
Nike Missile Sites of the San Francisco Bay Area - stevewilhelm
http://acme.com/jef/nike/#HN
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enknamel
Out in the Marin Headlands they have a whole exhibit about the missile sites
there and around the Bay. You can even interview and listen to presentations
by people who were stationed around the Bay during the cold war watching for a
Soviet attack. Apparently, the Soviets had a plan to repeatedly nuke the bay
to generate huge clouds of radiation that would then spread across the
country. [http://www.nps.gov/goga/nike-missile-
site.htm](http://www.nps.gov/goga/nike-missile-site.htm)

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enahs-sf
The headlands missile site is just a short and very pleasant bike ride away.
Highly recommended.

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slayed0
Ha! I do this ride nearly every week and I'm not sure I would describe it as
"short and very pleasant" to a general audience. Unless you have a decent road
bike and are fairly fit you will likely be walking up hawk hill.

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zten
Never mind making it up the hill -- the backside descent of Conzelman Road is
really what your average person should skip. You'll miss out on some of the
old structures by skipping that, but there's still things to see if you go
down Alexander, take the tunnel to Bunker Rd, and follow that out.

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vt240
The site in Poulsbo, WA had been flooded for years. When I was a high school
student, we used to go have parties there. The whole campus was 10-20 acres
and most of the buildings were still intact, although pretty ransacked.
Similar to the sites I visited in the Anchorage, AK area. I think it was about
10 years ago they started to prep the site to build a new Walmart. The
construction crew pumped all of the launchers out and let me go down and take
a look around. It was pretty neat to see everything that had been under water
for most likely 30 years. I took a bunch of slides I'll have to dig up one of
these days. I still haven't made it to see the museum. Most of these neat
military sites are private property now, although I think most of the Nike
installations were given to local government orgs.

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thesis
I've often wondered where our current air defense systems are now. It seems
the government must spend a lot of money hiding them in plain sight or I'm not
looking hard enough.

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c0nsumer
The Nike system was a last line of defense against bomber formations. The main
idea near the end of the program was to set off a surface-to-air nuke in the
middle of a formation and take it out. (Yes, that means near the population
centers which the Nike sites were situated around. ICBMs nullified the
usefulness of the Nikes and they were all decommissioned around 1974.)

Modern air defenses are the anti-ballistic missile stuff, interceptors located
at the borders, etc.

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InclinedPlane
To be fair, exploding a few kiloton nuke at several km altitude (probably
30,000 ft or so) would have fairly minimal impact on the ground, and would, of
course, bet totally worthwhile if it meant preventing dropping multi-megaton
bombs.

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woofuls
Wouldn't a low yield nuclear weapon detonated at a relatively low altitude
generate a localized EMP?

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dragonwriter
> Wouldn't a low yield nuclear weapon detonated at a relatively low altitude
> generate a localized EMP?

Probably, though Soviet strategic bomber formations probably wouldn't be
operating at particularly low altitude and, IIRC, the idea was to intercept
before they were over target (but not far enough away that it wouldn't be
problematic!) anyway, and, finally, localized EMP and flash from a kiloton-
range airburst is better for people on the ground than the effects of a
megaton-range ground burst.

If the Nike missiles around SF had ever been fired in anger, it would have
been an effort to turn what would otherwise be _total_ disaster into merely
_major_ disaster.

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bigiain
One of the interesting things about the Marin Headland Nike station tour is
the tidbit of information that they had targeting codes for Sacramento. So if
the Ruskies invaded and occupied the state capital there was an "option"...

(May well have been a bored volunteer making things up, but I wouldn't dismiss
it out of hand...)

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craigjb
This AT&T Bell Labs documentary about the anti-ballistic missile defense
program is eye-opening. The program roots are in the Nike anti-bomber defense
program. The complexity of radar and digital signal processing technology in
the 1960-70s is incredible (they even had stylus touch-screen interfaces).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARx2-wRn9-Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARx2-wRn9-Y)

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justizin
They note that one of the sites (Ft Cronkhite) is being used by The Marine
Mammal Center, it says that one 'magazine' (silo) is being used for the
storage of veterinary drugs, there are also a few decades of biological
samples, and the second silo is used in the rare case a Dolphin needs to be
rehabilitated.

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angersock
If you're ever able to hunt down a copy of the project report on Nike/Spartan,
do so. They're interesting reading. Those engineers were pretty awesome.

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elcapitan
"Nike - Just do it." :D scnr

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dgfv1
They make some nice shoes, too.

