Los Angeles Times, page B-1
Monday, August 7, 2000
Cold War Remnant Is
Being Destroyed
History: Nuclear missile base near Brea is one of few left in Southland. At one
time, there had been 16.
By H.G. REZA, Times Staff Writer
They were America`s first sentries in the Cold War, built on hilltops and in
Southland neighborhoods in an era when "duck and cover" was 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.
The base, built on two hilltops in the Puente Hills near Brea, had three huge
magazines, each about 20 feet deep from which missiles--both Ajax and
Hercules--could be brought to the surface and launched.
"We`re destroying a little bit of history. . . .," said Glenn D.
Barin, an 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 remnants 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 facilities 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.
Unknown to millions of Southern Californians, 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.
The once-bustling outposts formed a circle with Saugus to the north, Malibu to
the west, San Pedro to the south and Brea to the east. Except for aging and
vandalized concrete buildings that stand at some sites, there is little evidence
that these bases--staffed by Army and California National Guard soldiers--ever
existed.
The Long Beach site is now a blend of hotel and commercial developments. The
Mt. Gleason launch site near Palmdale is a Los Angeles County prison camp. The
South El Monte site is a work yard at a county park. A temporary site on
Fairview Road in Costa Mesa in operation from 1955 to 1957 is now the home of
Orange Coast College and the Orange County Fairgrounds.
Officials at the Fort MacArthur Military Museum Assn. in San Pedro are working
to preserve some of the sites in Los Angeles County. The fort was the
headquarters for the bases, which were up to 70 miles away. It also included a
cemetery for the dogs that helped guard the bases.
Museum volunteer Sam Stokes, a retired Los Angeles County district attorney`s
investigator, said the sites deserve to be placed on the U.S. and California
registers of historic places.
"Los Angeles doesn`t have a sense of history," Stokes said.
"Historic preservation in Los Angeles is a suicide mission. Military
historic preservation is even more futile."
But he credited officials in Rancho Palos Verdes and Malibu with preserving
some buildings at the Nike bases. The Rancho Palos Verdes City Hall complex on
Hawthorne Boulevard and Palos Verdes Drive used to be the base`s launch site.
The command site at Crenshaw Boulevard and Sea Crest Drive is now Del Cerro
Park. The launch site in Malibu, located on Rambla Pacifica, is now used by the
Los Angeles County Fire Department as a maintenance yard.
Neighborhoods` Nuclear Weapons
Stokes, a museum volunteer for 14 years and local Nike base historian, said Los
Angeles area residents were remarkably and blissfully ignorant about the
nuclear weapons that were stored near their homes, schools, churches and
businesses.
When Stokes made a presentation several years ago to the Rancho Palos Verdes
Land Conservancy about the old Nike base, he described what had long been a
closely guarded secret.
"They were shocked and appalled to learn that until 1974 there were
nuclear warheads in their neighborhoods," Stokes said.
Conservancy President Bill Ailor said he never gave the Nike base "a
second thought."
"We all knew it was there. It had guard dogs inside. At the time, I
figured it was a good defensive system and necessary," Ailor said.
"The feeling at the time was that those things were there for a reason.
But most of us only knew it as a missile site. Nobody talked about nuclear
weapons being there."
Retired National Guard Col. Carlos Ramirez was commander in charge of the
Stanton site in central Orange County.
"If anybody asked, we were instructed to say only that the Hercules had
nuclear capability," said Ramirez, who served at the base from 1964 to
1974. "We had houses north of us on Katella, south on Chapman, east on
Western and west across Knott, where there was also a school."
The Stanton base`s control center was in Garden Grove at Knott Avenue and
Patterson Drive, which is now a light industrial area. The launch site was east
of there on Western Avenue, now an Army Reserve Center.
The bases operated at a time when the Russians appeared unbeatable. They
launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1957. In 1961, a Russian
cosmonaut became the first man in space. On May Day 1960, they shot down an
American U2 spy plane with a surface-to-air missile, capturing the pilot,
Francis Gary Powers.
It was a time when every American schoolboy knew he was going to grow up and
fight the Russians, who were already in Cuba--90 miles from Florida--positioning
their nuclear missiles to strike the United States.
"The times were a lot different and a little scary. People didn`t ask a
lot of questions in those days, and everyone expected the military to defend
against the Communists," said Frank Evans, a biomedical engineer in Sun
Valley who commanded a site near Pittsburgh, Pa.
Americans` view of the military was more accommodating then too.
Evans recalled a time when a Hercules missile, all 11,000 pounds of it, fell
off his battery`s launcher, prompting fears that the nuclear warhead had
ruptured. Fortunately, it did not, but Evans said that as a precaution,
"many, many people" living nearby in the Pittsburgh suburb were
evacuated while troops checked for radiation.
The Army offered little or no information about the sudden evacuation, but
"nobody really complained," Evans said.
There were close calls in Los Angeles too. In 1966, a brush fire in Los
Pinetos, near Newhall, claimed 11 lives and came dangerously close to
destroying the Nike site where nuclear missiles were based. The soldiers
doubled as firefighters and repelled the flames just yards from the base`s
perimeter.
A 1959 Army report about the 211 Nike sites throughout the country recounted
the difficulty that military authorities had in acquiring land from cities and
private landowners for the missile bases. The report said that "the Los
Angeles area was in a class all its own" in refusing to give up private
land for the nation`s defense.
The Army wanted a combined 25 acres at the northwest and southwest ends of Los
Angeles International Airport. The report noted then-Mayor Norris Poulson`s
intransigence in giving up the parcels. According to the report, Poulson
"carried the fight to Washington after calling local Army representatives bullheaded."
Poulson and other opponents feared that the Nike`s booster rockets, which fell
to Earth, "would be a hazard to the area." An Army general responded
that "if we are attacked, there`ll be more deadly things than booster
cases falling through the sky unless the attackers are stopped."
But Poulson prevailed. The report said top military officials "decided the
city was right and the installation was relocated" to Playa del Rey
instead.
* * *
Missile Ring
Nike missile sites in the Los Angeles region were part of an air defense system
designed to protect such key industries as aerospace, ship building,
transportation and communications, aswell as military installations in the Los
Angeles area. Ten of those sites, including two in Orange County, had nuclear
warheads.