About Delta-09 Missile Silo
The strangest thing about Delta-09 is how little there is to see from a distance. A fence, a patch of prairie, and a few pieces of infrastructure sit beside Interstate 90 east of Wall. Beneath that ordinary landscape, however, is a deactivated Minuteman II training missile in a launch facility that once held an operational missile during the Cold War.
Delta-09 operated from 1963 to 1993 as part of a huge missile field spread across the northern Great Plains. The entire system depended on invisibility and dispersal. Launch facilities were placed far apart in open country, with the most important machinery and weaponry buried underground. Thousands of drivers could cross the region without realizing how much strategic infrastructure surrounded them.
Today the site is part of Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. Visitors can approach the fenced launch facility and look down through a viewing enclosure at the missile inside the silo. The National Park Service preserves Delta-09 as one of the best places to understand how the missile field physically occupied the landscape, because the location still looks remarkably close to what made it effective: mostly empty.
Delta-09 is reached from Interstate 90 Exit 116, about six miles east of Wall. Access is generally available year-round, although winter weather can close the site. The experience is eerie precisely because it lacks spectacle. There is no giant building announcing what lies below. A weapon system built to disappear into the prairie is still doing a convincing job of it.