Last weekend, Richard and Tracy invited us to join them, Tracy’s brother and Tracy’s parents on a tour of a Nike Hercules missile site on in Marin Headlands followed by pizza in Mill Valley. It was great fun and more than a little disconcerting. To explain let me give a little background, the Nike missile family was a Cold War-era family of SAMs – Surface to Air Missles – designed to protect what we are now calling The American Homeland. The last iteration of the Nike family was the Nike Hercules and there were 274 Nike-Hercules batteries and 10,000 missiles spread across the Homeland and more overseas. In the Bay Area, alone, there were 23 Nike Herc sites. All this I knew or sort of knew, because, for a short while, I was the driver for the General in charge of all the Nike Herc sites from Hawaii to Salt Lake City.
What I didn’t know – or remember, anyway – was that these missile sites were equipped with thermonuclear warheads. At least that is what we were told during the tour and the Internet seems to confirm it. The site we toured, Nike Missile launch site SF-88 in the Marin Headlands, was a typical Nike Missile site with seven of the nine missiles equipped with thermonuclear warheads, each warhead was hundreds of times more powerful than the bombs we used to kill about 225,000 Japanese. Theoretically, the thermonuclear weapons were required to take out massed groups of Russian Badger bombers, presumably loaded with their own nuclear weapons. As an aside, why the planners thought the Russians would be attacking in a mass is unfathomable to me, other than as a theory used as a way to sell weapons and make more money. When we destroyed both Hiroshima and Nagasaki we only used one plane each and one nuclear bomb each. If I were ordering the alleged attack, if anybody would order the attack, I/they would space the planes out. End aside. Actually, I just don’t want to believe that we had 161 thermonuclear warheads, each warhead hundreds of times more powerful than the primitive weapons we used on the Japanese, spread around the Bay Area. But we did, I guess.
In 2014, I visited the now-defunct Nike Hercules radar site on Hawk Hill, overlooking San Francisco and it brought back memories of being stationed there. I’ve reprinted part of that post (with some modifications).
Standing there, looking at the view of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco, I remembered one warm summer morning in 1965, when I drove a general up to this site. I was a Sergeant – a buck sergeant, E5 – teaching Germans Continues Wave radar at Orogrande, New Mexico, when I met General Lolli. He had recently taken over the 28th NORAD Region – NORAD stands for North American Aerospace Defense Command – and, because I was from the Bay Area, I was Lolli’s guide at Orogrande while he was on a tour of the various missile training facilities. At the end of the tour, Lolli asked me if I wanted to be transferred to Hamilton Air Base in California to be his driver. Duh! of course I did.
While we were stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base, neither of us lived there because neither one of us was in the Air Force. Lolli was an Army general – the only Army commander of a NORAD region – and I was his Army driver so I had to live at an Army facility. Fort Baker was the closest Army barracks and I had a private room near the entry (General Lolli lived at the Fontana West in San Francisco). Almost every morning, he would drive across the Golden Gate bridge and pick me up at Fort Baker, I would salute him and then drive him to Hamilton. On this particular morning, Lolli told me to drive him up the hill to the Nike Hercules Radar and Command Site overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
As an aside, this was the height of the Cold War and the country was in full, paranoic, war hysteria. Schoolkids would practice hiding under our desks when the air raid sirens went off outside; F 101 Voodoo fighters, would take off out of Hamilton Air Base, looking for nuclear-armed Russian TU-16 Badger heavy bombers; and our final defense was a series of twenty-three Nike Hercules Surface to Air Missile – SAMs to the cognoscenti – sites around the Bay Area. At the time, I knew the system was designed for nukes but I don’t remember if this battery had missiles armed with nuclear weapons. End aside.
As we drove up to the site, Lolli called in a mock attack and, when we got there, the klaxon was going off and everybody was running to their battle stations. The missile site had probably been at DEFCON 5, but Lolli had now called it up to a simulated DEFCON 1, Air Defense Warning RED. I don’t know if targets had been assigned, but, at the nearby launch sites, the blast doors were opened and the missiles were brought up on their elevators, ready to launch.
When the All Clear finally did come and General Lolli got back in the car, he was furious. It had taken about fifteen minutes too long to come up to DEFCON 1 and Lolli has just relieved a full-bird-Colonel of his command. As we drove down the hill, the General said, “If this had been real, I would have lost San Francisco.“
Now, almost 49 years later, we are in a warm spell, the only fog is across The Bridge, the Nike Hercules Missile Site is no longer operational, and San Francisco is still there, sparkling in the sun. I watch a freighter go under The Bridge and a Raven joins me. Maybe she wants me to give her – and I am saying her with no idea if it is a him or a her – some food, maybe he is just enjoying the view like me, maybe she wants to chastise me for all the harm my race has done to the planet. I tell her, “Hey, it could be worse, we could have fired off those missiles, we could have destroyed everything in a flash, more than 10,000 flashes, actually. But since you are here, just stay still and look over here, let me get your picture.”
