Letter: Comparing explosions

Thursday, Sept. 20, 2001 | 9:13 a.m.

It is Orwellian to contemplate the self-destruction of the last missile silo in America in light of the destruction of the World Trade Center's twin towers on Sept. 11.

With no fanfare and almost zero press attention, the United States on Aug. 24 blew up the last Minuteman III missile silo scheduled for destruction under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I). The silo at Grand Forks Air Force Base, which once housed an intercontinental ballistic guided missile equipped with nuclear warheads, was destroyed and sealed with 800 pounds of explosives.

START I was signed in 1991 by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and former President George Bush and took effect in December 1994. The destruction of America's missile silos began on Oct. 29, 1995, when Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev detonated a charge that demolished a Minuteman missile silo about 65 miles from Kansas City.

"The first foreigner to blow up a U.S. missile silo is the minister of defense of Russia, how about that?" an elated Grachev crowed. William Perry, then-President Clinton's secretary of defense, who also participated in that 1995 event, described it as an "act of great symbolic significance."

So is the destruction of the twin towers.

FRANK PELTESON