In a time of uncertainty, upheaval and catastrophic risk, there's nothing like a missile silo.

You may have no idea what your 401(k) will be worth, or your house, or whether your kids will be able to go to college. Eighty feet below the plains of North Dakota, however, these concerns magically evaporate.

Take a slow, loud elevator cage down into the depths of Oscar Zero, as it is called -- the launch control center for what used to be a bevy of Minuteman III nuclear missiles aimed at the late, great Soviet Union -- and return with us now to those days of the Cold War when, unlike today, even when things were bleak, they were at least clear.

"In the movie 'WarGames,' we were the first to go," Delore Zimmerman, a Grand Forks economic development specialist, recalls cheerfully.

When you're surrounded by 150 Minuteman III silos, with 400-plus warheads, spread out geometrically across eight very large counties from the Canadian border to Interstate 94, you have an extremely clear idea of what the end of the world looks like. Kind of consoling, actually, in its lack of ambiguity.

Today is harder.

Today is more like the situation described by Thomas Homer-Dixon -- "systems that are kind of stressed to the max already, where policymakers are trying to keep ten balls in the air simultaneously and keep all the various constituencies satisfied as best they can. And then there's some exogenous shock on an already highly stressed system that produces a kind of overload situation." Homer-Dixon is author of "The Upside Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization."

Oh, sure, the Cold War end-of-the-world scenarios had plenty of stress overload, especially in how they would start. What if the Israelis were to start losing a Middle East war, for example, or what if the North Koreans disappeared up their own corkscrew logic?

But the Cold War scenarios were by several orders of magnitude the most excruciatingly studied futures that never came to pass.

Visit the Fulda Gap in Germany, for example, about an hour east of Frankfurt. That was the location of the all-time No. 1 pawn-to-king-four scenario of the start of the end.

In that scenario, the endless tanks of endless Soviet divisions would come racing through this valley -- which looks not unlike the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia -- headed for Western Europe. The American 11th Armored "Blackhorse" Cavalry was there on hair-trigger alert to complicate their lives as thoroughly as they could.

If you visited this outfit in the early '90s -- after The Wall had fallen but before it had thoroughly entered people's brains that the Cold War threat was really gone -- you got an earful about their fast tanks, with sophisticated guns. "One shot, one kill" without stopping was the whole idea, they'd tell you.

But the cavalry guys knew they were basically very formidable speed bumps. They also knew where every Lassie collie of every one of their kids would go on the first day of the end of the world. It was that planned.

While the fast and technologically superior 11th Cavalry tanks were supposedly killing Soviet tanks at a 7 to 1 ratio, so the theory went, the 747s from the States were disgorging troops, who would run to their prepositioned main battle tanks to really bring it on. When the 747s turned around to get more American troops, so the scenario went, they would not return empty. They would be full not only of American military kids, briefers told reporters, but also their pets, in cages stockpiled for exactly this scenario. Yes. They had figured it out to that level of minutiae.

The 11th Cavalry dads, meanwhile, knew exactly where they would stop their tanks to get warm pastries and hot coffee on the way to Armageddon. They knew which German bakeries would sell them stuff out their window at 4 a.m. because they'd responded to surprise practice alerts a zillion times.

Oddly enough, that level of guaranteed certainty produced one of the least likely futures in history. It is the one we have today, in which we have survived as a species and even thrived sufficiently to create credit default swaps that possibly will do what the Soviet nuclear targeters failed to do: bring us to our knees.

After a while, you think about this at the bottom of Oscar Zero.

Its portion of the actual missile fields that made North Dakota one of the world's great nuclear powers has been gone for a decade, destroyed as part of an agreement between the United States and Russia. Oscar Zero, however, has been preserved in the hope that the State Historical Society will one day be able to reopen it as a museum. Such an attraction is seen as an economic development opportunity, bringing in tourists. Oscar Zero is not yet open to the public, but if you've got friends in the economic development community, it's possible to find someone with a key who will show you around.

That would be John Clark, a Cooperstown native who maintains the place just as it was on July 17, 1997, the day the nuclear warriors stood down. When Clark was in the Air Force, he served as a "nuclear weapons specialist." He would test the cone-shaped warheads electronically to make sure they would work. You ask him if that was spooky. More in hindsight than at the time, he says.

The command post deep underground is in a concrete pod perhaps 30 feet high and 50 feet long. You enter it through a tunnel sealed by a three-foot-thick blast door. The floor on which you stand, gazing at the desks full of ancient electronics, is suspended from the top of the pod by giant shock absorbers about 2 feet across and 20 feet long. The chair on which you sit to look at the "status alert" display board -- which includes lights labeled "Enabled," "Lch in process" and "Missile away" -- is similar to an airline pilot's captain's chair. It has a four-point seat belt that comes over your shoulders. Oscar Zero is majorly prepared for the ground to move beneath your feet.

How are your retirement funds doing? you ask Clark, 58, your tour guide who still works maintenance at the local hospital.

"If there's anything I could go back to school for, it would be economics," he says, without the slightest hesitation. "I don't understand it, I guess." He shakes his head so rapidly it's like a shiver.

On the road back to town, the crop-laden harvest fields look like iridescent bathroom tiles of jade and turquoise, chocolate and sand, stretching out to the horizon on luxuriously licorice soil so flat that they say you can't lose a dog for three days.

Oscar Zero is thought-provoking, and silence-inducing.

Sure, okay, so nobody today is saying we're looking into any abyss as deep as that of the Cold War. Although you hear people in Europe talking about this being the end of an era for capitalism, possibly producing changes as substantial as occurred in Russia after the fall of communism.

It does, however, turn out that the unthinkable that you've thoroughly thought about for decades is not what bites you in the butt.

It's your unexamined faiths that get you. The faiths in markets. In leaders, in investment advisers, in pensions, in funds, in companies.

They are nowhere near as solid as that pod 80 feet below the surface of the North Dakota plains.