Nuclear Armed New Jersey - America 250

The lovely Mrs. E. and I were recently at Sandy Hook. Most people think of Sandy Hook as a Jersey Shore beach and recreation area. It is that, of course. But it also contains a remarkably complete history of how New York City was defended from attack.

Fort Hancock guarded the entrance to New York Harbor with enormous coastal guns and mortars.

Some of the batteries date from the late nineteenth century, although the military importance of Sandy Hook goes back much further. The weapons changed over time. The mission did not.

By the 1950s, the danger was no longer an enemy fleet sailing past Sandy Hook and into NY Harbor. Rather, it was formations of Soviet bombers flying overhead, possibly carrying nuclear weapons toward New York.

The Army’s answer was Nike.

Nineteen Nike missile installations formed a defensive ring around the New York metropolitan area. A substantial portion of that ring ran through New Jersey: Sandy Hook, Leonardo, Holmdel, South Amboy, South Plainfield, Watchung, Livingston, Wayne and Mahwah. Another string of batteries in South Jersey—at Marlton, Lumberton, Pitman, Swedesboro and Berlin-Clementon—helped defend Philadelphia.

This was not some distant military frontier. It ran through the New Jersey suburbs.

The missile sites generally consisted of two separate facilities. The radar and fire-control section was placed on higher ground, where its crews could detect and track incoming aircraft. The launch area was often a mile or more away. There, the missiles were stored horizontally in reinforced underground magazines, lifted to the surface by elevators and moved onto launch rails.

In other words, there were missiles beneath the local cornfields. There were alert and missile control radars in the suburban hills.

The original Nike Ajax carried conventional explosives and was intended to destroy a single aircraft. Beginning in the late 1950s, many sites were converted to the larger Nike Hercules. Hercules missiles could fly farther and higher, and they could carry a nuclear warhead.

For years, the presence of those warheads was treated as something between a military secret and a fact everyone understood but was not supposed to say aloud. When the magazine “Weird NJ” interviewed the former commander of the Livingston–East Hanover installation, he freely explained that the Hercules was designed to destroy an entire formation of aircraft. Asked directly whether his missiles actually carried nuclear warheads, he replied: “I can’t say anything on that.”

Subtle.

The official discretion has since faded. The National Park Service now describes the Nike weapons at Sandy Hook as nuclear weapons guarding the New York metropolitan area. The defensive theory was that a nuclear explosion offshore—or over northern New Jersey, depending upon where the bombers were intercepted—could destroy several attacking aircraft at once. The plan for protecting New York from Soviet nuclear weapons, therefore, involved detonating American nuclear weapons in the approaches to New York. Hmmm.

The Nike bases were woven into ordinary communities. At East Hanover, officers, enlisted men and their families lived in Army housing beside the installation. Three fences and patrol dogs protected the missile area. Local residents were periodically invited to tour the radar section, but not the launch site. The Army wanted to reassure the neighbors without showing them precisely what they were being reassured about.

At Livingston, portions of the former installation survive as Riker Hill Art Park. Buildings once connected to the air defense of New York are now studios for painters, potters and sculptors. Elsewhere, former Nike properties have become schools, municipal facilities, parks, housing and commercial development. In many places, virtually nothing remains above ground. The thick concrete magazines were sealed, covered and left beneath whatever came next.

There was also a warning of how badly things could go wrong.

On May 22, 1958, workers at the Nike site in Leonardo were handling a missile when its booster exploded. The blast set off additional missiles and killed ten people—six soldiers and four civilian technicians. The Ajax missiles involved carried conventional warheads, not nuclear ones. That distinction was important, although probably less comforting to anyone living nearby.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, New Jersey’s Nike crews went to the highest state of readiness. At the Livingston–East Hanover battery, the soldiers reportedly maintained a five-minute launch status around the clock for roughly a month. Behind the fences, beneath the suburban landscape, the missiles were ready to come up out of the ground.

They were never fired in combat.

By the late 1960s, the system was becoming obsolete. Nike had been built to stop formations of manned bombers. The Soviet threat was shifting toward intercontinental ballistic missiles, which arrived too high and too fast for Nike to intercept. The batteries closed one by one. The last New Jersey sites were deactivated in 1974.

Today, Sandy Hook preserves more of this history than most places. The missile-launch area, radar complex and remains of Fort Hancock sit amid beaches, bicycle paths and bird habitat. Families drive past on their way to the ocean, often without realizing that this narrow strip of land was once prepared to fight a nuclear war.

That is the peculiar thing about New Jersey’s Nike sites. They were not hidden in deserts or remote mountain ranges. They were placed in Middletown and Livingston, beside farms in Burlington and Gloucester counties, near schools, houses and commuter towns, and literally on the beaches of Sandy Hook.

We subsequently built over most of it. The site nearest my house now sits beneath the Watchung Stables. The only remains of the old military installation are a snippet of barbed wire fencing and the old access road (now closed).

Most of the suburban moms and daughters in riding helmets and jodhpurs cantering along the riding paths there have little idea that they are on what was once the front line of the Cold War. It ran right through NJ.