight path was clear, the Minuteman missile burst from the launch facility at 1 a.m., a ball of light emerging from an amber gust of flame, with observers watching in rapt silence as the glow slowly disappeared with a distant growl.
The uniformed airmen then burst into applause and cheers as many embraced one another — several of them shedding tears.
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