AMERICAN SCENE: The ABM Temple at Grand Forks

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ALTHOUGH no device of war has caused more debate in recent years than the anti-ballistic missile system, few Americans have any notion of what it looks like. Nor are they likely to. Thanks to the SALT agreement signed with the Soviet Union, only two ABM sites would be constructed in the U.S.: one near Washington, D.C., to protect the nation's decision-making center; and the other near the remote town of Grand Forks, N. Dak., to defend the retaliatory might of 150 Minuteman ICBMs targeted at the Soviet Union and China. Only the site in North Dakota is under construction. TIME Correspondent John Mulliken visited Grand Forks and sent this report:

The way rolls west out of Grand Forks, on and on down a highway seeming to go nowhere. The soil is deep black, rich for the yellow durum wheat that grows on it. The farmhouses with their freshly painted white barns are few and far between. The towns marked on the maps are almost nonexistent when whooshed through; what few cars there are move at 80 m.p.h. to 90 m.p.h. They have to; otherwise, they too would never get anyplace.

It is a lonely area. The bleakness of the long winters, the wind coming out of Canada, and the snow and the cold —35° below zero—have provided natives with the saying: "We have three seasons here—July, August and winter." Finally, at Lakota, you turn right off Route 2 and head north on Route 1 toward Nekoma, once a town of "84 old people" and now the headquarters of the only U.S. ABM site. Suddenly it looms above the featureless landscape like some huge, misplaced Mayan temple, a 21st century monster squatting on the 19th century rural countryside of northeast North Dakota.

A monster it is. The missile-site radar's concrete housing is 231 ft. square at the base and 125 ft. deep; 50 of those feet, including the living level, are underground. Next to the MSR is its own power plant, all underground, containing six huge generators with 17-ton flywheels. The construction, 90% completed, will be finished by the end of 1974. The 7-ft.-thick steel reinforced concrete walls are complete on the outside. Wooden stairs run up on top of the pyramid, out of which stare, one to a side, four empty radar eyes. These "radar support rings," as they are called, are 30 ft. in diameter, and will be able to track hundreds of incoming warheads from several hundred miles out. At their direction, the MSR will launch both long-range missiles and fast little Sprint missiles, which have a range of 25 miles and can climb to 50,000 ft. in two heartbeats. There is a "farm" of 30 Spartans just to the west of the MSR. Scattered round are smaller farms containing 68 Sprints. "They are just tin cans in the ground," explained an official, "and they pop up 25 miles on release."