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This article is part of \u201cThe New Nuclear Age<\/a>,\u201d a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.<\/em><\/p>\n Air Force Member (tape):<\/strong> Yeah, unfortunately, right now we can\u2019t have anybody on the access road because they\u2019ll just, like, come out and monitor. I\u2019m sorry.<\/p>\n Ella Weber (tape): <\/strong>Gotcha.<\/p>\n Ryo Morimoto (tape):<\/strong> No, no, that\u2019s okay.<\/p>\n [CLIP: Music]<\/p>\n Ella Weber:<\/strong> You\u2019re listening to my first encounter with the Air Force at a nuclear missile facility.<\/p>\n My name is Ella Weber. I am a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes, which is located in the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in central North Dakota.\u00a0<\/p>\n In this podcast, I\u2019m going to tell you about myself, my community and our relationship with nuclear weapons. I\u2019m 20 years old and a junior at Princeton University.<\/p>\n You\u2019re listening to Scientific American<\/em>\u2019s The Missiles on Our Rez,<\/em> a new miniseries from Science, Quickly<\/em>. This is Episode 1: \u201cBecoming Nuclear.\u201d<\/p>\n [CLIP: Music]<\/p>\n Weber: <\/strong>I\u2019m part of an undergraduate-directed project called Nuclear Princeton. We\u2019re driving on the Fort Berthold reservation to look for nuclear missile silos.\u00a0<\/p>\n The people you\u2019re about to hear are my friends Lillian Fitzgerald<\/a>, a member of the Klamath Tribes, and Blue Carlsson<\/a>, a member of the Cherokee Nation. Joshua Worth<\/a>, who\u2019s Native Hawaiian, is kind of observing from the back seat.\u00a0<\/p>\n We\u2019re also there with Ryo Morimoto<\/a>, a Japanese anthropologist and assistant professor at Princeton. There are five of us documenting the experiences of people living near missiles.\u00a0<\/p>\n Weber (tape): <\/strong>Are we turning here?<\/p>\n Morimoto (tape):<\/strong> Yep because this 87.<\/p>\n Weber (tape): <\/strong>Oh wait, It\u2019s not on 87. It\u2019s, like, right off this road. It\u2019s \u2026 we have to pass it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Carlsson (tape): <\/strong>Oh, okay.<\/p>\n Fitzgerald (tape):<\/strong> We haven\u2019t passed it, or\u2026?<\/p>\n Carlsson (tape): <\/strong>So, we\u2019re going \u2026.<\/p>\n Weber (tape): <\/strong>We have to pass it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Carlsson (tape): <\/strong>So, we\u2019re going through and straight.\u00a0<\/p>\n Weber (tape): <\/strong>Yeah\u2026.it\u2019s right there.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fitzgerald (tape):<\/strong> It\u2019s this?<\/p>\n Weber (tape): <\/strong>Yeah\u2026yeah, it should be that! That little mound right there? That\u2019s it!<\/p>\n Carlsson (tape): <\/strong>Oh\u2026.<\/p>\n Fitzgerald (tape):<\/strong> With the porta potties by it? What if I need to pee?<\/p>\n Weber (tape): <\/strong>No, that\u2019s the missile silo.\u00a0<\/p>\n Carlsson (tape): <\/strong>H-09.<\/p>\n Fitzgerald (tape):<\/strong> Oh yeah, wow!<\/p>\n Morimoto (tape): <\/strong>[Laughs]\u00a0<\/p>\n Weber:<\/strong> Our team had surveyed at least three nuclear missile silos. Because they\u2019re underground, we usually could only see a barbed wire fence with a long pole sticking out of the ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n We arrive in front of what looks like a nondescript tan house. It sits atop miles and miles of empty prairie, blanketed in snow. An eagle even swoops overhead. It\u2019s very cinematic.\u00a0<\/p>\n I and other members of the project\u2019s research team are at Hotel-01. It\u2019s this missile alert facility\u00a0 of the 91st Missile Wing, located between New Town and Parshall, North Dakota.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fitzgerald (tape):<\/strong> Air force!<\/p>\n Carlsson (tape): <\/strong>Yeah, he has a U.S. government plate\u2026 [expletive].