Free Water and the Cold War

Control panel of missile launch control

Artwork done by Air Force personnel

Look who Davis found in Wall!

Johnstons had their free water at Wall Drug Store

Our first stop on Saturday was Wall Drug Store in Wall, SD, which is famous because of their interesting road signs found all over the world advertising the free water, the $.05 coffee, free doughnuts and coffee for honeymooners, etc. It started in the late Depression era when a young couple, the Husteads, bought a drug store. Giving the store 5 years to be successful, they were at the end of their 5 years when Dorothy, the wife, heard all the cars passing by on the highway without stopping in town. So, they made signs to put on the highway offering free water and from only a few customers, they now have about 20,000 a day! As we left the Wall Drug Store, an older gentleman passed by and said his dad had helped build the drug store adding that, of course, it sure has changed since those days!
Next, we headed to the Minuteman Missile site, a preserved bunker and launch control center for the solid-rocket missiles with a 1.2 megaton warhead that held the Soviet Union at bay during the Cold War. The Army Corps of Engineers built 15 underground missile control centers which were linked to 10 missile silos each. They could be launched and reach the Soviet Union in 30 minutes for total annihilation of the area which was struck. There are no longer any active silos in South Dakota, but 500 nuclear missiles are still depolyed in the upper Great Plains. They were decommissioned and imploded after the START treaty was signed in 1991 by the US and the USSR. The Delta-01 Launch Control Facility and the Delta-09 Launch Facility were chosen for historic preservation because they were the most typical and least altered from the original 1961 Minuteman missile configuration.
So to sum it up, these sites were the places we were all told had two people manning the keys that had to be turned at the same time after launch codes were issued and verified which would launch the missiles that would have begun WW III!