A chef provided the staff with the necessary meals, ensuring everyone had enough energy to work in the harsh conditions. There was also a two-man launch team, the direct operators of the ten Minuteman III land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in the silo, bearing the responsibility of launching the missiles at crucial moments.
Judging by the number of personnel and the allocation of duties, the guarding force did indeed seem extremely weak.
Yet these missile silos had never experienced any major problems.
The reason the U.S. military could maintain the security of its missile silos despite seemingly weak defenses was that it had a unique strategy.
They had set up a large number of fake silos among fifteen real missile silos.
These fake silos looked almost identical to the real ones, making them difficult to distinguish.
Some fake silos were even located just two or three kilometers from residential areas and had been captured on Google Street View.
The U.S. military did this partly to confuse potential enemies, making it difficult for them to accurately determine the locations of real silos and increasing the difficulty of launching an attack. On the other hand, it also scattered the enemy's attention, forcing them to spend more time and effort distinguishing real silos from fake ones during an attack, thereby buying the U.S. military more time to react.
As the key component protecting a missile silo, the silo hatch was designed and manufactured to exceptionally high standards.
The missile silo hatches at Minot Air Force Base were 115.4 centimeters thick. Such massive hatches provided solid physical protection for the silos.
They consisted of 90 centimeters of ordinary reinforced concrete and 25.4 centimeters of borate radiation-shielding reinforced concrete.
The ordinary reinforced concrete gave the hatches their basic strength and compressive resistance, allowing them to withstand