Nike Missile Sites of the San Francisco Bay Area (2001) | Hacker News Reader

Nike Missile Sites of the San Francisco Bay Area (2001)

acme.com

90 pointsstevewilhelm48 comments

Out in the Marin Headlands they have a whole exhibit about the missile sites there and around the Bay. You can even interview and listen to presentations by people who were stationed around the Bay during the cold war watching for a Soviet attack. Apparently, the Soviets had a plan to repeatedly nuke the bay to generate huge clouds of radiation that would then spread across the country. http://www.nps.gov/goga/nike-missile-site.htm

The headlands missile site is just a short and very pleasant bike ride away. Highly recommended.

Pleasant!? Up Hawk Hill?! (Mostly joking while nursing some very sore legs after my first ride in a few weeks)

Ha! I do this ride nearly every week and I'm not sure I would describe it as "short and very pleasant" to a general audience. Unless you have a decent road bike and are fairly fit you will likely be walking up hawk hill.

Never mind making it up the hill -- the backside descent of Conzelman Road is really what your average person should skip. You'll miss out on some of the old structures by skipping that, but there's still things to see if you go down Alexander, take the tunnel to Bunker Rd, and follow that out.

Well worth seeing. As far as I know, it's the only Nike exhibit of its type with a launcher that actually gets raised up. There are various remains of other Nike sites around (including on Angel Island) but there's typically not much there.

It's much more than a static exhibit. I've been out to SF-88 and had a tour of the control and radar trailers, with their analog computers and consoles powered up [2], but the radars not emitting. They can run the missile lifts up and down and raise a missile to firing position.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg3sjXUr-yg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssY11Dujaog

The site in Poulsbo, WA had been flooded for years. When I was a high school student, we used to go have parties there. The whole campus was 10-20 acres and most of the buildings were still intact, although pretty ransacked. Similar to the sites I visited in the Anchorage, AK area. I think it was about 10 years ago they started to prep the site to build a new Walmart. The construction crew pumped all of the launchers out and let me go down and take a look around. It was pretty neat to see everything that had been under water for most likely 30 years. I took a bunch of slides I'll have to dig up one of these days. I still haven't made it to see the museum. Most of these neat military sites are private property now, although I think most of the Nike installations were given to local government orgs.

I've often wondered where our current air defense systems are now. It seems the government must spend a lot of money hiding them in plain sight or I'm not looking hard enough.

The airforce is testing a cruise missile defense balloon in Maryland. It's a blimp tied to the ground.

I'd imagine most of US civil air defense is just sending up fighter jets.

But on 9-11, US air defense got caught with their pants down. I wouldn't expect much.

>I'd imagine most of US civil air defense is just sending up fighter jets.

The US has developed a lot of missiles, including those used to shoot down other missiles. Do you have a reason to believe that their IADS is so dependent on fighters? I'm not particularly well-informed on the issue so I'd be interested to read more.

Just guessing based on lack of obvious military installations around cities.

Miniaturization technology has advanced enough that they don't need fixed installations. Low altitude anti-air defense is probably a bunch of Stingers stored in a locker in key target buildings. High-altitude ABM defense would be Patriots and THAADs, both of which are mounted on mobile trucks which presumably are housed in U.S. military bases and in secret garages or other locations. It's to your advantage to not let your enemies know where your defenses are; pretty much all missiles since the 1980s have been mounted on trucks that let them be stationed anywhere a road goes to.

The White House has NASAMS on nearby buildings, which is a pretty decent upgrade in capability over Stingers.

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/americas-capitol-is-guarded...

> But on 9-11, US air defense got caught with their pants down. I wouldn't expect much.

I'm not sure it's US air defense who got caught with their pants down, the entire notion of the 9/11 attack would have been to get around the effectiveness of US air defense at keeping foreign aircraft out of US airspace.

The time needed to scramble F-16s is not based on a jet flying from Boston to DC or whatever. That's already the end zone.

The FAA and NORAD did indeed have protocols to deal with hijackings in US airspace requiring a military response. Those protocols broke down somewhat on 9/11. A lack of communication between the FAA and the military slowed down the military response to the hijackings.

