Shelton Rec Center is the Site of a Decommissioned U.S. Missile Defense Base

We have a feature on the Ethan and Lou Show called: "The Place You Live" featuring Mike Allen. Mike is the former I-95 News Director and a skilled communicator.

Every Tuesday morning, he joins the Ethan and Lou Show to give us a deeper look into the small towns of CT and NY.

On Tuesday's show (3/16/21) Mike did a segment we called "Nutmeg Missiles". In it, we learned that the U.S. had vital military missile installations in small CT towns.

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These sites are either hiding in plain sight or folks have simply wiped this history from their memory. Allen told the Ethan and Lou Show:

"Most people have completely forgotten that these sites were there. Now, others trumpet it, literally have signs out from that say Nike Site and come one, come all and most of them now are recreational sites."

He told us all of the sites have been decommissioned and educated us a bit on the kind of weapons that lived in these nearby towns, saying:

"I just gotta tell you a little bit, I won't get too technical in detail on this, but this was the whole strategy on this. They had what was called an Ajax missile. Now first of all, the Nike missile program, everybody's heard about Nike. Nike is the Greek Goddess of victory and, of course, the military loves these code names.

So they had Nike-Ajax missiles and Nike-Hercules Missiles. Nike-Ajax was designed, one missile for one plane and on the tip of that missile was something that's called a high explosive fragmentary bomb. So, they shoot the missile up there, explode it, take the plane out, explode it. You're good. Well as the Soviet's started building more and more planes, they said, you know that strategy is not going to work. They're going to bring in multiple planes in squadrons and one Ajax missile is not going to defend against that. So, they came out with the Hercules missile and on the tip of the Hercules missile was not a fragmentary bomb, but a nuclear bomb."

The Nike-Ajax and Nike-Hercules lived here in CT, closer to your home than you ever may have imagined.

Allen also explained why the U.S. military believed these sites needed to be on places like Ansonia, Fairfield and Shelton, saying:

"So there were two prongs to this, number one was, let's get people inside the bunkers so we have a civilization to come out to. Even the Federal Reserve Bank had a bunker that they had a billion dollars in cash in. So if there was nuclear war and devastation, they could come out and they'd have some currency to hand out to get the economy jump-started again.

I mean, this is how people think about it and strategize about it and one of the tough decisions that was made was, part two of the strategy -- we're going to have missile sites around the country defending the most important cities.

Well, which cities were those? Well obviously New York was there, D.C. was there. Connecticut had two cities and they were Hartford and Bridgeport.

At the time, they were considered crucial to the war effort so they had Hartford which was the insurance capital of the world and they were making plane engines up there in Bridgeport -- making a lot of munitions.

Now, once you were on this list, there were only about 40 cities around the country that were on this list. But, once you're on it, then you've got six missile sites surrounding your city that were going to shoot down Soviet planes if they came in with a bomb.

So from 1945-1975, the technology was, if you were going to deliver a nuclear bomb to another country and there were only two countries, it was the United States and Soviet Union were the super powers and that was the nuclear arms race.

You had to actually fly it in an airplane over the country and drop it. That's how it was, you didn't have the ICBM's that you have today where you can push a button and it flies over on its own. So the thought was, OK, if they come in with a plane, we're going to have to shoot it down before they get to their target.

So, that's why they were going to have these missile sites and they were going to be able to surround the cities and get them from different angles where the plane could be coming in from and that's what they were looking to do."

There are only a few destinations for "The Place You Live." You can listen to the Ethan and Lou Show Tuesday mornings between 8 am - 9 am on 95.1 FM on your radio, listen on our app which is free to download at Google Play or the App Store.