Gretchen Heefner

Quick Facts

Significance:

Dr. Heefner teaches and researches the history of the U.S. in the world, with a focus on the Cold War, militarization and the surprisingly intimate relations between national security regimes and the everyday.

Gretchen Heefner is an associate professor of history at Northeastern University. She teaches and researches the history of the U.S. in the world, with a focus on the Cold War, militarization and the surprisingly intimate relations between national security regimes and the everyday. Professor Heefner teaches courses in 20th Century U.S. and world history, including courses on the Cold War, Dissent, Americans Abroad, and U.S. Conservatism. Her first book, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2012), traces the deployment of nuclear missiles across the American heartland in the late 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the Minuteman missile field in South Dakota. The book argues for the importance of viewing both military and foreign policy history not as stand-alone subjects, but as crucial aspects of the social and political history of the United States.

Dr Heefner was interviewed for the park film project in 2015. Below are excerpts from her interview.

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Can you speak a little bit about the South Dakota ranchers viewed the landscape and how they would have viewed the construction of the missile field in the early 1960s? 

. . . as a historian I hate to generalize about people too much. But, from my research, in this particular moment when the missiles were deployed, to particularly the western South Dakota, and Montana, and North Dakota, and Wyoming, and in Missouri, um. In general, I would say it’s a group of people who had, really put down deep roots in this area, so it was a lot of families that had been there for generations, you know? Whose maybe grandparents had originally homesteaded the property that the family was living on. So, these were family ranches, and homesteads, where people had really deep connection to a particular place, and really, to a few hundred acres, right, um, and deep community ties. And so, you know I think in the 21st century it’s hard for us to remember that there was a time in the sort of mid-20th century when people still lived in agrarian communities, and had local towns, local sort of community centers, local American Legion halls, where they all knew each other, and they all got together for certain events. Where they celebrated with each other, and mourned with each other, and knew each other pretty intimately, and then also had these really strong family units that often had multiple generations living in the same house. And so, I think the attachment to the land is something that we really have to think about, when we think about how people responded to having weapons planted, and sort of buried in their midst.
 

How well did a missile field fit into the prairie landscape?

. . . the landscape of, what became the missile fields, was almost made for hiding missiles, right? It was very hidden, so you didn’t really notice uh the missiles, the minuteman missiles once they were buried there. It was, again I sort of described this as these sort of rolling hills and landscapes, sparse trees, sort of gnarled sparse trees when they existed, a lot of fences, you’ll see. There’s not a whole lot of, there’s not a whole lot to describe, [laughs], in a sense, when you go out there. So, people didn’t tend to notice sort of two acre plots of land, and missiles that were buried underground, so you wouldn’t even had seen them above the ground. So in a sense, it was the perfect place to hide nuclear weapons.

. . . if you were to be driving by these missile fields, even today, it was particularly in the 1960s and the 1970s, you wouldn’t have noticed they were there. The only way you would have known, is if you had had the information that, certain people sort of published and started putting out there in the 70s and 80s, as they started looking at some of these sites and protesting them, um-. And they, a group of, a group called “Nuke Watch” actually started mapping these missile sites, and they gave people signs of what you would look for. And what you would look for, and this is what I had to do when I went out there, was triple phase power transformers, which don’t usually exist out in this part of the rural west. And if you’d see these sights, you’d know there was something going on. Because, there was a special site that needed this kind of power, right. You could look for these two acre plots of land, surrounded in a chain link fence, but again that fence wouldn’t look much different from fences you might see that ranchers would have, to store equipment or materials. So you can start to see sort of these, these small signs of what to look for. But most of these missile sites were not off of the interstate. They weren’t right off of main freeways, they were off of roads, and the Air Force did this quite purposefully. But, they really blended in, pretty remarkably, to the landscape and to the natural environment.
 

Can you speak to the philosophy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and its legacy?

MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, was this sort of preeminent American deterrent; a nuclear deterrent policy, particularly under the Eisenhower administration and Kennedy administration. The name switches on various occasions, but ultimately this is the policy: that you will amass enough nuclear weapons, or enough firepower, to deter your opponent from every doing anything stupid, from ever attacking.

In a sense, right, this worked because there was never nuclear war. Neither side was ever going to attack each other. The United States and the Soviets never fought directly during the Cold War. The fought a lot of proxy wars with enormously devastating consequences for people around the world, but they never fought each other. A nuclear war did not happen. MAD, in a sense, worked the way it was supposed to. I think in the missile fields you see some of the consequences of that, but ultimately it worked.

. . . there’s a cost to any system like this. I think you see . . . today you can drive around the missile fields and see some of these old sites, abandoned sites, you know, people lost property. They lost these homesteads they had grown up on. For some people, they lost a sense of security. Other people gained a sense of security. There are stories to be told in all of these sites. Just because MAD worked, doesn’t mean that we should ignore all of the stuff that went into making it happen.