American Nukes

About Nike-Hercules

For people living in Anchorage, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Bridgeport, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Boston, Providence, Detroit, Minneapolis, Lincoln, New York, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Seattle, Milwaukee, and many other cities in the 1960s, the first indication that they were about to be incinerated would have been the vertical streaks of white smoke reaching upward into the sky and growing taller with each second.

The Hercules version of the Nike missile, a nuclear-armed defensive missile, ringed cities and military bases throughout the country. Since they were based so close to urban centers by necessity they were a common part of the landscape seen out the car window on the way to work. They were almost assuredly the only real nuclear weapon a person would ever see in their lifetimes.

The hope of the Nike-Hercules system was to destroy incoming Soviet bombers, and their nuclear bomb payloads, before they could end America. The Russians were atheists and did not fear God but the Army wished to make certain that the Russians at least feared the Nike-Hercules.

The earlier version of the Nike, the Ajax, was a much smaller and slower missile with a conventional explosive too weak to destroy, at most, more than a single bomber in an attacking formation. Most likely the missile would explode in the air between the planes, too far away from any of them to achieve any purpose. The Hercules solved that problem by swapping out the high-explosive warhead for a nuclear one. Close enough counts when the blast is measured in kilotons.

The Nike-Hercules is the rare nuclear weapon with any claim to a moral high ground. It was designed to defend against those who brought to our lands their own immoral weapons for their own immoral purposes. That we would be required to blast our own sky over our own population to put a stop to their double-layered immorality perhaps seems less foolhardy than an unexpectedly noble purpose, born out of necessity.

Those lines of missile smoke pointing into the sky would have been a warning, a countdown clock, however brief, for the people watching, for the people driving home from work. Dumb and backward as they were thought to be, the Rooskies had somehow built nuclear bombs and high-flying, continent-spanning bombers, and surely they could figure out how to at least get a few planes past the Nike-Hercules swarm. And a few planes over the target—one of our cities, one of our military bases—would be all that it would take.

I wonder what the people watching those missiles fly upwards on their noble mission would have thought about in the few minutes they had remaining, the few minutes before the bombs of the enemy, those surviving the Hercules gauntlet, flashed and flamed with their immoral light.

Would they have thought about the national defense capability that such a system afforded the United States, neutering the power of the freedom-hating North Pole-crossing Russian pilots? Would they have considered the potentially destabilizing effect such a shield would have, theoretical or real, on the nuclear arms race, where the enemy saw the shield as a way for the United States to defy the repercussions of a first strike upon the Soviet Union? Would they have smirked at the irony of the Nike-Hercules, its purpose to shoot down bombers rapidly eroding, even upon its deployment, by the rising threat of ICBMs, outer-space-crossing missiles that went too high and traveled too fast and there were just too many of them to intercept?

But there weren’t too many enemy bombers. There were, in fact, far fewer bombers posing a direct threat to the United States than our own military claimed, the threat greatly exaggerated, our Curtis LeMays all too ready to believe in budget-swelling dangers, the bomber gap segueing into the missile gap into the ABM gap, into the navy size gap, into the hypersonic missile gap, the cyber gap, and the AI gap and it never ends, the trap that has snapped shut around us never reopening.

Gallery

Nukemap

NUKEMAP is a web-based mapping program that attempts to give the user a sense of the destructive power of nuclear weapons. It was created by Alex Wellerstein, a historian specializing in nuclear weapons (see his book on nuclear secrecy and his blog on nuclear weapons). The screenshot below shows the NUKEMAP output for this particular weapon. Click on the map to customize settings.

Videos

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