Why are the United States' ICBMs clustered together? The majority of our Minuteman missiles are in Wyoming and Montana. I read why once, but can't remember for sure. Any ideas?
actually we have them all over the darn place. aside from those states and others they are on bombers and on submarines. i remember an argument many years ago when we were discussing a mobile land based system. i cant remember the congressmans name now but he suggested why dont we just load them all on amtrack cars, give the soviets a schedual and they would never be able to find them.
Our missiles really aren't clustered together---but as one person pointed out--they are situated in an area (away from dense population) for a reason (hence the answer NIMBY). They appear to be clustered---but they are in fact positioned in area's that are very difficult for Russian enemy nukes to hit. (One may be surprised to find that most Russian nukes are still mostly, even to this day, fairly inaccurate!) Anyway there are a variety of reasons (outside of NIMBY). One would be the reduced fallout on larger population areas (in case of a successful enemy first strike on the silos). Another one is the relative safety of the position of the ICBMS to an enemy counterattack (they are located in a mountainous area like Montana and Wyoming---or in remote areas like Western North Dakota). One answerer pointed out that we should have mobile missile launchers---while that is a smart strategic move, we do still have treaties in place with Russia that prevents us from developing such weapons. (Actually recall an article in Popular Mechanics back in 1988 regarding a rail-based mobile ICBM missile silo---I think the MX missile program was partly designed around that). As it stands we have a monopoly on SLBM (sub-based ICBM's) on Russia---while they have a complete monopoly mobile missile launchers (right now the current Russian mobile missile inventory mostly contains RT-2UTTH Topol M ICBMs). FYI, the positioning of nukes also (until the ABM treaty was signed) had a network of Anti Balistic Missile defense systems in North Dakota and Alaska. Although the ABM treaty was eventually abrogatted by both the US and Russia---significant missile defense systems haven't been yet put into place to protect our ICBM's (although we are currently putting one in place right now)
Any nuke missile that hits them will throw other incoming missiles off course, that way some will survive to launch a counterattack.
NIMBYism? (Not In My Back Yard)