The 9/11 Commission Report is well worth a read.

Depends on what level you are talking about.

For ICBMs there are naval vessels like the Aegis, as well as land based systems surrounding the CONUS.

Within CONUS however they are largely relegated to military installations. For example there are batteries on military installations in the D.C. area, but not outside of those reservations.

[1]http://theweek.com/articles/549964/futuristic-air-defense-sy...

The Nike system was a last line of defense against bomber formations. The main idea near the end of the program was to set off a surface-to-air nuke in the middle of a formation and take it out. (Yes, that means near the population centers which the Nike sites were situated around. ICBMs nullified the usefulness of the Nikes and they were all decommissioned around 1974.)

Modern air defenses are the anti-ballistic missile stuff, interceptors located at the borders, etc.

That gives you insight into the sort of absolute war they were prepared to fight. The world is, in some ways, a better place today.

The world is better now than it ever was, in many ways: http://sploid.gizmodo.com/the-world-is-now-safer-and-better-...

while that's nice, we're also running head on into a climate catastrophy, so it's sadly not for long.

Agreed that there is less of a death by nuclear war.

But today there is a far greater chance of being shot by a an armed squad of uniformed men driving armoured vehicles.

It's really apples and oranges, but people still die at the hands of violence today as they did in the past.

That's kind of misleading, it went more like:

"it appears as though our missile attacks the center of mass of tight formations, downing none of the aircraft"

"let's put a nuke on it and call it a feature"

To be fair, exploding a few kiloton nuke at several km altitude (probably 30,000 ft or so) would have fairly minimal impact on the ground, and would, of course, bet totally worthwhile if it meant preventing dropping multi-megaton bombs.

Wouldn't a low yield nuclear weapon detonated at a relatively low altitude generate a localized EMP?

> Wouldn't a low yield nuclear weapon detonated at a relatively low altitude generate a localized EMP?

Probably, though Soviet strategic bomber formations probably wouldn't be operating at particularly low altitude and, IIRC, the idea was to intercept before they were over target (but not far enough away that it wouldn't be problematic!) anyway, and, finally, localized EMP and flash from a kiloton-range airburst is better for people on the ground than the effects of a megaton-range ground burst.

If the Nike missiles around SF had ever been fired in anger, it would have been an effort to turn what would otherwise be total disaster into merely major disaster.

One of the interesting things about the Marin Headland Nike station tour is the tidbit of information that they had targeting codes for Sacramento. So if the Ruskies invaded and occupied the state capital there was an "option"...

(May well have been a bored volunteer making things up, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand...)

Likely. Although there's been remarkably little public research on EMPs. It's hard to say what impact that would actually have. Even if it fried every electronic device, that'd still be much better than a 10 megaton nuke going off above downtown.

>>Even if it fried every electronic device, that'd still be much better than a 10 megaton nuke going off above downtown.

My worry is what happens to critical infrastructure. For instance, if the blast were in line-of-sight of multiple high-voltage transmission lines then extra-high-voltage transformers (think >200 kV) could “melt-down” (that is to say, the cellulose insulation is damaged by higher than normal temperature of the oil caused by the excess DC current, but maybe I am wrong?). These are multi-million dollars, weigh 500 000 lbs, are very difficult to move, and have a lead time measured in years. (There are probably 10 of these on hand as spares across the country for the 4,000 currently in use.) Cascading power failure, say substantial failure in San Francisco, could affect the entire Western Interconnection. If the power goes down, so does water pressure which depends on electrical pumps. A loss of power/water for more than a week could be an extremely severe event. A military strategist wouldn't settle for just one city to be in this state either.

So if you have an attack on multiple fronts, then today it would be suicidal to potentially knock out the power to your own cities. But, maybe back when the Nike was in use power failure wouldn't be as catastrophic as it would be today OR this wasn't a possible failure mode.

Um, a multi megaton nuke of the city center would have the same effect or worse.

You assume the bombers were definitely carrying nuclear weapons. They needn't if your goal is to have the enemy wipe itself out by this method, they only need to think you are carrying them.

