You don’t get to see the stars here in Mandan as much. Volochenko tells the Tribune that the site’s remote location has one clear advantage: “t night, it’s nice. But he rarely found time to visit the property, and now that he’s planning to move to Texas, he’s ready to sell. Leslie Volochenko, a handyman from Mandan in southern North Dakota, purchased Site 4 in 2012 with intentions of fixing it up for a doomsday scenario. The site hasn't been used since the 1970s. Per the Tribune, it was one of four smaller sites designed to protect the nearby Nekoma base, which boasts an enormous missile control building constructed in the shape of a futuristic pyramid. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, a multibillion dollar network of missile launch sites in North Dakota. Remote Sprint Launcher 4 was once part of the Stanley R. “The idea was that if missiles were coming in from the Soviet Union over the Arctic, these were defensive missiles intended to shoot down anyone coming in,” Pifer’s realtor Dave Keller tells Atlas Obscura’s Isaac Schultz.

It also houses the remains of 14 launch tubes for Sprint missiles-roughly 30-foot-long projectiles named for their short range. Now, however, its luck appears to be changing: As Jack Dura reports for the Bismarck Tribune, the history-making site is headed to the auction block.Īccording to Pifer’s Auction and Realty, the lot encompasses 49.48 acres of land, a number of Brutalist concrete buildings, a command bunker and a dual fence. Decommissioned during the 1970s, the property has fallen into disrepair over the years. One such potential doomsday hideout was Remote Sprint Launcher 4, a Cold War missile launch site and bunker in northeastern North Dakota. Between the 1950s and ’70s, government officials placed more than 1,000 missiles at launch sites scattered throughout the Dakotas and beyond, per the National Park Service. turned its attention to a surprising place: the Great Plains.

But tensions between the two countries ran high, and the threat of nuclear warfare loomed large.Īs both parties raced to prepare for disaster, the U.S. During the Cold War, soldiers from the United States and the Soviet Union never battled directly.

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