During the Cold War in the late ’50s, LA-96 was one of 16 NIKE missile sites that protected Los Angeles from a feared attack by Soviet bombers. Army specialists monitored the skies from this high point between Los Angeles and the Valley, looking for Soviet air strikes. The technology at the site could both detect enemy aircraft and assist anti-aircraft missiles launched from a nearby facility. It was an active battery from 1956-1968.
Years of disuse later, the missile site is now part of a public park. People can stomp up the steel structures and enjoy the sweeping views in all directions. Not much has changed, or what’s been added is deliberately made to match the existing structures, so it still sort of feels like somewhere you’re not allowed to be.
The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had a great impact on American domestic life. The 1950s and 1960s saw an epidemic of popular films that horrified moviegoers with depictions of nuclear devastation and mutant creatures. Cuba’s alliance with the Soviets had a profound impact on the American psyche, which peaked in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles on Cuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In these and other ways, the Cold War was a constant presence in Americans’ everyday lives.
Paranoia about an internal Communist threat—the second Red Scare—reached a fever pitch between 1950 and 1954, when Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, a right-wing Republican, launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of the State Department, the White House, the Treasury, and even the US Army. During Eisenhower’s first two years in office, McCarthy’s shrieking denunciations and fear-mongering created a climate of fear and suspicion across the country. No one dared tangle with McCarthy for fear of being labeled disloyal.
The Red Scare led to a range of actions that had a profound and enduring effect on U.S. government and society. Federal employees were analyzed to determine whether they were sufficiently loyal to the government, and the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated allegations of subversive elements in the government and the Hollywood film industry.
McCarthy became the person most closely associated with the anticommunist crusade–and with its excesses. He used hearsay and intimidation to establish himself as a powerful and feared figure in American politics. He leveled charges of disloyalty at celebrities, intellectuals and anyone who disagreed with his political views, costing many of his victims their reputations and jobs. McCarthy’s reign of terror continued until his colleagues formally denounced his tactics in 1954 during the Army-McCarthy hearings, when army lawyer Joseph Welch famously asked McCarthy, “Have you no decency?”