Inside a Baltimore County site where nukes defended the US during the Cold War

Amid rising fears in the 1950s of a Soviet attack on home soil, the U.S. military built rings of defensive missile bases around several American cities, including Baltimore. Many were armed with nuclear missiles capable of destroying a wave of incoming enemy bombers in a single strike.

Arms reduction talks and technological advances rendered the Project Nike program obsolete, and the sites were decommissioned by the 1970s and largely forgotten. Some became schools, parks or private residences. Others fell into decay.

But in western Baltimore County, the program’s legacy lives on. Just north of Granite, dedicated volunteers spent years restoring a former installation called BA-79.

The site, located at the headquarters of the Civil Air Patrol’s Maryland Wing, is open to the public and offers free tours once a month. The first ones of the year are Sunday afternoon.

The rehabilitated Cold War relic appears unassuming at first. It hides in plain sight at the edge of Patapsco Valley State Park, off a winding, single-lane road lined with farms. The former missile launch area is now mostly a vast expanse of cracked, faded asphalt.

But the hub of the site lies underground. There, visitors can explore cavernous magazines that stored the missiles, metal elevators that raised them aboveground and blast-proof command rooms from which soldiers could launch them.

Volunteers have also turned the old warhead assembly building into a museum and recovered an original Nike radar and missile booster.

Many of the restoration’s volunteers lived through the Cold War. They said BA-79 offers a reminder of how the fear, paranoia and tension between the world’s superpowers reached local communities.

“The fact that there were nuclear warheads in your backyard — that’s a fascinating thing that people need to learn about," said Dave Zuchero, a Howard County retiree who has volunteered at the site for the last six years.

The last line of defense

The 29-acre BA-79 base opened in 1956, joining a network of nearly two dozen Nike sites that protected the skies over Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

Other missile bases in Baltimore County were built in Fork, Phoenix and along Greenspring Avenue in Cronhardt. Anne Arundel, Harford, Kent, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties also had sites.

Their job: to serve as a last line of defense against Soviet bombers that eluded American interceptor jets and were flying toward local shipyards, steel mills, military targets and cities.

BA-79 was a double site, meaning it had six underground magazines compared to the usual three. It was armed with two types of the dart-shaped Nike missiles: Ajax, an early surface-to-air weapon with a conventional warhead, and Hercules, a nuclear-tipped missile with a range of about 100 miles.

Why would the U.S. military launch a nuclear weapon over its own territory? It was better than the alternative, said Civil Air Patrol Chief Master Sgt. Tom Reed.

“This was the last chance,” Reed said. “If the bombers made it through, I’d rather have an airburst than Baltimore or D.C. getting hit.”

Project Nike’s cost, including land acquisition, building nearly 300 sites around the country and producing thousands of missiles, likely ran into the billions. But since Soviet bombers never tried to reach the U.S. mainland, the sites were never used.

The only launches were accidental. In 1955, an Ajax missile took off unexpectedly from Fort Meade and disintegrated over the recently constructed Baltimore-Washington Parkway. No civilians were injured.

The Nike program, named for the Greek goddess of victory, grew outdated soon after it began. By the late 1950s, the Soviets developed intercontinental ballistic missiles, which traveled too high and too fast for the system to track and intercept. Bombers became a secondary threat.

The final blow to the Nike program came in the early 1970s, when the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the SALT I treaty and agreed to limit defensive missile systems like Nike. All the remaining bases, including BA-79, shut down by 1974.

The Granite site served as a National Guard base until the early 1990s, then was mostly abandoned, used only by the Maryland State Police for K-9 training. Some of the remaining Nike structures became gathering spots for local youth to post graffiti or drink alcohol.

The Civil Air Patrol began leasing the property from the state in 2014, occupying two administrative buildings while blocking access to the rest.

As the site’s history faded from view, the subterranean missile magazines filled with rainwater and were locked for safety, while dense shrubs and trees grew over the launch area.

Around 2018, Reed, a longtime Civil Air Patrol member, grew interested in exploring what lay beyond the “No Trespassing” signs.

“Our safety officers are like, ‘Don’t go down there. It’s dangerous,’” Reed said. “And that means you got to go down there.”

Open to the public

Reed knew nothing about Project Nike when he began venturing to the forbidden side of the Civil Air Patrol base. But after clearing part of the area and doing some research, he became obsessed with learning more.

“When we started, it was just to see what was down there,” Reed said. “And then we got more and more interested.”

Reed began leading groups of Civil Air Patrol members to clean up the site, whacking weeds, pulling up shrubs, scraping dirt and rust, and pumping out millions of gallons of water from the underground magazines. They then painted the buildings, magazines and elevators to match their 1960s appearance.

Soon, Boy Scouts and military members joined the restoration efforts. So did local residents like Robin Haines, who said he’d driven by the Civil Air Patrol headquarters many times without knowing it once housed nuclear weapons.

“This is an undiscovered little gem for a lot of people, once they find it,” Haines said. “If you have any interest in military history, the Cold War, here it is.”

After six years of restoration, the site opened to the public in 2024. It hosts free open houses and public tours on the fourth Sunday of every month between April and September.

Among the stops is the warhead assembly building, where soldiers mounted the Hercules nuclear warheads to the missiles.

Inside are poster displays detailing the history of BA-79, along with a half-scale Hercules replica, which volunteers constructed from 3D-printed materials, large blocks of foam, and recycled mailing tubes. They hope to acquire an original Nike missile.

Another highlight is an underground missile magazine where some original stenciled signage and the elevator controls remain in place. Through a thick blast door is the control room, which has retained some original wiring.

Only a few other Nike installations — in Alaska, Florida, New Jersey and San Francisco — have survived. Homes now dot the Greenspring Avenue site, and the county public works department uses the Phoenix site.

BA-79 relies almost entirely on volunteers and donations to touch up, preserve and rehabilitate the site.

“We want people to learn more about it because it’s almost forgotten,” Zuchero said. “It was a crazy, important time in Cold War history.”