The Line
It was not a shield around cities. It was a line drawn across a country — and it had two layers. HAWK stood forward, close behind the front line NATO expected to fight on, to kill what came in low. Nike stood a hundred and fifty kilometres further back, to break the bomber streams coming in high.
Each pin is a Nike battery: concrete pads, buried magazines, a radar farm on the nearest high ground, and a double-fenced bunker in the woods holding atomic warheads. Each chevron is a HAWK position. The glow is the Nike engagement envelope — 140 kilometres of reach per battery, overlapping into a continuous field of fire.
Switch to THEATRE and the belt turns out to be one stretch of something much longer. The same missile stood around Copenhagen and Oslo, across the Venetian plain, and on both sides of the Turkish Straits — but only in Germany was it a belt.
Measured from each plotted position to the nearest point of the Iron Curtain. The forward Nike row sits about 150 km back, which matches the contemporary description of the belt's eastern edge lying roughly 150 km west of the inner-German border.
The Position
A Nike battery was never one place. It was four, deliberately scattered: the radars on a hill, the launchers a kilometre away behind earth berms, the warheads in their own fenced wood, and the men billeted in a barracks down the road.
Click any structure to open it.
The Watch
Thirty years of nothing happening, performed to a standard. Three crews, forty-eight-hour shifts on weekdays and seventy-two across a weekend, one battery of the battalion always fifteen minutes from firing.
The Case
What the whole apparatus existed to do, once, for about ninety seconds. The sequence below is the documented firing procedure of a Nike Hercules battery, run at real time.
The Arithmetic
Nobody in 1963 thought this was absurd. It was the most rational answer available to a genuine problem. That is the part worth sitting with.
A thought experiment with the numbers stated. Move the sliders; the map fires.