Fails the sniff test

 

1. Several years before 9/11 I had to go out to San Francisco for programming seminars and on a sightseeing break across the Golden Gate I was driving a few miles up the coast and found a Nike-style missile installation still manned with guards & dogs walking the fence.  Wished I’d had a camera at the time…

   This site says New York/New Jersey used to have 19 missile sites until the mid-70s:
   http://alpha.fdu.edu/~bender/N-site.html

   And until last year we had several bunkers here in Martin County Florida that I’m sure were for missile installations (not surprising as the Kennedy compound in West Palm Beach was probably targeted by Castro.)

   Posted by TimO       09/26/2011  at  09:02 PM  



2. 19 is getting close to two dozen. Mt. Nebo was a double battery so perhaps it should count as two? We visited that one as an outing with Cub Scouts. “Look children, nuclear weapons!”
   It was the coolest thing ... ferocious attack dogs behind barbed wire and soldiers with real guns, missiles 2 stories tall like gleaming white daggers that snapped up out of the ground in something like 2 seconds, radar domes in darkened rooms full of dials and meters and an electronic map we could look at with blips on it, etc. Heaven for a 9 year old boy.

   Of course, they didn’t say that the rockets had nukes. Nukes were officially denied. It wasn’t until I was working in the corporate world 35 years later that some guy who came to give some kind of training lecture mentioned his past time in the Army as a missileman. We got to talking and he admitted it, he’d worked at the very base I’d visited, but I’m sure the nuclear cat was long out of the bag by then anyway.

   Posted by Drew458       09/26/2011  at  10:11 PM  



3. Speaking of Nike (Ajax) sites, there was one right off Rte-303 next to the local drive-in movie when I was younger.

   I believe there was one near Wayne, NJ as well. They upgraded to Nike (Hercules) before they decommissioned them.

   These were meant to stop Ruski bombers from nuking New York City back in the 1950’s. But they could very well be utilized today intercepting a hy-jacked airliner.

   Posted by New Jersey Yankee       09/27/2011  at  12:27 AM  



4. NJY - That’s the Mt. Nebo base. Don’t know why the Army called it Mt. Nebo, as all the locals called it Clausland Mt. The place was maybe half a mile from the old Camp Shanks, which was a major embarkation point for troops during WWII. These days the drive-in is the Orangetown recycling center, and the launch area might be part of the parking lot for the local Lowe’s.

   These things were everywhere. The older radar station in Spring Valley was just a couple miles west, the Ramapo base a few miles north west, and a couple more out a little past Ramsey NJ along Rt 17 (Campgaw Mt.)

   I think we may have almost been neighbors! What town did you grow up in? Northvale, Old Tappan, Orangeburg?

   Posted by Drew458       09/27/2011  at  08:29 AM  

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