Alexander Peterhans’s Reviews > Gods of Metal > Status Update

"The short-grass prairie that stretched before me was windswept, gorgeous, dotted with small homes. You would never think that hidden beneath this rural American idyll, out of sight, out of mind, were scores of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Just yards away from my rental car, sitting not far below my feet, there was a thermonuclear warhead about 20 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima."

"In Montana, the new launch sites were built in an area extending for 14,000 square miles. Instead of being protected by armed guards, as in the Soviet Union, America’s ballistic-missile complexes were unmanned, and built on one-acre plots of land, amid ranches and farms. (...) Today, these missile sites are essentially unguarded nuclear-weapons-storage facilities. Some are within a quarter mile of private homes."

"But since the early 1980s, a small group of peace activists, devout supporters of the Plowshares movement, have been trying to break into nuclear-weapons sites throughout the United States. They’ve almost always succeeded."