Between the steelmakers, refineries, meatpackers and transportation industries and the heavy population, the Chicago area was considered a primary target during the Cold War.
About 30 Nike missile bases ringed the Chicago area. “They were ground to air, so they would strike the plane or whatever was flying over,” Duneland Historical Society President Cliff Goins said. “That was all hush-hush. We weren’t supposed to know anything about that.”
“You can’t research or teach about the 20th century without talking about war,” said Purdue Northwest professor emerita Kathleen Tobin, who once spent a semester teaching a course about the Cold War in the region.
She and Goins offered a short course on the subject Saturday at Indiana Landmarks’ Northwest field office at Valparaiso University’s Linwood House.
“We don’t realize the importance, the significance of our production and also the vulnerability of our area as a target,” Tobin said.
Simply put, the Cold War was a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union over competing ideologies. “The conflict is really over economic theory. Should we have a free market or a controlled economy,” she said.
“We were competing agriculturally with the rest of the world,” she said, to be the capitalist breadbasket for the rest of the world. Chemicals produced here supported agriculture as well as transportation.
The importance of transportation shouldn’t be taken for granted. “We were a transportation hub for sure,” with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway adding large ships to the networks of railroads and airports.
Tobin showed a map of Griffith to illustrate her point about the number of railroads that crisscrossed Northwest Indiana en route to Chicago, the nation’s rail hub. “Those were trains we were waiting for. Those were not bike trails,” she said.
“These were very instrumental in heavy industry, bringing coal, bringing iron ore through the Great Lakes and getting finished products out,” she said.
Tobin showed a map of the predicted impact of a hydrogen bomb hitting Chicago’s Loop.
Several members of the audience remembered the “duck and cover” drills during the Cold War, diving under their desks at school.
“They didn’t know that much about radiation causing cancer, anything like that,” she said.
Tobin recalls hearing sonic booms near the Munster missile site just north of the Dyer border.
Goins recalls showing up for his first day on the job as a ranger at what was then known as Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in 1987. As an Air Force brat, he immediately recognized the Mineral Springs Road headquarters as a former military base and asked his coworkers what type, but it took him five or six years to find out it had been a Nike missile base’s control site. The launch site, about a half mile away, is on private property.
“The Nike bases were formed as a form of ground air defense,” ready to shoot down aerial attackers.
The first-generation missiles were called Ajax, replaced by Hercules, then Zeus. “We did not have Zeus missiles in any of our sites here,” Goins said.
Each base has two sites – a control area and a launch site, separated by about a half mile.
The first bases in the Chicago area opened in 1955, with the last closing in 1974.
“C-32 is the one near and dear to me because I spent 35 years at Indiana Dunes National Park,” he said.
The base was equipped with two Ajax, and later two Hercules, missiles.
The base had a helipad, tennis court, recreation area, barracks, mess hall, signal towers and more. The former mess hall now houses the national park’s historical collection.
“What I wouldn’t give to have pictures of some of these places,” Goins said.
The towers at the park headquarters are now all gone. He pointed to one of the towers, where the park’s firefighters used to hang fire hoses to dry.
Goins, who retired in 2019, said the current chief of resource management is working to turn the former base into more of a tourist area, building on Goins’ work.
“History is being made every single day,” Goins said.
For the town of Porter’s centennial, a Hercules missile was carried on a float in the parade.
Goins did a similar program on Nike missile bases shortly after 9/11, he said, and was repeatedly interrupted as he spoke. The gentleman turned out to be a base commander of C-32, so Goins invited him up to share his story.
Another man Goins met gave his uniform to the National Park Service. “I was just a flunkie maintenance guy,” he said.
The man spent half a day talking about his work there. Rocks that lined the sidewalks had to be painted white, and he did other routine maintenance work. That didn’t include going near the missiles.
The soldiers who worked at the sites didn’t just wait for a chance to fire missiles that never came. “They did all the things young GIs do,” eating in the mess hall, sleeping in the barracks, playing ping pong or tennis in their spare time. But that wasn’t all.
Every hour, they would raise a missile from its resting position, lower it back down, then rotate to the next missile. The tracks underground had to be checked, with other components – “basically, keeping everything shipshape, fire ready,” Goins said.
If the soldiers needed medical attention or a commissary, the closest was Fort Sheridan, about 100 miles away from the most distant Nike missile bases in Northwest Indiana.
The Gary airport, site C-45, open from 1957 to 1960, was equipped with eight Ajax launchers.
Site C-46, in Munster, had 12 Ajax, converted to eight Hercules, launchers. It was just north of the Dyer line off Calumet Avenue. A subdivision now stands on the site.
Site C-47, open from 1957 to 1974, still has some intact infrastructure at the control site, which became a paintball park. The launch site was once used by Portage Township Schools as a driver’s education training site. “This is one of the smaller ones,” Goins said.
Site C-48, open from 1957 to 1960, was near the corner of 35th Avenue and Grant Street. The control site was redeveloped as a car dealership but later abandoned.
Goins’ wife, Angel Goochee-Goins, was a microbiologist when she arrived in Northwest Indiana and did routine samples for radiation at the site. That’s how she deduced the underground infrastructure had been removed. “When I moved here, it was a vegetable market,” she said.
Goins recalls his stint traveling the country, training new National Park Service employees. One of the tasks was for the students to work in groups, coming up with a feature that might merit greater attention by the park service. One group in South Dakota discussed Minuteman missiles, ultimately leading to the creation of Minuteman Missile National Historical Park in Philip, South Dakota, in 1999.
“I can do this at Indiana Dunes,” Goins decided. Site C-32, the national park’s headquarters, is Indiana’s newest entry on the National Register of Historic Places, he said, having been included on Sept. 11, 2025.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
