Whipped Cream Difficulties

I thought it might be interesting to talk about Nike.

Not the goddess of victory, or the shoe company: the missile system. I’ve always thought that was a cool looking system.

First up, “The United States Army Air Defense Command”. This one is only about 10 minutes.

Bonus video #1, and also short: a vintage AT&T Tech Channel video about the Nike Zeus ABM system.

Nike Zeus was an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system developed by the US Army during the late 1950s and early 1960s that was designed to destroy incoming Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile warheads before they could hit their targets. It was designed by Bell Labs’ Nike team, and was initially based on the earlier Nike Hercules anti-aircraft missile. The original, Zeus A, was designed to intercept warheads in the upper atmosphere, mounting a 25 kiloton W31 nuclear warhead. During development, the concept changed to protect a much larger area and intercept the warheads at higher altitudes. This required the missile to be greatly enlarged into the totally new design, Zeus B, given the tri-service identifier XLIM-49, mounting a 400 kiloton W50 warhead. In several successful tests, the B model proved itself able to intercept warheads, and even satellites.

Bonus video #2, which is a bit longer: “The Nike Hercules Missie System” from the US Army.

List of Nike missile sites from Wikipedia.

San Vicente Park in California. Part of the park was an old Nike-Ajax missile site, which has been preserved and is accessible to the public. I’d like to visit there one of these days.

There were two Nike-Hercules sites in Austin: according to the Wikipedia list, one is in Elroy (which is kind of near the airport and the Formula 1 track, and is the home of Wild Bubba’s Wild Game Grill), and the other “is now the location of the University of Texas System Police Academy”.

(I had no idea UTPD had their own academy. I figured they shared space with the Austin PD’s academy. You learn something new every day.)

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2020 at 2:00 pm and is filed under History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.