Also, I argue that your line-of-sight is increased by "low-altitude" EMP blasts (30 000 ft for a localized EMP on a bomber vs >100 000 ft for high-altitude EMP) whereas a nuclear detonation probably occurs at much lower altitude (~2 000 ft), so the higher altitude could in theory attack a much larger area as far as power is concerned. So in terms of electrical infrastructure, a larger area of damage could occur by Nike attacks on bombers higher up. But who knows.

EMP from nuclear detonations is more of a high altitude thing. The gamma rays knock electrons off atoms in the atmosphere, which move really fast because the gamma rays are energetic. Up where the atmosphere is thin, those electrons can move a substantial distance before the collide with another atom. As they move, the Earth's magnetic field causes their path to curve, which causes them to emit electromagnetic radiation. At lower altitudes (which a bomber interception would be, relatively speaking) the electrons don't get far enough before they collide with stuff.

Also airburst weapons result in minimal local fallout. There is the long term global fallout, but that risk wouldn't be catastrophic from a 30kt weapon. So the "local" blast would be the only operational damage. Granted it would be an insane amount of damage, but minimal long term dangers. I was an NBC officer in the Army and we conducted all sorts of scenarios dealing with tactical nukes (specifically maximum cross time calculation and blast diameters and cones of contaimination; I am so glad that much of that is academic at this point however there certainly is a danger from nuclear arms in the hands of nefarious actors. The asymmetric battlefield is so much harder to defend against than the old Societ threat.

There is no general air defence these days. There are point installations protecting military targets, on military land, but there aren't batteries of missiles to defend large cities. If needed they launch intercept aircraft. (imho those military point defence installations are turned off most all of the time. See below.)

Recently in Vancouver we hosted the woman's world cup. Joe Biden was in town. And so was this (http://i.imgur.com/pvxYN49.jpg). That's the USS Stockdale entering Vancouver port to provide him cover. It left port the day after he left town. All very quiet. Local news didn't speak of this big thing coming in unescorted. I only noticed after one of our boats went screaming by the dog beach (http://i.imgur.com/G7lY9s4.jpg) about half an hour before. It was probably leaving to make room at the dock. When the Stockdale left it was followed by a tug and a rib from the local cops... they probably learned about it at the same time I did.

Stockdale's itinerary listing it docking in North Vancouver. http://www.uscarriers.net/ddg106history.htm

The lack of air defence is probably a good thing. The error rate, the risk of shooting down something by accident, would be unacceptable.

My 1.5 cents: probably coincidence. It would be difficult to get naval vessels to follow him around the world, for example during his trip to land-locked Mongolia:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/photogallery/vic...

Just because the ship followed him to one event/location, doesn't mean it needs to follow him to every. Their thinking probably is "We can get good protection at this location through USS whatever, let's do it."

It might also be based on very practical things. The prez/vice always have a quick exit plan. The stockdale has a pair of helos that could have picked him up from anywhere in the city. That might mean they didn't have to lay on as many ground assets.

Air defense batteries have limited use if you have excellent global surveillance capabilities -- they will know about an impending air attack long before it happens. Consequently, they are really only used to protect critical "first strike" targets. With ample warning, there are many ways to protect areas from air attack, including combat air patrol.

Also, air defense and ballistic missile defense have largely converged. The newer systems are designed to intercept just about everything that moves from sea level to low-earth orbit. It is one of the reasons the ABM treaty had to be scrapped -- limiting missile defense was tantamount to limiting air defense.

It's basically minimal at this point. Most of it comes down to cold war history. In the 50s, the threat was Russian bombers coming over the pole, so the U.S. built a big air defense system, including SAGE, Nike, BOMARC, and F-102s and F-106s. By the 60s, the Russians were concentrating on ballistic missiles, and not much more work was put into air defense in the U.S. By the 70s, a lot of the original 50s system was removed for obsolescence with no full replacement. The Russians kept improving their system though, and it remains quite powerful. Some of this comes down to geography though. There are multiple lines of radars across Canada, and so the U.S. would have had much more warning time of a Russian attack. By the 80s, a smaller group of F-15s were presumably adequate to defend the U.S., nevermind the missiles.

