Nike missile sites typically had a launch area separated by about 1,000 yards from an Integrated Fire Control (IFC) radar array. It’s not far from 46th Street, one of those improbably named country roads whose name suggests an endless urban grid emanating from Nicollet and Washington Avenues and covering the earth like longitudinal and latitudinal lines. The old barracks are located on Nike Road, a short spur that comes off of County Road 24. Bonifacius site, mostly because it was the nearest to my house, but also because the launch site seemed, at least from Google Maps, to have left some visible marks on the landscape. The Nike missile on display near downtown St. It’s currently being developed into an indoor farm. It went through a few owners in the 2000s. The latter is still barricaded with barbed wire, right on the side of the road. Near the former, there’s a Nike missile, purchased long ago by a local businessman, and now propped upright with a fresh paint job and an interpretive plaque in a city park, provided by the local historical society. The two most visible Nike launch sites are those in St. You can even walk up pretty close to some of them. To that end, all four sites are still visible and in various states of preservation. The barracks and radar arrays were visible against the landscape, though, and a physical reminder that when and if nuclear war came to the United States, you’d see where it might all end in the course of a daily commute down the local county road. The Nike missiles were stored in an underground magazine, to be raised out of the ground by a hydraulic elevator before launch, so they weren’t looming against the skyline in a particularly dramatic way. It was these men in their airplanes the Nike missiles were meant to destroy. I recently came across a guide to these sites from the late ’80s, and the lurid nicknames applied to the missiles by residents and activists is at perfect odds with their complete invisibility on the landscape: Holy Terror, Womb Envy, Pluto’s Bayonet, Planetary Slaughterhouse.īefore the heyday of Planetary Slaughterhouse and the advent of the ICBM and nuclear submarine, though, the best way to deliver a nuclear payload was for crews of men in long-range bombers to fly over the North Pole and drop them on their targets personally. The intercontinental ballistic missile program that would define nuclear war in the public imagination didn’t get going until the 1960s, when hundreds of out-of-sight, out-of-mind Minuteman missile sites were built across the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming and elsewhere on the High Plains. Nuclear war was, in the late 1950s, something that happened up-close. They were each decommissioned in 1971, when the burden of the nation’s domestic missile defense plans shifted west to the Great Plains. In the October of 1959, the United States Army constructed these launch sites, as well as some barracks for the men who manned the missiles, in rolling farmlands near Farmington, Isanti-East Bethel, St. Tipped with nuclear warheads, a single Nike missile was meant to destroy a large formation of bombers in one blast, before they could deploy their payloads. In the event of Soviet bombers flying over the North Pole to annihilate the United States, these missiles were meant to serve as a last defense of American cities, taking down the incoming bombers about 90 miles away from their targets. They form a protective ring – or, I guess, a crosshairs – around the urban center. There are four former surface-to-air Nike missile sites around the Twin Cities metropolitan area, thirty miles out in each cardinal direction.
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