Nike Missile Site HM-69 in Everglades National Park
One of the beautiful things about the National Park Service is that it has an educational mission — most times it focuses on natural history, but sometimes also our nation’s cultural history.
We stumbled upon a wonderful surprise within the park — one of the best preserved relics of the Cold War in Florida, the HM-69 Nike Missile site.
A nice NPS volunteer gave us the historical run-down: the missile base was built by the US Army Corps of Engineers, completed in 1964 at the height of the Cold War, in response to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. At a time when national security against a Soviet attack was America’s main priority, the US Army chose this strategic site within Everglades National Park, just 160 miles from the Cuban coast, to build an anti-aircraft missile site.
The missile shown above was reconstructed in 2004 by a local vocational-technical school. The real 41-foot surface-to-air missiles were designed to intercept an entire fleet of bombers, taking them out with a single electromagnetic pulse (EMP) blast from the 40 kiloton warhead.
Finally, in a sign of how those times were so different than today, check out the picture below. This copy of the front and back panels from a Cheerios box was part of the display.
How great was it that a major American product brand proudly and openly supported the US military in its mission to protect us! We owe life as we know it, in part, to the skill, accuracy and restraint of the Cold Warriors manning the HM-69 Nike Missile site in Everglades National Park.