Plainfield's nuclear past...and its fallout

Well, the Plainfield area's, if not Plainfield's directly.

President Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower undertook two policy initiatives which had dramatic impacts on the Plainfield area, though the law of unintended consequences has reversed the drama of the effects on us.

These were the development of the Interstate Highways system and the missile defense of American cities.

Todays' NY Times has a fascinating article about the 21 missile sites which ringed New York City, intended to fend off Soviet nuclear attacks (see here).

Many people living in the area today may be surprised to learn that Plainfield was flanked by missile installations as part of the Eisenhower initiative.

In South Plainfield, what had been the Hadley Airfield became a Nike missile installation, at first with 25-mile range Ajax missiles and later with nuclear-capable Hercules missiles with an 87-mile range.

To the north, another installation in the Watchung Reservation was similarly equipped. That site is where today's Riding Stables are located (which has been 'waymarked' here), while South Plainfield's has become the shopping mecca along Hadley Road.

FDU professor Donald Bender is the go-to guy on the New York Defense Ring, and has a complete website for your delight (see here).

In that Strangelovian past, while school kids practiced duck-and-cover air raid drills (see more here), those who ran the country planned for a possible Armageddon which, thankfully, never came.

Eisenhower's two initiatives arose from two stimuli.

The missile defense was a direct outgrowth of the Cold War missile race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Eisenhower's other initiative, the Interstate Highway System, was a little more indirect.

Ike, who had been the Supreme Allied Commander in the European theater of action during WWII, was acutely aware of the role that aerial bombing of its industrial infrastructure played in bringing Nazi Germany to its knees.

Germany's industries were tightly integrated into its rail infrastructure, and made factories easy targets as bomber squadrons could simply fly along rail lines to deliver their payloads, which had the double effect of knocking out the enemy's industrial production as well as its means of transporting war materiel to the fighting front.

This was a lesson which impressed Eisenhower greatly. American industrial production also relied to a great extent on rail transportation and, in the event of an invasion would be vulnerable in the same manner as Germany's.

Ike's approach was to develop the Interstate Highway System which had the dual purpose of allowing the military to speed troops from point to point if needed for defense against attack, AND to allow for the transport of materiel NOT TO DEPEND ENTIRELY on the fixed, immobile and vulnerable rail system. (The fact that WE can drive them, and that suburbs grew up along them, was not the main intent.)

At the same time, industries were incentived to move away from dense urban centers and locations along fixed rail lines out to the open spaces surrounding urban areas.

A direct consequence for Plainfield of both the Interstates and this industrial policy was the closing of Plainfield's Mack Truck plant, which employed 1,500, in 1961, to be replaced with a new facility out in the boondocks of Bridgewater.

While the nuclear defense system was never put to the ultimate test and we have come to accept the new, more peaceful uses to which those old Cold War sites have been put, Plainfield's West End has never fully recovered from the shock of that employment loss.

You can see for yourself if you take the time to travel through the neighborhood and see what has become of its former shopping districts and the surrounding neighborhoods.

That's why they're called 'unintended consequences'.

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• NYTimes: "Shadow cast by region's atomic past"
• Don Bender: "Nike Missiles and Missile Sites"
  
• Detroit News: "When bomb shelters were all the rage"
  
• Waymarks: "Welcome to NY-73 Summit/Watchung Nike Missile Site"
  

-- Dan Damon

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