Cold War targeting of U.S. military sites and cities for nuclear destruction

Notice how foreign/Soviet/Communist/Chinese nuclear targeting focused on:

NYC/New England/Boston region

New Jersey/Naval Weapons Station-Earle, NJ (which housed nuclear weapons for US Naval craft)

Norfolk, Va., for obvious reasons

San Diego - not surprising, with the amount of the US Naval Fleet based there

And lastly, just a very, very few Midwest locations, ie, Minot ND, Omaha NE, etc.  Very interesting, considering the number of heavily fortified ICMB silos located within.

NIKE Missile Information Part 5

Here is the video from Bell System (currently AT&T) on the NIKE missile system:

NIKE Hercules Missile Intercept - U.S. Army Proving Ground

NIKE Hercules Missile Defense

This is a new research project I am undertaking, and will be posting frequent blogs and tweets regarding  my findings.  There are a tremendous amount of resources out there, especially since FOIA has opened up government records regarding the NIKE project.

The entire family of NIKE missiles deployed by the U.S. Army during the Cold War.

From Prof. Donald E. Bender's very informative website, here is a brief overview of the NIKE program:

Nike, named for the mythical Greek goddess of victory, was the name given to a program which ultimately produced the world's first successful, widely-deployed, guided surface-to-air missile system. Planning for Nike was begun during the last months of the Second World War when the U.S. Army realized that conventional anti-aircraft artillery would not be able to provide an adequate defense against the fast, high-flying and maneuverable jet aircraft which were being introduced into service, particularly by the Germans.

During 1945, Bell Telephone Laboratories produced the "AAGM (Anti Aircraft Guided Missile) Report" in which the concept of the Nike system were first outlined. The Report envisioned a two-stage, supersonic missile which could be guided to its target by means of ground-based radar and computer systems. This type of system is known as a "command" guidance system. The main advantage over conventional anti-aircraft artillery was that the Nike missile could be continuously guided to intercept an aircraft, in spite of any evasive actions taken by its pilot. By contrast, the projectiles fired by conventional anti-aircraft artillery (such as 90mm and 120mm guns) followed a predetermined, ballistic trajectory which could not be altered after firing.

The Nike Mission

During the first decade of the Cold War, the Soviet Union began to develop a series of long-range bomber aircraft, capable of reaching targets within the continental United States. The potential threat posed by such aircraft became much more serious when, in 1949, the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb.

The perception that the Soviet Union might be capable of constructing a sizable fleet of long-range, nuclear-armed bomber aircraft capable of reaching the continental United States provided motivation to rapidly develop and deploy the Nike system to defend major U.S. population centers and other vital targets. The outbreak of hostilities in Korea, provided a further impetus to this deployment.

The mission of Nike within the continental U.S was to act as a "last ditch" line of air defense for selected areas. The Nike system would have been utilized in the event that the Air Force's long-range fighter-interceptor aircraft had failed to destroy any attacking bombers at a greater distance from their intended targets.

Nike Deployment

Within the continental United States, Nike missile sites were constructed in defensive "rings" surrounding major urban and industrial areas. Additional Nike sites protected key Strategic Air Command bases and other sensitive installations, such as the nuclear facilities at Hanford, Washington. Sites were located on government-owned property where this was available (for example, on military bases). However, much real estate needed to be acquired in order to construct sufficient bases to provide an adequate defense. This was a sometimes difficult and contentious process. Often, the federal government had to go to court in order to obtain the property needed for such sites.

The exact number of Nike sites constructed within a particular "defense area" varied depending upon many factors. The New York Defense Area -- one of the largest in the nation -- was defended at one time by nearly twenty individual Nike installations. Due to the relatively short range of the original Nike missile, the Nike "Ajax", many bases were located relatively close to the center of the areas they protected. Frequently, they were located within heavily populated areas.

