Cold Warhead By Tom McNichol Special to The Washington Post Sunday, November 30, 1997; Page E01

"The thing everyone wants to know around here is `How come they named the Nike missile after a sneaker?' " reports Bud Halsey, the unofficial curator of the only restored Nike missile launch site in the country, located in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, in a former military installation known as Fort Barry.

It's a measure of how far we've come from the Cold War that the name Nike more readily calls to mind Michael Jordan soaring majestically above the rim rather than bombers soaring majestically above the charred remains of nuked cities. Never mind beating swords into plowshares -- we've somehow managed to beat missiles into sneakers.

Halsey, a retired Army colonel and historian, even contacted the Nike shoe company a few years ago to see if they would make a donation to the missile site restoration effort as a kind of zany cross-promotion. Nike Inc. never replied, sensing that nuclear missiles -- even deactivated ones -- probably weren't a good tie-in for a company whose slogan is "Just Do It." Lately, Halsey is glad Nike didn't respond. The Nike missile Web site (http://www.nikemissile.org) is regularly showered with messages from irate people ranting about shameful overseas labor practices.

"We get some really vitriolic messages," says Halsey, shaking his head. "I have to break it to them that we're not a shoe company."

Nikes -- the missiles, as well as the shoes -- were named after the Greek goddess of victory. Long before Jordan learned to go airborne, Nike missiles were guided surface-to-air weapons, America's last line of defense against attacking enemy (read: Soviet) bombers. The Fort Barry missile site, active from 1954 until 1974, was part of a Cold War air defense system of more than 300 Nike sites nationwide, deployed in defensive "rings" around major urban and industrial areas. (Washington, D.C., was protected by Nike sites in Rockville, Lorton, Waldorf, Fairfax and Davidsonville. The nation's first Nike site, activated in 1952, was in Fort Meade, Md.)

But the once-secret Fort Barry battery, designated by the Army as Site SF-88L, is the only Nike launch site that's been restored for public viewing. It's also the only site in the National Park system that interprets Cold War weaponry, although the Park Service recently purchased a Minuteman missile site in North Dakota.

Touring Site SF-88L is like stepping into a old sepia-toned photograph. A hand-lettered sign welcoming visitors to "Bravo Battery" now stands at the front gate, where once a 24-hour armed sentry stared intruders down. Just inside the gate is the Launch Trailer, an inconspicuous Army truck that was the brains of the missile site, housing the communications equipment that actually launched the missiles. Nearby, the missiles themselves are still keeping watch, if only for tourists. Thanks to a recently completed launcher restoration, one of the missiles can be raised into the near-vertical firing position, for the first time in 23 years. (The missile's engines and warheads have been removed, preventing an accidental Park Service strike on Fisherman's Wharf.) The five-ton Nike Hercules had a range of about 90 miles, flew at more than 3,200 mph and could be armed with either conventional explosives or nuclear warheads.

"It's one of those missiles that looks like what you think a missile should look like," says Halsey. "It's got a lot of bang to it."

Nike missile sites routinely consisted of two separate parcels of land -- the launcher area and a "battery control" area that contained the radar used to track hostile aircraft and guide the missiles to their targets. The battery control area hasn't been restored, but if you're ambitious, you can still visit what's left of it. The only access is by foot, an hour-and-a-half hike from the launcher site, up a 960-foot hill atop Wolf Ridge.

The effort pays off with spectacular views of the Golden Gate and downtown San Francisco and an eerie glimpse at an abandoned military installation returning to the elements. A weathered stone marker, featuring a crude drawing of a Nike missile soaring over the Golden Gate Bridge, still stands near the front gate, a kind of Cold War petroglyph. The rest of the site looks like a ghost town, with several empty military buildings surrounded by patches of broken concrete with grass growing in the cracks. The buildings have been stripped of all windows, doors and fixtures, except for a single metal towel hook that still hangs on the wall of what was once a shower area. Looking at the rusted hook, you can almost relive the experience of being posted there -- the scratchy military-issue towel, the frigid shower, the barking sergeant. Even Andrew Young might have found these Nike working conditions objectionable.

"Being posted at a Nike site was hell sometimes," recalls Al Kellogg, 50, who was stationed at a Nike site in nearby San Rafael, Calif. "We'd have to watch the radar screens for 24 hours straight, and then we'd get 24 hours off. To this day, I can't play video games."

