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Tuesday, September 14, 2021
CONTINUITY: Nike-Hercules—When U.S. Cities were Ringed with Nuclear-Tipped Missiles
When I was a kid, my parents took me on a week-end tour of a local Nike-Ajax site, probably in 1958 or 1959. They showed you everything, except inside the circular berm where they did hazardous propellant maintenance operations. (Nike-Ajax used toxic hypergolic liquid propellants in its second stage.) Afterward, the site was converted to the nuclear-tipped Nike-Hercules, and no tours were offered.
At the peak, there were 265 Nike-Ajax sites in the U.S. The longer range Nike-Hercules covered a larger area, and was deployed in only 130 locations, with the excess Nike-Ajax sites decommissioned.
Posted at September 14, 2021 12:49