Historic Nike Missile Unveiled in The Everglades

The Cuban missile crisis celebrated its 50th anniversary on November 20, 2012. For two days preceding the anniversary a reunion was held of veterans of the four Nike Hercules missile bases constructed in south Florida to counter the Russian nukes in Cuba. The main event was a tour of Section C, a base built on an agricultural holdout in Everglades National Park known as the Hole in the Donut. The hole was finally absorbed into the park, and through the efforts of one veteran, Charles Carter, the base was preserved as a historic site and listed in the National Register of Historic Places, with park rangers assigned to interpret it. AHC staff Bob Carr and Tim Harrington became acquainted with Carter while working on The Everglades, a cultural history of the park recently published by Arcadia. Carter offered the use of his archive of photographs for the last chapter in the book which concludes with the Cold War era. He also invited the authors to attend the reunion as his guests, from which experience this report derives.

Three barns surrounded by security berms in the hole in the donut. Each barn housed five missiles

A highlight of the tour of the Everglades base was the unveiling of a real Nike Hercules missile salvaged by Carter who, after scouring the country, found one rusting in an Alabama cow pasture. With ongoing serendipity it was restored for the occasion by students at the Baker School of Aviation in Miami whose prayers for a summer project it answered. The Nike missiles had long since been decommissioned and deconstructed, but in their day they were at the apex of U.S. Army military technology. Four booster rockets gave the Nike its long range; it could carry either standard high explosives or a nuclear warhead with a blast radius of 2 ½ miles; complex instrumentation enabled it to intercept and destroy incoming missiles air-to-air.

Door to the launch control room beneath a berm

Nearly 200 veterans attended the reunion, which kicked of with a breakfast Saturday morning. The keynote speaker, Col. Francis R. Stevens, Jr., ended his somewhat sardonically entertaining attempt to reconstruct history with a request for anyone in the audience to correct him or add to his information: nobone had the whole story, and after fifty years everything was declassified. After a long silence, one man after another told his story—all but one. He announced that he would not tell what he thought should remain a secret.
One veteran informed the audience that, had Cuban or Russian sabateurs infiltrated a base, his unit had orders to destroy that base with a missile attack. Another explained that, were a missile to be fired, its booster rockets could not be allowed to fall on a Miami suburb, therefore they were designed to fall on another base. Another explained: to fire a missile it had to be rolled out of the barn and set up on a launch pad; when the rockets were fired, the fireball would annihilate the base. But by then, the men manning the base would be in a control room or bunker underground. The control room was built into a berm around the perimeter of each barn. The berm was patrolled at first by dogs trained to attack anyone other than their particular trainers, and that included the rest of the team. Mosquitos relentlessly attacked the dogs’ noses, ears, paws and bellies until they had to be removed. An MP who took over patrolling the perimeter after the dogs left said it took a fast march to keep ahead of the pursuing three-foot diameter cloud of mosquitos and no-see-ums.

Barn displaying a restored Nike Hercules missile: veterans share memories with one another and with park rangers

Charles Carter, left, talks to Bob Carr about preservation of the base

Along with us on the second day, touring the Everglades base, was our cinamatographer colleage, Ed Carr, who was there to shoot video segments for a proposed documentary on the history of Miami seen in the light of Cuban Missile Crisis. With Ed filming, we interviewed Charles Carter and several other veterans.
In commemoration of the occasion, several books have been published including two available at the park. Taking advantage of the passage of time, as most veterans did in their reminisences, the books confirm what stories we were told suggest: that we avoided nuclear war only by a miracle, or by many little ones in which the cool heads on the front lines of both sides of the conflict averted catastrophe.
Once, on this base in the Everglades a nuke was ten seconds short of being fired at a target approaching from Cuba when it discoverd that the target was a private plane that had taken off from Mexico but ran into a storm and was blown off course to Cuba. With most of the plane’s instruments damaged by the storm, the pilot was attempting to reach Miami guided by voice radio. Seconds from from being vaporized he was overheard by Army radar operators, who aborted the launch.
In the end, it was a victory, too, for historic preservation when Everglades National Park embraced this most unlikely episode in its cultural history and unpeaceable part of its peaceable kingdom.