PROTECTING AMERICA: COLD WAR DEFENSIVE SITES A NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARK THEME STUDY Prepared by: John S. Salmon, Historical Consultant Produced by: The National Historic Landmarks Program Cultural Resources National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Washington, D.C. October 2011 Contents Historic Contexts Foreword Introduction Part One: The Cold War to the Death of Stalin Part Two: From Deep Freeze to Détente Part Three: The End of the Wall Time Line: The Cold War Associated Property Types Types of Properties Associated with the Cold War Registration Requirements for National Historic Landmark Designation Methodology Study Results National Historic Landmarks National Historic Landmarks Study List Bibliography Appendices A. Registration Requirements for Listing in the National Register of Historic Places B. National Register Properties and Study List C. Cold War–Related National Park Service Units D. Preliminary National Inventory of Cold War–Related Sites and Resources 2 Historic Contexts Foreword On January 6, 2009, Congressman Rush Holt introduced H.R. 146, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, in the House of Representatives. The bill was entitled “An act to designate certain land as components of the National Wilderness Preservation System, to authorize certain programs and activities in the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, and for other purposes.” Cosponsors included Congressmen Earl Blumenauer, John Dingell, Eni Faleomavaega, Maurice Hinchey, James Langevin, James McGovern, Gary Miller, Patrick Murphy, Steven Rothman, and Peter Welch. The bill was referred to the House Natural Resources Committee, which reported it favorably to the House of Representatives on March 5. The House already had approved the bill on March 3, and the Senate approved it with changes on March 19. The House voted to approve the amended bill on March 25. President Barack Obama signed the bill into law (P.L. 111-11) on March 30, 2009. Section 7210 of the Act authorized a Cold War Sites Theme Study. The study was first proposed by Representative Joel Hefley (H.R. 107) and Senator Harry Reid (S. 1257) in 2001, but the legislation had not passed then. Section 7210 contained the same language as the 2001 bills: “The Secretary [of the Interior] shall conduct a national historic landmark theme study to identify sites and resources in the United States that are significant to the Cold War.” The Act directed the Secretary to consult with federal and state historic preservation officers, among others, and to consider the following resources while gathering information and conducting the study: (A) The inventory of sites and resources associated with the Cold War compiled by the Secretary of Defense under section 8120(b)(9) of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 1991 (Public Law 101-511; 104 Stat. 1906; and (B) Historical studies and research of Cold War sites and resources, including— (i) Intercontinental ballistic missiles; (ii) Flight training centers; (iii) Manufacturing facilities; (iv) Communications and command centers (such as Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado); (v) Defensive radar networks (such as the Distant Early Warning Line); (vi) Nuclear weapons test sites (such as the Nevada test site); and (vii) Strategic and tactical aircraft During the course of the study, tribal historic preservation officers were contacted, as well as federal and state historic preservation officers. Communications with the 3 Department of Defense revealed that no single inventory of Cold War sites had been compiled; rather, since 1991 several topical surveys and inventories have been conducted and prepared. Several of them, including historic contexts, are available on Web sites and are listed in the Bibliography in this theme study. Because the Cold War era (1945–1991) is so recent, and the universe of potentially related properties is so vast, relatively few such properties have been identified, designated as National Historic Landmarks, or listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The majority of properties are fewer than fifty years old, and many have been demolished as sites have been deactivated or have been so altered as to be lacking in sufficient integrity for designation or listing. Although a few surveys have been made and several historic contexts have been written, there is an urgent need for more because the resources are disappearing. The historic contexts section of this study is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the origins and evolution of the Cold War from World War II until the death of Josef Stalin in 1953. This section discusses the ideological differences between the two principal adversaries, the dawn of the atomic age, and the weapons systems that each side developed. The second part concentrates on the Cold War at its coldest, as the United States and the Soviet Union appeared to settle into a period of endless provocations and proxy wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation often seemed likely to become a reality. By the end of this period, both sides had come to accept that matters could not be allowed to continue in these patterns, that a new way of dealing with each other had to be found. Détente was the first step. The third part brings the history of the Cold War to its conclusion, from the end of the Vietnam War and the beginnings of a thaw in relations because of presidential diplomacy, the rise of dissent in the Soviet Union (especially in Eastern Europe), and the final collapse of the Soviet economic and political structure. This historic context should enable the researcher to understand the basic developments and the ways in which the weapons systems and defense programs of the United States were affected by international affairs and the political and military challenges of the Cold War era. Although the Cold War touched virtually every aspect of life in the United States and abroad, the principal focus of this theme study is on the types of sites and resources described in Section 7210 of H.R. 146. Other important themes outside the scope of this study could be mentioned only briefly here—the home front, the influence of consumerism, the nuclear weapons complex, the civil defense system, the antiwar movement, and the movements for civil rights and other forms of social change, to name but a few. It is suggested that they be considered for future studies related to the Cold War. 4 Introduction As World War II ended, the world entered what has become known as the Cold War—a term that financier and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch first used in a speech on April 16, 1947, to describe the increasingly chilly relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. In fact, although the two great powers were allied against Germany during World War II, relations between them had never been warm. The Soviets continued to resent the fact that America supported the Whites over the Reds during the Russian Revolution, when the United States invaded Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok in 1918, engaged Soviet forces in combat, and remained on Russian soil until 1920. In America, Soviet communism was immediately seen as a threat to capitalism (the “Red Menace”) and sparked the infamous Palmer Raids against suspected revolutionaries in 1920. The raids were just the first of several attempts by ambitious American politicians to whip up anticommunist hysteria during the twentieth century. Mutual suspicion and ideological opposition, then, typified the relations between the Americans and the Soviets from the beginning. The alliance of World War II was largely a marriage of convenience to oppose Hitler’s fascism, which both sides agreed was the larger threat at the moment. Once the hot war ended, the United States and the Soviet Union resumed their previously distant relationship, but with new and dangerous elements to consider. Two facts dominated the Cold War Era, which is defined for the purposes of this theme study as the period between 1945 and 1991: the United States and the West vied against the Soviet Union and its satellites in a global political and military struggle for supremacy, and the threat—sometimes seemingly the promise—of nuclear obliteration hung over all the Earth like the Sword of Damocles. Day in and day out for four and a half decades, the two sides maneuvered. Puppet states, proxy wars, espionage and counterespionage, overt and covert operations, subtle intimidation and raw violence, threats and bluster, public pronouncements and secret treaties, alliances and betrayals, paranoia and credulity, lies mixed with truth, smoke and mirrors—each side toyed with reality and illusion to gain advantage. To many people, the greatest delusion of all was the belief that mere mortals could somehow control the means of annihilation and keep the finger hovering over the button from ever pushing it. The world watched with white knuckles as time after time, each side slipped and slid closer to the fatal moment in a clumsy danse macabre. Would this be the day that one or both made a final miscalculation? In America, children gasped whenever television screens went black in the middle of an evening sitcom, the word BULLETIN dropped into view, and a grim voice intoned, “We interrupt this program for a special announcement.” Were the missiles on their way? To most Americans, the Cold War was an era of constant low-grade fear and worry punctuated by unforgettable moments of sheer terror. Outside the relatively safe haven of the United States, with its protective shield of missiles and long-range bombers and Distant Early Warning stations, however, much of the world’s population experienced numbing fear every day. The grinding oppression of Soviet life, the secret police, the disappearances, the Gulag, the wars of “revolution” and “liberation,” the episodes of wholesale slaughter, the trading of one despot for another, 5 crushed the spirits or took the lives of millions.