There's a scene in Bridesmaids in which the character of Megan, played by Melissa McCarthy, claims not only to work for the U.S. government but to have Top Secret security clearance. This means, she adds, that she knows where all the country's nuclear missiles are hidden. "You would be amazed," she whispers conspiratorially. "A lot of shopping malls."
There's more truth to this joke than you might expect. During the Cold War, many missile defense sites—precisely because their purpose was to guard infrastructure of vital national interest—were housed in urban or suburban locations. Los Angeles in particular, thanks to its aerospace facilities, military bases, and booming postwar population, became one of the most fortified regions in the United States. "Unknown to millions of Southern Californians who lived among them," a story in the Los Angeles Times reported back in 2000, "hundreds of surface-to-air missiles fitted with nuclear warheads were poised at nine of the bases to be launched against enemy bomber formations that never appeared."
At the intersection of Woodley Avenue and Victory Boulevard in Van Nuys, Nike missiles—named, like the athletic shoe, after the Greek goddess of victory—were housed in silos until 1974. The site, known as LA-96L and still used by the Air National Guard, is now a giant concrete pad fenced from public access. It sits across the street from a well-groomed golf course behind a lush Japanese garden that is part of the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant. Beyond lies the domestic sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, just as it did when the site had an underground arsenal ready to fire on a moment's notice.
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Tracking down abandoned military landscapes of the twentieth century has become something of a niche pursuit. While the insights and discoveries of a loose group of freelance geographers, photographers, and urban explorers are most easily found online, there are also fantastic books on the subject. For the journalist Tom Vanderbilt, author of Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America, the Cold War "was—and is—everywhere in America, if one knows where to look for it. Underground, behind closed doors, classified, off the map, already crumbling beyond recognition, or right in plain view, it has left an imprint as widespread yet discreet as the tracings of radioactive particles that below out of the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s."
In Los Angeles today, next to shopping malls, industrial parks, tennis courts, and gardens—just as in Chicago, Long Island, and other American locales—these ruins remain an otherworldly reminder of how close our nation came to doomsday.