Missile Defense Complex RSL4, North Dakota

This is one of four small missile fields, constructed in the 1970s, to house little missiles intended to shoot at missiles shot to destroy our other, bigger missiles. It was part of the Safeguard Missile Defense System, which reached its apogee in 1975, with the construction of two large pyramidal radar systems in North Dakota, and these four nearby separate missile fields. By the time the system came online, it was already limited by international treaties, technically flawed, and defunded by congress. It was operational for just a few months, until it was closed in February 1976. After a few decades of abandonment, one of the big radar pyramids was auctioned off in 2012, though the other continues to be used, at Cavalier Air Force Station. The four missile sites, located in a ten to twenty mile radius around the main Missile Site Radar pyramid at Nekoma, each had around a dozen small silos, known as Remote Sprint Launchers (RSL). The four RSL sites remain, abandoned.