Fire in the hole

When you mention North Dakota to someone, even the average American, you'd be lucky to elicit any response that even vaguely alludes to the fact that North Dakota is in fact an American state. People know South Dakota(that's where Mount Rushmore is), but not North Dakota. Little do people know, that if North Dakota were to secede from the US, it would be the 3rd largest nuclear power in the world. Yeah, take that carved faces on a mountain.

In fact,

the orange dots surrounding the box that is the town Albert lives in, are missile silos.

These missiles are called "minutemen", referring to an American militia that were famed to be able to form an attack in a minute. Like its namesake, these missiles too are able to launch within a minute of hitting the "big red button". In fact, it takes only 12 minutes from launch to hit its intended target-Russia(or the Soviet Union, keeping to the Cold War theme). The current Minuteman force consists of 500 Minuteman-III missiles in missile silos around F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming; Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana; and Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota.

Upon closer inspection on those orange dots surrounding the town of Starkweather, you will see

this rectangular shape which is the exact same thing you will see for all the missile silos.

He hasn't seen one personally, but this is what it looks like inside the silo,




Outside the silo,


and this is how it looks like when someone hits the "big red button".



And this is the last thing you will see if you are on the wrong side of a nuclear attack.



To show you how this works



As you can see, the whole missile isn't the actual nuclear warhead, most of is to facilitate the rocket propulsion(which achieve speeds of 15 000 mph or 23 times the speed of sound). The actual warheads are the tiny triangular ones you see at number 7. In the picture you see 9 war heads, but in all actuality one missile can only carry 4 max, the rest are decoys, probably to dodge anti-missiles and to increase the odds of hitting the targets.

Just to illustrate the devastation of modern nukes, the aftermath of a limited nuclear attack on say, lets see, a random country, like, say, Iran(hey, if “pre-emptive” attacks on perceived enemies which may or may not be threatening America with weapons they may or may not possess isn't justification enough for a nuclear Holocaust then what is?), would result in three million people killed by radiation in just two weeks, and 35 million people exposed to dangerous levels of cancer-causing radiation in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Of course, this is nothing more than plain conjecture.

And its probably best that its left that way.

Beat that you bunch of carved faces on a mountain.