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The Quebec 01 Launch Control Facility, twenty-five miles north of Cheyenne and fifteen and a half miles south of Chugwater, in Laramie County, Wyoming, possesses extraordinary national significance under National Historic Landmark Criterion 1 in the area of Military History, for its association with the deployment and operation of the Minuteman IB, Minuteman III, and Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) systems during the Cold War (see Location Map and Figure 1). Strategic land-based missile delivery systems, submarine-launched missiles, and manned bombers comprised the US nuclear triad during the Cold War, the 1946-91 military and political standoff between the US and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. From 1965 to 2005, Quebec 01 comprised the launch control facility (later termed a missile alert facility) for a flight of ten nuclear missiles placed in dispersed, hardened, underground concrete launch facilities miles away. As part of the nation’s defense, the missile systems controlled by Quebec 01 preserved the peace by comprising a credible means of retaliation in response to an attack by the Soviet Union. Originally constructed 1963-64 as a launch control facility for the Minuteman I missile, Quebec 01 controlled a flight of ten missiles as part of the 400th Strategic Missile Squadron of the 90th Strategic Missile Wing at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne. The facility became operational in 1965 and, over ensuing decades, embodied the operation and evolution of a launch control/missile alert facility that directed increasingly sophisticated weapons systems.

From 1965 to 1986 Quebec 01 served as a launch control facility for the Minuteman missile, the backbone of the US nuclear arsenal. The Minuteman, the nation’s first solid-fueled missile, was equipped with a single warhead equivalent to eighty times the force of the 1945 bomb that devastated Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II. Quebec 01, constructed as part of the missile’s deployment, began controlling Minuteman IB missiles in 1965. Located in individual, hardened, underground launch facilities, the Minuteman represented a significant improvement over its Atlas and Titan liquid-fuel predecessors in the US nuclear arsenal. The new missile was smaller, more accurate, less expensive to manufacture, capable of being mass produced, and less expensive to maintain and keep on alert. President John F. Kennedy described the Minuteman as the nation’s “ace in the hole” in its global confrontation with the Soviets.