SF-88: The Cold War Missile Site Hidden in Plain Sight, California

In the early Cold War, the biggest fear was a Soviet bomber slipping through and dropping an atomic bomb on an American city. The U.S. Army’s answer was Project Nike: rings of missile batteries surrounding major cities and military bases, ready to shoot bombers out of the sky. The first Nike Ajax site went into service at Fort Meade, Maryland, in December 1953. Over the next years the Army built close to 300 sites, each staffed around the clock by a crew of 109 officers and enlisted men. In 1958, the more powerful Nike Hercules arrived. It could carry a W31 nuclear warhead, meant to destroy entire formations of bombers in the air. Each site had two parts: a control area with radars on high ground, and a launch area with missiles stored in underground magazines and raised to the surface by elevator. Many sat on the edges of growing suburbs. The threat changed. Once the Soviet Union built intercontinental ballistic missiles, defenses built to stop bombers mattered less. Budget cuts and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty finished the job, and nearly every Nike site in the lower 48 was deactivated by April 1974. The sites were handed off and reused as National Guard posts, schools, city yards, parks and even homes. Site SF-88, in the Marin Headlands north of the Golden Gate Bridge, went into service in 1954 and was inactivated in 1974. Under the SALT I arms treaty, it was chosen as the U.S. historical missile site, and the Army transferred it to the National Park Service. In the early 1980s, volunteers began restoring it, starting by pumping water out of the flooded underground magazine. Today it’s the most fully restored Nike site in the country, preserved as it was during operations.