During the mapping of the missile sites in South Dakota, Delta- 01 was assigned the name of “Mike and Beth’s Launch Control Center” after Mike Sprong and Beth Preheim, peace activists that mapped the Delta Flight and directed the mapping project in South Dakota. These informal designations are a combination of the names of those who mapped the sites, or political and pop cultural references from the era. One of the traditions of this project was that the volunteers provided informal names to each silo and control center. And of course he knew we weren’t tourists, but the point was we had a right to be out there driving on the back roads whatever it was we were doing this is supposed to be a free country.” And I said no thanks we’re just tourists. And we stopped there and, I mean, it was obvious they weren’t unloading furniture and this one soldier with the machine gun came over to my car as I was writing down the directions to that silo and also giving it a name and he said, can I help you with anything when I rolled down the window. eventually we came to a missile silo right near State Highway 34 and there was a semi-truck backed up right onto the pad inside the perimeter of the fence and there were a couple of soldiers, from the Air Force I suppose, with machine guns guarding the missile silo and the semi-truck. Jay Davis, a local peace activist, participated in the mapping of the rural missile sites in South Dakota and described an encounter with Air Force security personnel at a missile silo, At all six missile fields, local activists volunteered to drive the countryside and record driving directions to all locations, while maintaining legal distances from all facilities. Nukewatch’s Missile Silo Project, which resulted in the mapping of one thousand missile silo sites across the country, was intended to be a high profile project capable of furthering public discussion on nuclear weapons. It occurred to members of the organization that while the Soviet Union knew where all of the American ICBMs were based (and had targeted them with their own ICBMs), the location of these facilities had largely been forgotten by the American public.

Cover of the 1987 guide to the South Dakota missile fieldīy the mid-1980s, the actions of locally based anti-nuclear activists across the country inspired other groups like Nukewatch, based in Luck, Wisconsin, to undertake consciousness-raising projects of their own.

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