With all the ongoing controversy about whether a machine gun range should be built on the Upper Cape, it seems fitting to go back in time and revisit some history that in retrospect seems all but impossible, but true:
Cape Cod once was home to an arsenal of nuclear weapons, 56 bombs located about 600 feet from a residential subdivision, in what was then called Otis, now Joint Base Cape Cod.
On Dec. 7, 1957, Cold War raging, a headline appeared in The Falmouth Enterprise:
Air Force will build a $10.7 million missile launching site at Otis
The name of the missile was BOMARC, an acronym for Boeing Michigan Aeronautical Research Center.
BOMARC was a brainstorm designed to blow up approaching Russian bombers.
Each rocket was 47 feet long, tipped with nuclear warheads to be launched as attacking bombers reached the skies above Massachusetts. These were short range. They would detonate in our own airspace, a friendly, defensive nuclear explosion you might say, meant to eliminate the Russian version.
“Small hydrogen bombs are intended primarily as substitutes for the existing small tactical nuclear bombs,” The Enterprise explained, adding a dubious scientific note: “The H-bombs would presumably produce less radioactivity.”
The newspaper described a meeting planned for December 13, 1957, between Air Force and local luminaries:
“First there will be cocktails, then dinner … Suitably relaxed by this hospitality, the guests will then address themselves to the missile.”
The BOMARC was described as “a one-shot deal.” The reporter explained:
“When the BOMARC is fired, it will be the real thing and, as one of the panel put it, it will then not matter in quite the same way if a missile misfired and drops its atomic load on Cape Cod.”
56 missiles arrived in 1960. The area became a secured compound bustling with activity.
As the Cape was going nuclear that June, another BOMARC site, McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, wound up on the front page of The New York Times. A missile caught fire on its launching pad. Radioactivity spewed, forcing officials to seal the area in thick concrete.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union shifted from manned bombers to intercontinental missiles – which BOMARCs certainly couldn’t stop. And Defense Department engineers were admitting that “serious technical difficulties” made BOMARC unreliable.
Yet it took until 1973 before the site, superfluous for national security, was dismantled.
That our military thought it was a good idea to plant 56 nuclear weapons on Cape Cod, designed to explode in our own airspace, must rank as the dumbest, most dangerous decision ever carried out on this peninsula.
Far as we can tell though, no radioactivity ever leaked here; people were aware of those dangers.
But they took less care with fuels, acids, solvents needed to keep missiles 24-7 ready to fly. These were dumped into pits and leaching fields, seeping into the ground toward public and private drinking wells.
That legacy, not fallout from atomic weapons, is in part why Cape Cod’s base became New England’s largest military Superfund site.