And yet they managed to sink the Avro Arrow :(

    By the 60s, the Russians were concentrating on ballistic missiles,
    and not much more work was put into air defense in the U.S.

How does one defend against ICBMs? Is that not considered "air defense"?

    By the 80s, a smaller group of F-15s were presumably 
    adequate to defend the U.S., nevermind the missiles.

"Nevermind the missiles"? Do you mean: a smaller group of F-15s was adequate to defend the US if by "defend the US" we mean completely ignoring the missiles?

    The Russians kept improving their system though, and
    it remains quite powerful.

Where can one learn more, or what web search keywords are good?

Ballistic missile defense is a pretty different problem from defending against aircraft. While both involve defending from stuff above you, they take radically different paths at radically different speeds. An aircraft is moving at roughly the speed of sound (a bit under for most stuff, or maybe somewhat over for some of the fancier bombers) on an unpredictable path at an altitude between maybe 40,000ft and 100ft. An ICBM warhead is traveling at maybe mach 25, is coming down on a near vertical trajectory from a couple thousand miles up, and is on an entirely predictable trajectory.

The differences make for extremely different requirements. To shoot aircraft down, you want a missile that can travel somewhat faster than the aircraft. By not going too fast, they can stay maneuverable, to counter the aircraft's own maneuverability. You can use a proximity fuze so that once you get somewhat close to the target, the missile explodes and destroys the aircraft with shrapnel. You typically have some hours of warning to get the missile into position.

To shoot down an ICBM warhead, you need a much faster missile in order to perform the intercept at a useful altitude. You have maybe 20 minutes of warning at best, and probably no more than 5-10 minutes knowing the exact target. The target doesn't maneuver so the missile doesn't need to counter that. The target is maneuvering so fast, however, that a proximity fuze does you no good if you're using chemical explosives. The target is moving much faster than your explosives explode, so timing the explosion to hit the target with your shrapnel field is too hard. One option is to hit the target directly (kinetic kill), which means hitting something with a cross section of a couple of square feet while your closing velocity is several miles per second. This is hard. Another option is to use nuclear warheads on the interceptor. The detonation won't physically destroy the incoming warheads, but the radiation flux can destroy their electronics.

The answer to "how do you defend against ICBMs?" is more or less: you don't. No practical system to defend against a large-scale ICBM attack has ever been developed, or even planned. Defending a few targets at great expense is possible. The Soviets had their Galosh missiles defending Moscow, which are still in place. The Americans built the Safeguard system to defend ICBM silos around North Dakota, but it was decommissioned quickly because it just cost too much. The Americans now have the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense in Alaska and California. This can defend much of the country against ICBMs, but only a small number of them, so the intent is to prevent e.g. North Korea from carrying out a small strike, not stopping a full-scale Soviet/Russian/Chinese strike. Some Aegis destroyers operated by the US Navy also have the ability to shoot down ICBMs, but again the numbers are limited. In general it's cheaper to build an ICBM than to build something that can intercept an ICBM (especially since one ICBM can carry 10 or more warheads, all of which need to be shot down separately unless you can somehow destroy the missile while it's still launching), so unless you have great economic superiority over your adversary, they can always out-build your defenses.

ICBM RVs spend only seconds in the atmosphere before they hit their targets, air defense isn't going to work to defend against such attacks.

This AT&T Bell Labs documentary about the anti-ballistic missile defense program is eye-opening. The program roots are in the Nike anti-bomber defense program. The complexity of radar and digital signal processing technology in the 1960-70s is incredible (they even had stylus touch-screen interfaces).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARx2-wRn9-Y

They note that one of the sites (Ft Cronkhite) is being used by The Marine Mammal Center, it says that one 'magazine' (silo) is being used for the storage of veterinary drugs, there are also a few decades of biological samples, and the second silo is used in the rare case a Dolphin needs to be rehabilitated.

If you're ever able to hunt down a copy of the project report on Nike/Spartan, do so. They're interesting reading. Those engineers were pretty awesome.

"Nike - Just do it." :D scnr

They make some nice shoes, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com