The Dead Hand of the Cold War

Back in the late seventies, my friend Lori Dodge moved from the comfortable Nall Hills subdivision in Overland Park, Kansas, with its split-level houses, and close proximity to Metcalf South mall, to the jerkwater town of Gardner, Kansas. At least I thought it was jerkwater. It’s not. One day at summer camp, she told me about the new school in her town, Nike junior high.

"It used to be a missile base", she said.

It was a novel thought and we smiled at the notion of a military presence lingering in our avocado and burnt orange world. "In the event of nuclear holocaust, all intramural basketball games will be rescheduled".

I forgot about Nike junior high for a time. After all, junior highs don’t even rate a sports mention on the community page of the local paper. Even for the cold war kids who called themselves "the missiles".

Back in the 1950s, during the grand stand-off with Russia, American defense planners deployed short-range ground-to-air missiles as our last line of defense against Russian long-range bombers. The Nike missile program was designed to protect our cities, but when you considered this was Eastern Kansas, it became an ominous proposition. If Russian bombers were raiding Kansas City, then we were losing the war.

In those days, K.C. was a prime target on the Russian radar. Maybe not at first, but once they started cranking out those atomic bad-boys, you better believe we rated. Later, the minuteman program deployed nuclear warheads 60 miles east of town. Thank goodness it was downwind most days. So we definitely needed the Nike missile bases. I’ll bet in those days they pronounced it as one syllable. No matter, as long as they stayed awake out there. You never knew when those Frenchmen in Wichita would lay down for Ivan.

The Gardner Nike missile base (KC-60) was not a secret. The town gave a full-frontal embrace to the fire-control base. There were two parts to every Nike installation: the fire control base (our junior high in this story) and the actual silos. And for technological reasons known only to the vacuum tube set, the silos could not be too close to the control center.

If you want to see the intermediate school, nee junior high, it’s easy to find. Don’t even exit I-35. Spit out the southeast window of your vehicle at the Gardner exit. But if you want to see the silo slabs, get ready to climb fences and trespass. While my hobby de jour is exploring my extended neighborhood, I’m afraid some property owner will go all defcon one on me. Instead, why not see the installation like the Russians did, from the air.

What a bit of post cold war fun. We’ve all had a jolly good civil defense laugh, ha ha. But the dead hand of the cold war is still a twitch away from a Dom Deluise moment in a Fail-Safe day. Dead bunny hats off to cool headed Ruskies like Stanislav Petrov who knew better than to launch his missiles on September 26, 1983, even when the computer system he designed said he was being attacked. Talk about "The Day After". That was the day after the Wheat Meet keg party in the parking lot of the Burge Union during my freshman year at K.U. We weren’t due to be bombed until the November sweeps.

Who says it’s not exciting to live in Kansas? Let’s hope whoever makes the next nuke has the good sense to get the latest target data. Those underground silos were capped and filled with water in 1969, I swear.