New Life for a Doomsday Site

If the Soviet planes had come, our boys would have tried to shoot them down from this perch in the mountain scrub between Encino and Brentwood.

On a clear day, it’s a perfect place to view the San Fernando Valley, the Los Angeles Basin and Santa Catalina Island. At the height of the Cold War, it was a perfect place for the U.S. Army to set up a high-tech radar center as part of the last line of defense against a nuclear bomber strike on Southern California.

These days, hikers and mountain bikers, unaware that they are passing a monument to the nation’s preparedness--or its fears--hardly notice the raised platform at the crest of San Vicente Mountain. A quarter of a century ago, they wouldn’t have gotten past the guards.

Troops were stationed here 24 hours a day, operating five radars from underground bunkers and scanning for telltale blips. Up here, one can imagine the soldiers keeping watch over 1950s Los Angeles, where the national fear of communism cost some in Hollywood their jobs, but also fueled the region’s economy with a steady demand for advanced weapons.

Part of the Nike air-defense system, named for the Greek goddess of victory, the center would have been the command post for tracking Soviet bombers and supervising the firing of missiles from launch sites on Victory Boulevard in the Sepulveda Basin, atop Oat Mountain overlooking Chatsworth, and in the San Gabriel Mountains.

“I don’t think many people realized we had six to nine thermonuclear weapons sitting right in the middle of a major population center,” said Al Brown, who was stationed at the Nike site from 1964 to 1966. “We can laugh about it now, but it wasn’t funny worth a damn back then.

“If you didn’t believe the Russian air threat was for real, by the time we finished beating you over the head with the drills you were conditioned to believe it,” said Brown, now a regional vice president with Union Bank in Burbank. “We were running those nuclear-tipped suckers up and down on their launchers and going around with keys on our necks. It was the real thing.”

During the mid-1950s, the Army set up 16 such missile sites protecting the Los Angeles area, deemed to be a prime target as a major population and military-aerospace center, as part of a network of more than 300 batteries nationwide.

The men chosen for the Nike units were scrutinized through personality tests and watched for any sign of irresponsibility, such as late bill paying or excessive drinking.

But the shifts at the control sites were dreaded. Stuck in a lonely outpost on a gravel road, the lights of the city tantalizingly close, there were constant drills to keep the soldiers ready to respond to an air attack within three minutes.

“I think the young soldiers at control had to deal with a very stressful situation,” said John Holley, who commanded the Encino-based unit in 1965 and 1966. “The hours were long and the responsibility was tremendous, but I think the soldiers really felt they were doing something for their country.”

By the late 1960s, however, intercontinental missiles had replaced bombers as the threat and the government began shutting down the Nike system.

The San Vicente Mountain site was closed in 1968. In 1973, the Army turned it over to the city of Los Angeles, which planned to build a park here.

Although a few Nike sites have been preserved, including one in San Francisco, most have been bulldozed, fenced and abandoned, or converted to other uses. The Los Angeles Police Department, for instance, planted an antenna on San Vicente Mountain to relay radio signals.

After two decades during which its remains were splashed with graffiti and littered with tons of bottles broken by adventurous beer drinkers, the former Nike center will finally receive a $1-million face lift from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy with funds set aside by the city’s Recreation and Parks Department.

By fall, picnic tables will be mounted next to the cement foundations where the radar, barracks and mess hall once stood, near the dirt section of Mulholland Drive, and restrooms and landscaping will be added.

The observation tower will be fixed with signs pointing out landmarks and relating the history of the Nike site. There will be maps of the trails in the area and a written explanation, for future generations, of the arms race between the two superpowers.

“Most people 25 to 30 years old, if you ask them if they know what the Nike site is, will say something about the tennis shoe,” said John Diaz, the conservancy’s project coordinator. “They have no idea why this was here.”

As the memory of the Cold War fades, there are few places to visit--no bombed-out buildings, no detention camps, no battlefields--to remind Americans of the half-century Doomsday face-off. This place is one.

Call it a memorial to the tens of millions who did not die in a nuclear confrontation, or maybe just a nice place to have a picnic.