your white sands, concurrent with that, they started development of what we know now is the nike system. ajax is the one of a green launcher in the foreground here. basically what nike was was one booster, one rocket to take down one aircraft. the brief was at the time that the soviets would send squadrons of aircraft over the north folder canada into the united states and they would be engaged with one missile per aircraft. that was a big program out here. the nike ajax was the first american missile to actually shoot down an aircraft, in 1951 out here, they shut down a drone b-17 bomber from world war ii. army --his time, the the german rocket team at left by 1950 and the army had the first guided missile battalion here white sands. these guys were not your typical army draftees at the time, these were very educated, they have degrees in physics, engineering, metallurgy, that kind of thing. they were glad to be here because the alternative was to be in korea running the korean war. they did not mind being out here. what a lot of these men did was they were stationed here, but they would go

the nike ajax was an important system. had 24y of chicago batteries around the city of chicago. the threat changed. ajax was seen increasingly as not being as robust a system as they needed. it had a short range. a battery on the southside of chicago, engages a target from will goh, the debris down in the city of chicago. it was considered inefficient. you had to have one missile per aircraft. they started looking at a different system and developed the nike zeus. that's in the background in the green launcher. it could potentially carry a nuclear warhead. the thinking of that one was, you could deploy less nike zeus batteries in that one location. with the nuclear warhead, the thinking was not to blow up everything, but to render the electronics, any mechanisms in those bombs -- if you don't blow them up, render them unusable. eus was deployed for a long time. up until the late 1980's or early 1990's in some countries. testing here, people think it is mostly military testing but it has involved a lot of civilian use as well. the rockets that are fired out here even today are so