<\/p>\n [CLIP: Car sounds]<\/p>\n Weber: <\/strong>Before members of the Air Force came outside, I didn\u2019t actually know what a missile alert facility was. So I turned to Wikipedia to try to understand where we were.<\/p>\n Weber (tape):<\/strong> Oh, it used to be known as the launch control facility. It is a soft, or not able to withstand nuclear explosions.\u00a0<\/p>\n Carlsson (tape):<\/strong> Oh, God, this guy\u2019s coming out.<\/p>\n Weber (tape):<\/strong> It consists of a security control office, dining room, kitchen, sleeping areas for security forces stationed there and occasional maintenance troop garages for various vehicles and other facilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n Weber:<\/strong> I\u2019m so distracted that I\u2019m not paying attention to what\u2019s happening outside of the car.\u00a0<\/p>\n Weber (tape): <\/strong>That\u2019s what a missile …<\/p>\n Carlsson (tape): <\/strong>Ella, look up.<\/p>\n Weber (tape): <\/strong>Well, that\u2019s fun.<\/p>\n Carlsson (tape): <\/strong>Yeah, there\u2019s two guys\u2014one of them has a really big gun. They both have really big guns.<\/p>\n Weber:<\/strong> Ryo decides to talk to the two Air Force guards.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fitzgerald (tape):<\/strong> You guys, take a picture.<\/p>\n Carlsson (tape): <\/strong>I don\u2019t want to take a picture. I\u2019m scared. Ugh\u2026.<\/p>\n Research team (tape): <\/strong>Hi\u2026.<\/p>\n Weber:<\/strong> We get out of the car, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n [CLIP: Car doors shutting; everyone shuffling outside]<\/p>\n Worth (tape): <\/strong>These people are nice.\u00a0<\/p>\n Weber (tape):<\/strong> Of course. This is North Dakota, guys. Woo\u2026.<\/p>\n Morimoto (tape): <\/strong>You guys stationed here?\u00a0<\/p>\n Air Force Member (tape): <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n Carlsson (tape): <\/strong>Must be fun\u2026.<\/p>\n Air Force Member (tape): <\/strong>Where are you guys from?<\/p>\n Research Team (tape): <\/strong>Princeton University.<\/p>\n Air Force Member: <\/strong>Oh, wow. It\u2019s pretty nice in Princeton.<\/p>\n Morimoto:<\/strong> We\u2019re trying to think where to go to get food [laughs].<\/p>\n Air Force Member: <\/strong>So, I mean, there\u2019s a place in Parshall that you can get food, but that\u2019s probably the only place for, like, 50 miles.<\/p>\n Morimoto:<\/strong> Well, thank you so much.<\/p>\n Weber (tape):<\/strong> Sorry to disrupt your day. Have a good one.<\/p>\n [CLIP: Footsteps receding]<\/p>\n [CLIP: Music]<\/p>\n Weber: <\/strong>Over the past 60 years, three generations of my people have lived with nuclear missiles on our ancestral lands. The missiles came in 1962, when my grandmothers, Debra Malnourie and Carol Schulz, were in boarding school.<\/p>\n Debra Malnourie:<\/strong> Where was I in 1962?<\/a> I think I was at Wahpeton Indian school.<\/p>\n Weber: <\/strong>In case you don\u2019t know, such boarding schools were founded to eliminate traditional American Indian ways of life and replace them with\u00a0 mainstream American culture.<\/p>\n Carol Schulz:<\/strong> There were rows upon rows of beds where everybody slept in the first night. You could hear everybody cry.<\/a><\/p>\n Weber:<\/strong> Just a decade prior to missiles being installed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flooded more than a quarter of the reservation. That quarter consisted of nearly all of the agricultural land and 80 percent of the Fort Berthold population<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Because of this, hundreds of families were forced to relocate as the water slowly crept up the valley. Homes, schools, graveyards, and churches were all flooded. With nearly all the resources gone, many families were forced to send their kids to boarding schools.\u00a0<\/p>\n Schulz:<\/strong> Some of the kids spoke nothing but their native tongue. And I remember the first time I\u2019ve seen this woman just haul off and hit this little girl. And I\u2019m looking at her. I thought, \u201cWhat did she do?