Nike Missile
Explorer_

// Exhibit B — The Rotunda //

// Exhibit D — The Intercept Problem //

What The Computer Saw

The battery's analog computer watched two radar tracks at once, solved where they would meet, and steered the missile to that point — not to where the bomber was, but to where it was going to be. Watch the predicted intercept appear before either track arrives.

Command guidance per Bender, “The Nike Missile System” (ed-thelen.org) — TTR tracks the target, MTR tracks the missile, the computer solves the meet and sends the burst order.

// Exhibit E — Fire Mission //

You Are The Battery

A simulated engagement, compressed to one console — the same sequence a crew drilled endlessly: find it, identify it, lock it, and only then turn the key. Work the checklist.

Simulation, placard level — sequence per Bender, “The Nike Missile System” (ed-thelen.org)

// Exhibit F — The Rings //

The Ring Around Your City

Close to 300 batteries, organized into rings around the places America could not afford to lose. If you grew up near any dot on this map, there were missiles under the grass nearby. Tap a ring.

▸ FIND THE SITE NEAREST YOU — full site-by-site lists at ed-thelen.org/loc.html ▊

// Exhibit G — Notes //

The Cold War Story

For two decades, American cities lived inside rings of missiles. Nike sites — named for the Greek goddess of victory — were built in defensive circles around major cities, industry and bomber bases: close to 300 sites nationwide, nearly twenty around New York alone. The missiles waited in underground magazines, brought up by elevator and fired near-vertically, the last line of defense if Air Force interceptors missed. The radars and the computer stayed on the ground and flew every intercept by remote command.

1. 1945

   A missile to replace the guns

   In the last months of World War II, the Army concluded anti-aircraft artillery couldn't stop fast, high-flying jets. Bell Labs' AAGM report sketched the answer: a supersonic missile continuously steered from the ground by radar and computer.

2. 1949

   The threat goes nuclear

   The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. The prospect of nuclear-armed Soviet bombers over American cities — sharpened by the outbreak of war in Korea — turned Nike into a crash program.

3. 1951

   First successful test firing

   The missile that would be named Ajax flew at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico.

4. 1953

   Ajax goes on alert

   December: the first Nike Ajax battery became operational at Fort Meade, Maryland — the world's first widely deployed guided surface-to-air missile. Rings of sites followed across the country through the mid-fifties.

5. 1958

   Hercules — bigger, solid, nuclear

   Nike Hercules deployed with triple the reach and a W-31 nuclear warhead, built to stop whole formations — and the H-bombs they carried. Early batteries borrowed the heavier W-7 warhead while W-31s were still scarce.

6. 1960

   A missile kills a missile

   At White Sands, a Hercules tracked and destroyed a Corporal ballistic missile — the first ballistic missile ever intercepted by another missile.

7. 1964

   Ajax stands down

   All Ajax sites in the continental U.S. had closed; Hercules held the line. But the Soviet threat was shifting from bombers to ICBMs, which no Nike could stop, and the drawdown began.

8. 1974

   The rings come down

   The last operational Nike sites in the continental U.S. were inactivated and Army Air Defense Command disbanded. Allied forces in Europe and Asia kept Hercules on alert for decades more.

9. Today

   A museum in the Marin Headlands

   Site SF-88 near San Francisco is the most fully restored Nike site in the country, kept alive by NPS staff and veteran volunteers — missile elevator and all. This page is its digital cousin.

SOURCES: Bender, “The Nike Missile System” (ed-thelen.org) · NPS — Nike Missile Site SF-88, Golden Gate NRA · Nike Missiles & Rockets (ed-thelen.org) · NPS — Nike Missile History, Golden Gate NRA