I’m taking my young nephews out West this summer to experience the dramatic natural settings there. South Dakota is our destination this weekend, where our focus on outdoor settings shifted unexpectedly when we discovered the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site just to the north of the Badlands National Park.
I thought taking the kids to the museum would help them gain insight about America’s invention of the worst weapons of mass destruction ever to exist. That’s not what we found at the historic site, though. The museum celebrates the development of America’s arsenal of nuclear weapons, and applauds the use of those weapons to engage in terrorism, threatening other nations with nuclear attack if they didn’t make concessions to the global agenda of the United States. The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site displays materials applauding the role of America’s nuclear weapons in creating “terror” in foreign countries. It’s a plainly pro-terrorism museum.
I couldn’t find a single acknowledgement of America’s nuclear destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki anywhere in the physical displays in the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site. The museum’s book store was also completely devoid of any material dealing with the fact that the United States is the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons. The historic site’s web site only mentions America’s killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima in order to brag that the Minuteman nuclear weapon was many, many times more destructive than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The refusal of the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site to acknowledge the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an omission on the scale of a museum of African-American history that doesn’t mention slavery, or a women’s history museum that never talks about women didn’t have the right to vote in the United States for over 100 years.
It’s particularly ironic that the federal government of the United States of America has a museum celebrating its possession of massive numbers of nuclear-armed ICBMs that have been aimed at civilian targets around the world, including targets inNorth Korea, at the same time that the USA expresses outrage that North Korea might be able to develop one nuclear-armed ICBM.
America can’t expect for other nations to refrain from developing their own nuclear weapons when the USA maintains museums celebrating America’s use of nuclear weapons as tools of international terrorism.