Besides the moon, there was another parallel race against the Russians in the Cold War. A contest that still harnessed rockets and was intricately intertwined with the same technologies, prestige, and foreign relations issues, but this one was measured in warheads, not astronauts. An arms race. And to defend the continental US against a Soviet nuclear attack, the Army surrounded American cities with the Nike Hercules system, the world’s first widely deployed, guided surface-to-air missiles.
So, duck and cover KRCU listeners. I’m Joel Rhodes “Telling History.”
The Nike Hercules was a state-of-the-art computer and radar guided surface-to-air missile with nuclear capability. Compared to the “goalie on a hockey team” by the North American Air Defense Command, Nike Hercules was designed to destroy incoming formations of long range nuclear-armed Soviet bomber aircraft over American airspace. The outer guards of our defense system were interceptor planes to knock these threats out of sky before they hit big cities, but just like in hockey, Nike missiles were the last line of defense. Our atomic bombs shooting down their atomic bombs with all the wreckage and fallout raining over Americans below.
A considerable improvement over the first-generation Nike Ajax, the 40-foot-long Nike Hercules had a maximum range of over 75 miles, a maximum speed of 3,200 mph, and the ability to hit targets at 100,000 feet. Estimated to be over 400-times more accurate than anti-aircraft artillery in WW II, the supersonic Hercules was faster and could out-maneuver any aircraft in the 1950s between altitudes of 5,000 to 100,000 feet. Hercules carried either a conventional warhead or one of three nuclear warheads: a “small” 3 kilotons (kt) device, a “medium” 20 kt, or a “high” 30 kt (by comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kt).
Starting in 1954, the Army activated 250 Nike sites. Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles were the first. Each city was ringed with these Nike missiles with the number of sites around a particular city depending on its size (New York had almost twenty). Kansas City, St. Louis, along with Dallas-Fort Worth, Cincinnati, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul, were part of the second phase deployment between 1958 and 1960.
St. Louis had four sites all within 35 miles of the metro: one in Pacific, Missouri, and the three others in Illinois, near Hecker, Marine, and Pere Marquette State Park. Scott Air Force Base, by Mascoutah, served as headquarters.
Manned around the clock, all Nike firing batteries could acquire, track, and engage targets autonomously. The missiles were routinely stored horizontally in underground magazines with large elevators bringing them to the surface when needed. On ground level, crewmen maneuvered the missiles by hand on a rail system to launchers. Once attached, the missiles were moved to an almost vertical launch position.
Ultimately, the Soviets decided against building a large fleet of intercontinental bombers and focused instead on ICBM development. This strategic change effectively eliminated the primary need for the Nike system. Beginning in the late 1960s, the US started de-activating domestic Nike bases and under the provisions of the SALT I treaty, by 1974 all remaining sites in the US were gone, many repurposed today as schools, public buildings, and homes.
