Missile sites are Cold War reminders: Most Nike bases turned into parks
Carl Nolte, SF Chronicle Staff Writer
July 2, 2006

The news that North Korea may be close to perfecting a nuclear missile capable of striking California brings back eerie reminders of another day, when the United States lived under the threat of nuclear war. In those years, the enemy was the Soviet Union and one of the prime targets was the Bay Area.

If the attack came, Maj. Gen. Andrew Lolli once said, "most of this area would unquestionably be destroyed.''

Lolli, who died last month, ought to have known. At the time, in the Cold War year of 1964, Lolli was commander of the 28th North American Aerospace Command at Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County. Stopping the attack was his responsibility.

The Cold War seems like a thousand years ago now, but in those days the fear of nuclear war was always in the background of life in America, and particularly in the Bay Area. There were air raid drills in schools and kids would practice diving under their desks. Not much of a defense against nuclear weapons. Catholic schools added an element: They prayed. There were signs all over most downtowns -- big buildings all had fallout shelters.
The government advised citizens that it might be a prudent idea to dig a family shelter in the back yard and stock it with enough food to survive a nuclear attack.

image from Popular Science, 1950s

President John Kennedy called the Cold War a "long, twilight struggle,'' and it was. Both sides had huge stockpiles of weapons on the premise that if one side attacked, the other would retaliate and neither would survive. It was a doctrine called mutually assured destruction, or MAD, an acronym that was apt.
The Bay Area was a target. There were a dozen military bases around the bay -- from the Pacific's nuclear submarine base at Mare Island, to the Alameda Naval Air Station, to the Presidio of San Francisco, and more.

The Soviets had us in their sights.

To defend the bases, there were more than a dozen sites ringing the bay armed with Nike missiles designed to shoot down Soviet bombers. These missiles first went into service in 1954 and lasted until 1974. There were 300 similar sites around the country.
For 20 years, Army troops manned the sites, standing 24 hours on and 24 hours off shifts, seven days a week. "There was no such thing as Christmas,'' said Lt. Susan Cheney, the last battery executive officer at Nike missile site SF88 at Fort Baker on the Marin Headlands.

There were Nike sites at the Presidio and at Fort Funston near the zoo. There was a site on top of Angel Island, sites on the Peninsula, in the East Bay, including at Lake Chabot and in the Berkeley hills, and in Marin. What is now the Marine Mammal Center near Sausalito was a Nike site.
The sites were controlled from the Mill Valley Air Force base atop the west peak of Mount Tamalpais. This was the biggest installation of the complex; it had radar to track incoming planes, barracks, a movie theater, even a bowling alley.
There were two generations of Nike missiles. The Ajax had a range of 25 miles and could shoot down a plane traveling at twice the speed of sound. The later Nike Hercules had a longer range -- 87 miles -- and could hit a faster plane. It could also carry nuclear missiles.
The Army would never confirm or deny that the missiles were armed with nuclear weapons. But there was little doubt.
" There were approximately 90 nuclear warheads ringing the bay, '' said National Park Service Ranger John Porter, who has studied the Nike missile system and is in charge of site SF88, which has been preserved in the Marin Headlands. The Soviet bombers never came, and the missiles, like the giant coastal defense artillery guns they replaced, were never fired. But there were some close calls.
Stephen Haller and John Martini, two National Park Service historians, wrote a history of the sites called "What We Have We Shall Defend." In it they quote Terry Abel, an Army warrant officer who was stationed at the site. He remembered "a little horrifying" alert during the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.
The unit went to battle stations. "It was not a drill. It was not a drill, it was not an exercise,'' Abel told Haller and Martini. "We had no idea at the time whether the Soviets were launching a first strike, or what in God's name was going on. ... Our little piece was getting those missiles loaded properly and up in the air properly, as fast as we could. It was horrifying and gratifying at the same time.''

Ron Parshall remembered an earlier incident, a 15-minute alert, which meant the enemy would be there in 15 minutes. "But we had that missile up in less than five minutes,'' Parshall, who was an enlisted man, told Haller and Martini, "so we had 10 minutes to spare ... and it's 'tick, tick,' waiting for something to happen. We thought we were at war. I definitely was very fearful at that time that we would be at war, and then you start thinking that San Francisco would be gone if we don't do our job.''

By the early '70s, it became clear the Soviets would use intercontinental missiles, not planes, and the Nike sites were obsolete. They were closed by 1974.

It was the end of an era in the Bay Area in more ways than one. Haller, the park service historian, is fond of pointing out that the Spaniards brought the first defense system to the Bay Area in 1794 -- a brace of brass cannons that were mounted to protect the entrance to the Bay.
The guns were cast in Peru in the 17th century and one of them was over 170 years old when it was mounted to protect the Spanish settlement in San Francisco. "They may not have been on the cutting edge,'' Haller said dryly.

So now Nike is a shoe and the places where the missiles were have all become parkland.
Missile site SF88 has been restored to what it was when it was the last line of defense of the United States. There are missiles in place, one of the first computers, radar sets -- everything but warheads. It's located at Fort Barry, in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It is open to the public from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and on the first Sunday of the month, which is today. There is no charge.