Nike Ajax missiles first became operational at Fort Meade, Maryland, during December, 1953. Dozens of Nike sites were subsequently constructed at locations all across the continental United States during the mid fifties and early sixties. Roughly 250 sites were constructed during this period. Nike missiles were also deployed overseas with U.S. forces in Europe and Asia, by the armed forces of many NATO nations (Germany, France, Denmark, Italy, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, Greece and Turkey), and by U.S. allies in Asia (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan).

**Bender, Donald E.  http://alpha.fdu.edu/~bender/N-view.html

Ella Baker: Freedom Bound

Born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1903, Ella Josephine Baker died 83 years to the day of her birth. Despite the fact that as a woman, she was expected by black ministers and community leaders to remain quietly in the shadows, Baker refused to sit idly by while the "men with clay feet" led the civil rights movement. No doubt, the significance of the day of her passing would not be lost on a firebrand such as Baker, who was never content to simply sit back in the shadows.
As a young child, Ella and her family moved from Norfolk to rural North Carolina where she spent a great deal of time with her grandmother, who related to her the tales of the horrible life on the plantation she grew up on. It was not so much the brutality or horrid treatment that moved Ella so. Rather, it was her grandmother's recounting of the severe beating received at the hands of her master when she refused to marry a man the master tried to force upon her. As such a young girl, Ella was confused and hurt at hearing the tale, but deep within her belly a fire began to burn.
Hearing her grandmother's story would play a formative role in Baker's life, and thrust her into what would eventually become not only a prominent role in the nascent civil rights movement, but would also earn her a place in history amongst the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and W.E.B. du Bois. For many years, the story of Ella Baker would falsely characterize her as a domineering, out-of-control woman. However, "Miss Baker," as those who respected her referred to her, would help to shape, mentor, and take as her protégés many of the very same men who would go on to be recognized as the leaders of the civil rights movement. For that role she is rightfully known as the "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement."
Baker believed in a type of familial collectivism; the community group exists, she said, without a social hierarchy, and yet everyone shares food, housing, child rearing and tools to help provide for all of their neighbors around them. She carried this into her first role with the NAACP in 1938, where she immediately challenged the presumptuousness of the all-male, black clergymen who were certainly not keen on females in leadership roles. When Baker graduated valedictorian from Shaw College in Raleigh, North Carolina, it was the normative standard that young black women were either housemaids; or else, with a college degree, school teachers. She opted instead to head to New York City, as was characteristic of her hard-charging spirit, and.
Consequently, Baker fashioned her mentorship style around encouraging a group-centered leadership, rather than grooming a single individual to lead. This characterized her radical, democratic vision, which rejected hierarchical constructs that would relegate women to subservient positions. Later on through the years, critics would decry her for this, claiming that it was her way of speaking pejoratively of Dr. King and his leadership style. As the quintessential organizer, she promulgated her collectivist beliefs at each and every organization she worked for or helped to found, arousing the ire of more than a few people.
Nonetheless, her audaciousness and tenacity led her to become, in 1943, the first female regional executive for the NAACP. Just a few short years later, Ella Jo Baker would go on in 1957 to help Dr. King found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, better known as SCLC. In 1960, she was the impetus behind the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commission (SNCC).
For Ella Baker, the truly catalyzing moment in her life began with the "year-long bus boycott in Montgomery, in which she saw the potential for the mass movement that had always been her dream." And again, Baker would incite conflict with the male ministerial set, who found it difficult to deal with a powerful woman such as she. Moreover, individuals such as Dr. King took affront to Ella Baker's mantra of "group-centered leadership rather than leader-centered group." Baker worried a great deal that a "cult of personality" was forming around Dr. Martin Luther King, which at times put the two of them at loggerheads. One such example was Baker's grassroots appeal to send people out door-to-door, and attempt to bring as many people into the fold as possible. Baker "urged the organization to recruit more low-income members by, for example, sending organizers into pool rooms and taverns; her experience had been that some would join up just out of sheer surprise."