\u201d And you could see everybody around us, and I\u2019m looking at my sister, and she\u2019s looking at me, and you know\u2014and the next one, same thing, same language. And she got hit, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s when I realized when they said you cannot speak your language, you must speak English, you have to fit in, you have to change. And I remember thinking, \u201cWhat am I going to change into?\u201d You know, you don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n Weber: <\/strong>And just barely a decade after, when families were still readjusting to this new way of life, the U.S. military installed the nuclear missile silos.<\/p>\n Sixty years later some things have changed, but others have not.<\/p>\n I am at Princeton, with plans to major in public policy and international affairs. Meanwhile the silos are still on the reservation, and the U.S. Air Force plans to refurbish all of them and upload new nuclear missiles, with plans to keep them operational for the next 60 years.<\/p>\n To tell you the truth, I didn\u2019t actually know there were missiles on the reservation until about a year ago, when Ryo sent me an e-mail.<\/p>\n Basically, he told me Princeton\u2019s Program on Science and Global Security<\/a> was working on a computer model to see what communities would be impacted by fallout in a potential nuclear war. One of the identified areas was my home region.<\/p>\n I was intrigued, so I asked for a meeting to be set up with these researchers. The first one I spoke to was S\u00e9bastien Philippe<\/a>, a French scientist and research scholar at Princeton.<\/p>\n [CLIP: Music]<\/p>\n S\u00e9bastien Philippe: <\/strong>For the past few years, I\u2019ve been researching the radiological consequences of nuclear weapon use and nuclear war.<\/p>\n Weber:<\/strong> S\u00e9bastien had been modeling the consequences of a concerted nuclear attack on U.S. missile silos and mapping areas that are most at risk.<\/p>\n Philippe: <\/strong>My goal is to understand the implications of nuclear weapon policy choices, and identify communities that will be most impacted by these choices.<\/p>\n Weber:<\/strong> What was unusual was that S\u00e9bastien had served as a nuclear weapon system safety engineer for the French government, so he knew the risks involved. And to my surprise, when he showed me his maps, the places I grew up knowing as home in Crookston, Minnesota, and in North Dakota were in an area that was completely lit up.<\/p>\n When I pointed where I was from this is what Sebastien told me.\u00a0<\/p>\n Philippe: <\/strong>So that dark area that shows the places where people could receive several times the radiation dose that result in near certain death.<\/p>\n Weber<\/strong>: Oh, wow.\u00a0<\/p>\n [CLIP: Music]<\/p>\n Weber:<\/strong> U.S. nuclear weapons can be launched from land-, sea- or air-based platforms. The U.S. military calls this the nuclear triad.<\/p>\n I grew up 220 miles away from Minot, North Dakota, the only Air Force base to have two of the three legs in the nuclear triad. There are strategic bombers and nuclear missile silos. We just don\u2019t have the submarine-based missiles\u2014probably because Lake Sakakawea isn\u2019t deep enough. (For legal reasons, I\u2019ll point out that that is a joke.)<\/p>\n Anyways, historically, they were placed there because by going over the North Pole, this was the shortest distance from the former Soviet Union. It was also chosen because the population density was much lower than, let\u2019s say, the East Coast, and should the nuclear weapons and bases be targeted, fewer people would die as a result. But\u2014it also happened to be right on the North East Segment of my tribe\u2019s reservation.<\/p>\n Philippe: <\/strong>When you’re planning for nuclear war, silos are a prime military target, destroying them requires detonating one or two nuclear weapons at close proximity.