The most surreal part of the launcher site is an underground area known as "the pit." Here, the Nikes were stored below ground to protect them from the elements, a serious consideration in the Marin Headlands, an area lashed by strong winds and corrosive fog. During afternoon tours, visitors can stand alongside a restored Nike Hercules and ride a hydraulic elevator that lowers them and the warhead into the missile men's underground lair. The noisy elevator clanks to the bottom of the shaft, and a set of bay doors snap shut above you. Suddenly, you're trapped in a dank, dimly lit underground pit with a gigantic missile stenciled "U.S. ARMY." If a crazed Army officer suddenly grabbed you by the sleeve and started babbling about his "precious bodily fluids," you wouldn't be a bit surprised. Down in the pit, soldiers known as "launcher rats" would sit behind a console, raise the missile to the surface, and have it ready to fire within 15 minutes. But in 20 years on the watch, no Nike missile was ever fired from Site SF-88L. In fact, no missiles were ever launched from any of the Nike sites across the country, another in a long line of high-priced American weapons that deterred by sitting on their butts and looking mean. As the overheated slogan coined by Nike's manufacturers, Western Electric, put it, "Whatever tomorrow brings . . . NIKE will be watching, always ready."

Western Electric probably didn't count on tomorrow bringing detente with the Russians, however. With the signing of the SALT treaty in 1972, most of the country's Nike sites, including Site SF-88L, were shut down. By then, the missile had become obsolete anyway. With their short range, Nikes couldn't defend against high-flying intercontinental ballistic missiles, which by then formed the backbone of the Soviet nuclear force. The Nikes passed into military history, although several countries still have them in their arsenals, including South Korea, which has the distinction of being the only nation on Earth to both deploy Nike missiles and manufacture Nike sneakers. Site SF-88L was turned over to the National Park Service in 1974, and the 30-acre tract was incorporated into the Golden Gate National Recreational Area.

The site quietly rusted until the mid-1980s, when Halsey and a group of volunteers became involved. The volunteers, many of whom served at various Nike sites in the area, began the long task of restoring the site to its original condition, scraping away years of neglect. The site receives no federal funding, so everything is being paid by donors and volunteers.

The Nike site has been an unexpected hit, attracting about 18,000 visitors last year, despite little publicity and a somewhat isolated location. It is particularly popular with history buffs and veterans. Every summer, Nike vets from all over the country descend on the site for a picnic, where they chomp on barbecued food and trade war stories about a war in which no shots were fired.

Not every visitor to the missile site is comfortable with what he sees, however. Cold War history is too recent not to stir passions. The Golden Gate area is dotted with abandoned batteries and gun emplacements that stretch back more than a century, but the Nike base is more morally ambiguous, part of a nuclear arms race that some argue should never have been waged.

"Whether you like it or not, the Cold War is part of our history," says Halsey. "You may not like slavery, but we still have Civil War battlefields. We try to tell the Nike story as objectively and dispassionately as we can."

If you want to get a sense of what it was really like for Nike crewmen to keep their lonely vigil, try spending a night at Bicentennial Camp, just over the ridge from Site SF-88L. I was hoping something called Bicentennial Camp might feature fire hydrants painted to look like Revolutionary War soldiers, or be patrolled by park rangers wearing cuffed bell-bottoms and really wide ties, or maybe have a 40-channel CB radio continuously squawking "Convoy" by C.W. McCall. But no dice. Clearly, this camp has a long way to go before it deserves the name Bicentennial. Once you get over that disappointment, spending the night at the edge of a fog-shrouded missile site is an experience that leaves lasting impressions. The fog whipping through the Golden Gate is often so dense, it practically takes on the properties of a solid. Nike vets used to call the area "Pneumonia Gulch." Sentries who patrolled the missile grounds with German shepherds often couldn't see the dog on the end of the leash. Boxed in by swirling gray walls, it's easy to feel completely cut off from the rest of the world, as the Nike soldiers no doubt felt staring blearily at their radar screens, waiting for an enemy that never came.

Missile men saw themselves as sentries at the front door of Fortress America, a heroic duty worthy of the mythological names the Army bestowed on the missiles themselves -- Ajax, Hercules, Nike. With the end of the Cold War, the Greek chorus of missiles has been silenced, leaving behind only a faint echo of their watching, always-ready vigil. Ajax is a kitchen cleanser, Hercules is a Disney movie, and Nike is and always was a sneaker -- a safer world by anyone's standards.

The Nike missile site is at Fort Barry in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, in Marin County about three miles northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge. The site is open to the public Monday through Friday from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m.; it's closed on weekends, except for the first Sunday of each month, when it's open from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. The first Sunday of the month is the best time to visit -- guides are available, and most functioning equipment is powered up and demonstrated. Group and school tours are also available. For more information, call 415-331-1453, or visit the Web site at http://www.nikemissile.org.

Nearby Bicentennial Campground is available year-round at no charge, but reservations are required. For information and reservations, call the Marin Headlands Visitors Center at 415-331-1540. At the same number, you can request a map of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which shows the Nike site and the trail to Wolf Ridge.

Tom McNichol last wrote about San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood for Travel.