It was her formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that was her signature achievement. SNCC was an offshoot organization for students who were organizing at the grassroots, local level, protesting with sit-in's at lunch counters and small, peaceful protests. Under Baker's tutelage, she infused her brand of molding and forming a democratic organization. Realizing that many of the energetic and eager college students she was organizing did not have much in the way of training or leadership experience, Baker took this opportunity to start with a tabula rasa, instilling her brand of collectivist ideology into this new organization.
Nevertheless, Ella Baker utilized her preferred style of participatory democracy, with everyone assuming group leadership, rather than a single leader in the top role. Baker also made it a point to keep SNCC firmly a student-run organization, out of the grasp of SCLC and the NAACP's dictums. Regardless of any of her past affiliations or employment with those two organizations, Baker was palpably displeased with them and was determined not to let the male clergymen subvert the new group from the broader and more ambitious goals she was guiding it towards.

JAMES ALFRED MOLNAR
Graduate School of Arts & Science
Wake Forest University

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America: True Democracy, or Beholden to Power Brokers?

American identity is a composite of both the history provided in the archival record, and the stories authored by writers that now make up the corpus of American literature over the past three centuries. However, those in power in America were primarily the ones whose stories concretized the national memory that we now acknowledge to be our unique idea - the one that gives us "Americanness." Those who have been in power in America for two and a half centuries have sought - and often succeeded - in crafting the legislature to suit their desires.

Power is obtained through two primary ways: the accumulation of wealth (be it through cash or landholding); or by force, which includes or implies the threat of death.

This paper will seek to develop the relationship by which wealthy - and most often landed - elites have leveraged this to empower themselves in ways that allow them to subjugate certain classes, to control the flow of information in various media, and explore how this has remained the status quo throughout much of United States' history. Moreover, we will explore contemporary America and how these "upper casters" as I will term them, continue doing so to this day. Lastly, we will analyze how this affects and shapes American identity both within - and how our national character is viewed from without.

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Jacksonian Politics in America

Though the emergence of distinct political parties in American politics predated the Jacksonian era by forty years or more, the election of a populist president like Andrew Jackson was arguably the catalyzing moment for the wealthy elites of America. Their response - the formation of the Whig party - was set to counteract Jackson's actions and help to preserve this minority's majority in the national political scene.

How could politics be considered fair in this period of American history when, for example, nearly one-fifth of the legislators came from the elite power centers such as Connecticut, while the state represented something on the order of one-twentieth of the nation's population? With his belief in the fair and equanimious redistribution of wealth in American society, Brinkley points out how Jackson ordered the redistribution of the federal surplus to all of the states in the nation. Jackson espoused a great deal of the same social and political mores of liberals in America today. These particular beliefs, coupled with Jackson's actions, would incite not only the creation of the Whig Party, but foment the development of a number of political institutions and mechanisms that exist even today, such as the party convention system. His presidency would have long-standing implications.

The foundation of the Whig party made the distinctions between they and the Democrats more and more obvious. In his writings de Toqueville claims that one of the few protections against the "tyranny of the majority" is the right of political association. We see such a right exercised in the massing of individuals in the form of political parties. "The right of political associations," wrote de Toqueville, "[enabled] the supporters of an opinion to unite in electoral colleges and appoint delegates to represent them in a central assembly... This is properly speaking the representative system applied to one party." With his power consolidated quite well, Jackson was free to deftly make executive decisions that advanced his agenda, while agitating the political and social elites of both the Northern power centers as well as the landed, elite Southern planters. Interestingly enough, Jackson and his Democrats appealed to individuals out West as they sought opportunities to better themselves through land acquisitions; less affluent Northerners, and even Southerner planters who wanted less government intrusion. This stands in stark contraposition to the Democratic party of today, whose power base is increasingly centered outside the Southern United States, which up until a few decades ago was overwhelmingly Democratic in affiliation.

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