It's like the grain silos across the great plains have their reverse image
underground in the missile silos hidden beneath slabs of concrete.

"This, finally, is the punch line of our two hundred years on the Great Plains: we trap out the beaver,
subtract the Mandan, infect the Blackfeet and the Hidatsa and the Assiniboin, overdose the Arikara;
call the land a desert and hurry across it to get to California and Oregon; suck up the buffalo, bones
and all; kill off nations of elk and wolves and cranes and prairie chickens and prairie dogs; dig up the
gold and rebury it in vaults someplace else; ruin the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and
Kiowa and Comanche; kill Crazy Horse, kill Sitting Bull; harvest wave after wave of immigrants' dreams
and send the wised-up dreamers on their way; plow the topsoil until it blows to the ocean; ship out the
wheat, ship out the cattle; dig up the earth itself and burn it in power plants and send the power down
the line; dismiss the small farmers, empty the little towns; drill the oil and natural gas and pipe it away;
dry up the rivers and springs, deep-drill for irrigation water as the aquifer retreats. And in return we condense
unimaginable amounts of treasure into weapons buried beneath the land which so much treasure came from -
weapons for which our best hope might be that we will someday take them apart and throw them away,
and for which our next-best hope certainly is that they remain humming away under the prairie, absorbing
fear and maintenance, unused, forever."