Missile Furniture
Making patio furniture out of scrap parts of an old Nike Hercules missile
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My strangely intertwined connection with the Nike Hercules
I have found myself strangely intertwined with the Nike Hercules missile over the years. Nike Hercules was a state-of-the-art, radar-guided, nuclear-tipped anti-aircraft missile of the late 1950s through 1970s. On the one hand, it was a frightening nuclear doomsday system. On the other hand, the integration of data from long-range search radars, short-range tracking radars, and digital computer-driven command-and-control systems for automated simultaneous intercepts of large numbers of aircraft was an astounding engineering breakthrough by Western Electric and the U.S. Air Force during the early to middle part of the Cold War.
Despite the scariness of the scenario for which they were preparing, I can’t help but be impressed by the achievements of those engineers. The Nike Hercules system was one of the first large-scale applications of electronic digital computers and telecommunication networks. These missiles were deployed around the world. In the United States these missiles defended cities including New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, DC, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Ultimately the Soviet Union more or less gave up on long-range bombers as part of their strategic forces and the Nike Hercules sites were left without credible targets to shoot at. (The USSR loaded most of its nuclear warheads onto long-range missiles instead, as they were cheaper and more likely to reach their targets than long-range bombers.)
I did some excellent spectrum survey measurements in 1995 from an old Nike Hercules site (designated LA-94, active with Nike Ajax and later Nike Hercules, 1955-1968) in the hills above Los Angeles near Newhall, where the LA county sheriff’s office now has a station in some of the old missile base buildings. (The spectrum survey results can be downloaded from the ITS web site at http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/pub/pubs.php, NTIA Report 97-336, “Broadband Spectrum Survey at Los Angeles, CA”.) When I was there the LA-94 site still had the original paint marks on the floor for the missile-section dollies. The missile sections (first stage, second stage, guidance and warhead) could be rolled around independently inside the bunker on those dollies. The individual missiles were referred to by personal names that were painted on the floor, in separate rectangular boxes for each missile section. One missile at LA-94, for example, was named “Davey.”
The warheads were the nuclear W-31, which included the ultra-cool dial-a-yield feature that allowed selective adjustment between 2 kT to 40 kT prior to launch. You could tell that nukes used to be kept in there because the red-lettered phrase “Two-Man Rule” was still neatly stenciled on the walls inside and outside the main entrance door.
When I was a kid, I had nightmare visions of entire banks of these missiles rising out of their subterranean bunkers on elevators to the terrifying, rising and falling minor-chord wail of air raid sirens. In my visions the missiles then swung around one after the next, all in a long row, pivoting into launch position and then screaming into the sky in a nuclear armageddon of airborne atomic warheads exploding among Russian bombers in the skies above American cities. From LA-94, for example, multiple atomic bombs, each roughly the size of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons, would have been exploding in the skies near Los Angeles, visible to people all over the coast of southern California. Compared to 9-11, how scary was that scenario?
Thankfully those days have passed. Compared to those visions of my childhood, I just shrug when people get worked up about terrorists with (relatively) small arms nowadays. Some things have gotten better over the years. That old threat was large enough to rub out our whole civilization within a day, and it was real. It makes it hard for me to get too panicky about any current threats posed today by small scale, technologically illiterate, nihilistic goofballs who frankly work like amateurs. Their only hope for causing much real damage is to either steal a weapon of mass destruction (in which case they still don’t pose more than a nuisance threat to civilization in terms of scale) or to have a lucky break in terms of penetrating a barrier with a conventional-weapons attack on a soft target.
I’ve kept running into these old Nike Hercules missiles and their radars over the years, as the photos above attest. I have some aluminum Nike Hercules missile parts. Two of the best pieces are a long, triangular side-fin and the circular ring that connected the first stage (a set of four strapped-together Nike Ajax first-stage booster sections) to the second stage.
My plan is to turn these two pieces into a pair of patio furniture tables. The circular booster staging ring ought to be especially easily adapted to take four legs and a circular glass table-top. Stay tuned to this web page to see what finally happens with this little side-project.
Salvaged Nike Hercules second stage booster ring (see picture below) that I’m making into a coffee table.
Salvaged Nike Hercules side fin that I’m going to make into a patio table.
Nike Hercules image showing 2nd stage booster ring and big triangular side fins like the ones I have salvaged. (U.S. Army)
Nuclear doomsday Nike Hercules image
(Courtesy U.S. Army)
Nike Hercules liftoff, a dress rehearsal for a nuclear doomsday.
(Courtesy U.S. Army)
Nike Hercules doomsday missile on a launcher at the WSMR missile museum.
Frank with a Nike Hercules on a trailer at a disused launch facility.
RSMS at LA-94 Nike site
LA-94 Nike site above Los Angeles. From here, multiple atomic bombs would have been fired into the skies above LA.
Ruined guard shack--a crumbling ruin at an abandoned Nike Hercules nuclear launch site.
LA-94 Nike Hercules entrance hatch. Nuclear weapons were stored inside for the day of Armageddon.
Nike Hercules bunker interior with elevator. Missiles sections were kept on dollies, awaiting final assembly & launch.
Nike Hercules doomsday missile elevator. The double doors swung downward and inward as the missiles rose for firing.
My brother, Chris, in front of a Nike Hercules door stencil. The ominous entrance stencil said “Two Man Rule.”
A Nike Hercules HIPAR radar antenna. Like the Anasazi ruin sites, this place now molders in a Southwestern desert.
Old Nike Hercules site antennas. The site is now derelict in a Southwestern desert. It is gradually crumbling like a Roman ruin.
Abandoned Nike bunker being swallowed by the desert. All civilizations die, their arrogance converted into detritus.
