248 UTAH INTERNATIONAL: A BIOGRAPHY OF A BUSINESS from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River delta, partly to irrigate the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and partly for urbanizing Southern California. The firm’s construction projects spread beyond California. As the Cold War deepened, Utah joined M-K in extensive missile site contracts. In 1962, the two firms received an $84 million contract to build two hundred Minuteman missiles silos with twenty launch control centers sprinkled across some eighty-three hundred square miles of Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska. Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, served as headquarters for the sprawling underground network that linked ten Minuteman-firing silos clustered around buried control centers—capsule-like chambers of fabricated steel and reinforced concrete. A mild winter spurred the work forward, aided by Utah’s revolutionary method of sinking shafts. Each missile silo consisted of a hole fourteen and one-half feet in diameter and sixty-two feet deep, to house a steel liner (or missile “barrel”) twelve feet in diameter. Previous contractors required six to eight days to sink these shafts, but the sandstone formations led Utah’s experienced engineers to suspect the shafts could be drilled like wells. They developed a huge drilling machine that could complete as many as ten shafts a week, setting a fast pace for the entire project. Personnel placed the steel liners and then encased them in concrete, built rooms for equipment and structural support, then backfilled the site to the original grade, and installed complicated electrical and mechanical equipment. The resulting launch control facilities, one for each ten missiles, lay forty-five feet underground. In 1964, again in a joint venture with M-K, Utah gained a contract for $121.9 million to construct another 150 Minuteman underground launching complexes with fifteen control centers, this time near Grand Forks, North Dakota. The next year the two firms won a $46.5 million contract to construct fifty launch silos and five control centers dispersed over an area of about thirty-five hundred square miles in northern Montana near Great Falls. Utah also participated in building the North American Aerospace Defense Command ( NORAD), an underground command headquarters facility. This project included several hundred Minuteman missile launching sites and generated exceptional earnings.