\u00a0<\/p>\n Weber:<\/strong> Basically, that means U.S. adversaries are probably targeting the 150 silos armed with nuclear missiles that are located in North Dakota.<\/p>\n As I looked closer to the maps, I noticed the dark plumes in central North Dakota near where the reservation is. When we zoomed in, we realized that the targets were within the Fort Berthold reservation boundaries. There were 15 nuclear missile silos within those boundaries.<\/p>\n This changed everything for me.<\/p>\n Weber: <\/strong>So that\u2026makes us a target?<\/p>\n Philippe: <\/strong>Yeah, that makes you a target.<\/p>\n [CLIP: Music]<\/p>\n Weber:<\/strong> I had minimal knowledge of nuclear weapons before I came to Princeton, so what Sebastien told me that day was, quite honestly, a lot to take in. There were nuclear missile silos on our land, and in the event of a nuclear war, my entire family would likely be dead within a month. That revelation hit me like a ton of bricks.<\/p>\n You might also think you know how a nuclear explosion works. But let me ask S\u00e9bastien to break it down for you a little bit more.<\/p>\n Philippe:<\/strong> When a nuclear weapon is detonated\u2026<\/p>\n [CLIP: Archival tape of announcer counting down to an atomic bomb test]\u00a0<\/p>\n Philippe: \u2026 <\/strong>inside of it, it starts a fission chain reaction that burns through the plutonium that is in the weapon. And also, that energy is used to light up the secondary part, or the fusion part of the weapon.<\/p>\n So the nuclear explosion generates a gigantic fireball, and that fireball, if it interacts with the ground, it can suck up the dirt and tiny soil particles then fix the radioactivity generated by the explosion. So all of this radioactive dust lifts up in the air. That generates the big mushroom clouds we see in the movies.\u00a0<\/p>\n And those mushroom clouds, eventually, they are pushed by the high altitude winds and the particles start falling back to the ground as soon as the mushroom cloud is created, but because some of those particles are lifted up so high in the atmosphere they can take days, or even sometimes weeks, but it can take days for them to come back. And in that timeframe, they can travel hundreds of miles away.\u00a0<\/p>\n So really, it\u2019s like in 24 hours or 48 hours, you can have fallout that crosses the entire United States, or well into Canada, or even possibly get to Mexico across the border.<\/p>\n Weber:<\/strong> Basically, that\u2019s what nuclear fallout is. But Sebastien wanted to tell me more about its risks.\u00a0<\/p>\n Philippe:<\/strong> When the particles you know, fall to the ground, and people are living in those areas, they get exposed to radiation from what is emitted, from those radioactive particles. Radiation can destroy cells, destroy your DNA. And when you get exposed to very high doses of radiation, you start seeing symptoms like people vomiting, losing their hair, internally bleeding and so on. It\u2019s just really awful.<\/p>\n Weber: <\/strong>I knew nuclear weapons existed, but I never really thought deeply about where they might be located or what the implications could be. But why would I? My mind was mostly preoccupied with the day-to-day stuff that college kids have to go through. I never really considered the possibility of a war with nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n I was shocked, to say the least. Why were there nuclear missiles on tribal land? Did my family know about this? Did they know that the Air Force was planning to put new missiles on the reservation and keep them there for the next 60 years? I had so many questions circling in my head that day.<\/p>\n I decided to go to the reservation, bring other Princeton folks with me, and meet with Grandma Debra to ask her what she knew about the silos.<\/p>\n Malnourie:<\/strong> Like, if you\u2019re going out of town here, there\u2019s one just before you hit that last hill going into Parshall. There\u2019s one on the right hand side. I think there might be another one out here. I\u2019m not sure.<\/p>\n