Missile tour full of irony

PHILIP, S.D. -- The cramped elevator descends into the South Dakota prairie to the launch control center buried below, once the nerve center for 10 Minuteman II nuclear missiles targeted at the Soviet Union. Although the inactive bunker is now a historic site, the National Park Service volunteer guide can't resist a dash of dry humor.

"And please," he says with a slight Russian accent, "don't press any buttons." The accent is bona fide, because park service volunteer guide Egor Prokofiev's hometown is Saratov, about 500 miles southeast of Moscow.

Prokofiev, a 21-year-old college student and journalist, volunteered over the past two summers at Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, just outside the Badlands in South Dakota.

Born a year before the Berlin Wall fell, Prokofiev grew up in an aircraft manufacturing town that was a "closed city," off limits to foreigners, during Soviet rule. The city, home to first-man-in-space Yuri Gagarin, sits near a then-Soviet-now-Russian Air Force base undoubtedly tagged as a destination for U.S. missiles at the time.

"Probably a Minuteman," he said nonchalantly during an interview.

Over the summer, Prokofiev led tours of the very weaponry pointed at his homeland for 30 years.

"I found it ironic," said Kerry Davis, a park service interpreter at the site and a former Air Force missile crewman. "My first job was to launch a retaliatory strike on the Soviet Union. Now I'm giving [Prokofiev] information to make a presentation, which includes information about the warhead and launch procedures."

Davis likes to deliver a little jolt of reality to the visitors on his tour by asking whether they would like to see how much relations with Russia have thawed; then he introduces Prokofiev. Eyes widen. Grins betray slightly puzzled surprise.

For some tourists, the Cold War seems to linger, or perhaps they're irked by the Russian government's recently more contentious posture toward the U.S. Prokofiev recently googled himself and found a blog entry by visitors on one of his tours who mused that he was a spy. Another visitor insisted that Russians are helping Iran build nuclear weapons.

"Some people still don't trust us," Prokofiev said.

The tours require visitors to drive from the temporary Minuteman headquarters -- trailers next to a convenience store and Badlands souvenir shop -- to the launch center building four miles down Interstate 90. The yellow, one-story, aluminum-sided building is visible from the highway and resembles a highway department garage. Prokofiev, a stocky fellow with a thin beard, leads his group through the bunk rooms, a kitchen, office and a break room. The crew down in the launch room called up their meal orders to the cook, he explains.

The elevator carries visitors down to the launch control center, a 10.5-by-33-foot room full of computers and encased in concrete. Giant shock absorbers on the outside of all four corners were supposed to allow the two-person crew to launch, even if a Soviet missile hit nearby. An Air Force crew years ago painted the vault-style door to resemble a Domino's pizza box: "Minuteman II: Worldwide Delivery in 30 minutes or your next one is free."

Prokofiev finishes the tour after another drive to an exit 11 miles down the highway to see the missile silo. The hatch has been slid back and a glass dome covers the dummy missile below.

Back in Russia, Prokofiev's family was curious, at first, and then enthusiastic about a rare opportunity, he said, except for his grandfather.

"He's an old communist. He didn't want me to come here at all," he said of Alexei Prokofiev, 80, a former political officer in the Soviet Navy. "He said to watch out for those Americans."