Many years ago I was told there were Nike missile sites along the Chicago lakefront. Supposedly they were scattered from Grant Park to somewhere north of Lincoln Park, and consisted of underground bunkers that would open to let the launching platform rise up and fire the missile. Was that a cold war urban legend? –Larry Cywin, Gainesville, Florida
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Nope, that was cold war reality. Chicago’s lakeside rockets were more conspicuous than most, but in the 1950s and ’60s every American city of consequence was surrounded by Nike missile batteries, the better to fend off Soviet bombers. Soviet bombers, you say? What about the USSR’s far more fearsome intercontinental ballistic missiles? Just so, which explains why nobody remembers Nike missiles today. They date from an era when people still believed it was possible to mount an effective defense against nuclear attack–in fact, the Nike batteries near some cities replaced antiaircraft guns. Then along came the ICBM, which rendered the whole thing quaint.
Local leaders complained loudly about the use of public parkland for missiles, contending among other things that the Ajax was already obsolete. They got no argument from the military on that point. Even before the Ajax was deployed the Pentagon pushed to replace it with a newer model, the Nike Hercules, which went into service in 1958. Larger than the Ajax, the Hercules had greater range (75 miles plus) and could deliver a nuclear warhead rather than conventional explosives, the thought being that you could take out several attackers per missile rather than just one. These nukes weren’t just firecrackers, either–they could be set to explode with a force of as much as 40 kilotons, twice as powerful as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The thought of detonating a nuclear warhead within 75 miles of a city you were nominally trying to protect today seems insane, but to be fair the Nikes were the last line of defense in a system that also included early-warning radar and interceptor aircraft. Also, while the Hercules could be equipped with nukes, given cold war secrecy we don’t know how many actually were.
