The Russians Were Coming, So L.A. Got Busy

It's 1956, and Nikita Khruschev lays a number on America's doorstep. Talk about liberty, pursuit of justice and the American Way all you like, boys, but sooner or later we will bury you. Los Angeles, typically, responds with a mixture of wide-eyed paranoia and open-palmed opportunism. War is good business, and the business of war is here. Forget about Hollywood. Los Angeles in 1956 is Ground Zero for the emergent Eleventh Commandment ("Thou Shalt Arm Thyself to the Teeth and Thus May Thee Smite the Godless Reds") of the day. Southern California's booming aerospace industry starts booming more loudly, almost, but not quite, drowning out the first-Friday-of-every-month wail of the strange new air raid sirens that sprout up like weeds in communities from Ventura to San Diego.

    Not that Hollywood doesn't poke its long snout into the Cold War Trough and make hearty noises of satified gluttonry. There's money to be made scaring the crap out of schoolchildren and old ladies, of course, so Bert the Turtle waddles his way into the public consciousness, injecting the spirit of light-hearted buffonery into atomic obliteration.  Celebrities claw and scrape to be the first one seen modelling new Civil Defense togs and people you've seen on TV are suddenly telling you how to build a fallout shelter in your own backyard. Untold thousands of delightfully panic-stricken Angelenos take them up on the offer.

     On a more serious note, new military bases guarding strange new devices called Nike Missiles start springing up all over the Southland. The ace card in the military's plan to intercept and shoot down the inevitable nuke-laden waves of Soviet bombers, by 1958 Nikes sites will number around 240 nationally, with important cities protected by a comprehensive ring of sites.  Los Angeles and its defense industry are deemed important enough to warrant 16 such sites.

    The plan is simple enough.  Radar installations in the network will detect incoming hostile aircraft before they approach too closely. Integrated fire support will work with the radar information to launch Nike Ajax missiles (eventually replaced by the nuclear-capable Hercules model) from the same site, or sometimes an adjunct site nearby, and intercept and destroy the threat.

    The system was designed to be a foolproof safeguard against Soviet nuclear incursion. American's hedged their bets with fallout shelters and Bert the Turtle. Unfortunately, the Soviets got better at eluding radar detection, and then the whole point was made moot by the development of the intercontinental ballistic missile, against which no practical defense could be made. The Nike program was gradually phased out over the course of the 1960s and the last active base went offline in 1974. Not a single Nike missile was ever fired against a hostile target.

     Today dozens of former Nike sites dot the American landscape, mysterious shrines to an arcane and largely forgotten art. Most of the bases are gutted, stripped to the ground or totally obliterated. A small handful remain in near-pristine condition, time capsules from the dead that have somehow escaped attention or modern intervention in the name of public works or housing. An even smaller handful have been turned into museum-like anthropological exhibits by local park agencies

    One such former base sits above the the San Fernando Valley on top of San Vicente Mountain, easily accessible from the dirt part of Mulholland Drive. Although most of LA-96C's installations have been removed, several towers and points of interest remain, assisted by many interpretive signs placed by park rangers. Visitors are encouraged to push or pull any button or lever found at the site in the hopes of possibly activating a dormant warning siren. LA-96C was an integrated fire control facility; it contained no missiles or launchers, just the radar that would spot incoming threats and the fire control capability to respond at a remote site. The missiles safeguarded to LA-96C were located at one end of Balboa Park in the Valley, where an air national guard station still stands today, and it can be clearly spotted from the top of San Vicente on a clear day. A coin operated telescope on top of the centrally located radar platform affords viewers a glimpse of downtown Los Angeles when the weather accomodates. Elsewhere, a wild cactus garden blooms behind a chain link fence, remnants of an original garden tended by bored and lonely soldiers in the base's heyday.

    Mostly, though, LA-96C rots away into the folds of history. This is a planned death; park rangers have decided to no longer combat the effects of nature on the base, though they will keep it open and accessible to the public as long as nature intends it to be visited. Some will view this as a fitting resolution to a Cold War legacy.

Coming soon: A Trip Up Stunt Road