They were America's first sentries in the Cold War, built on hilltops and in Southland neighborhoods in an era when "duck and cover" became a classroom drill and children learned to recognize the flash of a nuclear explosion.
Now, one of the last of 16 Nike missile sites dotting Orange and Los Angeles counties is being demolished this month.
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday August 8, 2000 Orange County Edition Part A Part A Page 3 Metro Desk 1 inches; 15 words Type of Material: Correction
Nike missiles--A graphic that ran Monday locating Nike missile sites omitted a location in Long Beach.
The base, built on two hilltops in the Puente Hills near Brea, had three huge magazines, each about 20 feet deep from which the missiles--both Nike Ajax and Nike Hercules--could be brought to the surface and launched.
"We're destroying a little bit of history," said Glenn D. Barin, engineer with Montgomery Watson Constructors, a Pasadena company hired by the National Park Service to do the demolition.
When the job is completed this month, the federal government will turn the land over to a local governmental agency, possibly for a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department training facility.
Today, most of the missile sites are gone, their remains hauled away or built over, stripped of the identity that made them symbols of a more frightening time.
For two decades--from 1954 to 1974--they encircled the Los Angeles Basin in a "Ring of Supersonic Steel" to protect the region against Russian bombers.
When the sites were in operation, the launch and command sites combined usually occupied about 60 acres and were staffed by about 120 soldiers. Each post had barracks, a mess hall, a small motor pool and by today's standards, abysmal security. The outer perimeter was ringed by a single roll of concertina wire in front of a chain-link fence. Veterans who served at the Nike sites said there was a single guard armed with a .45-caliber handgun at the entrance to the command and launch areas. At night, dogs patrolled the inner defensive perimeter.
Neighbors Unaware of Nuclear Arsenal
Unknown to millions of Southern Californians who lived among them, hundreds of surface-to-air missiles fitted with nuclear warheads were poised at nine of the bases to be launched against enemy bomber formations that never appeared.
The United States never fired a conventional Nike Ajax or a nuclear Nike Hercules missile against an enemy. By 1974, the Los Angeles area bases that protected 4,000 square miles were quietly closed and the warheads disassembled, 20 years after the first one went into operation in Malibu.
