Remembering Wisconsin’s Cold War History

To many, Wisconsin may seem very removed from the Cold War, but the state is filled with history and memories from that era. Waukesha author Chris Sturdevant has been working to keep this history alive over the last two decades.

Sturdevant, a Waukesha children’s librarian, serves as the Midwest chapter chairman for the Virginia-based Cold War Museum and has written two books on the subject: Cold War Wisconsin and Cold War Illinois.

Sturdevant’s Inspiration

Sturdevant talked over the phone about the role his childhood played in inspiring this passion, saying, “That was my era as a kid, I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, so that was the world atmosphere when I grew up. Just recalling the Afghan invasion with the Soviets, and then they boycotted the ‘84 Olympics, there was the Miracle on Ice, the Reagan years where someone was finally sticking it to them instead of just sitting on their hands.”

“And just watching a lot of it on TV–the Berlin Wall falling, Chernobyl and the Challenger explosion,” he added.

Sturdevant spoke about how these events have influenced his travels, taking him to places like North Korea, Afghanistan, Chernobyl and parts of Eastern Europe. “I wanted to see for myself what it is like and what Communism really is,” Sturdevant said. “It’s not just a theory we kind of fantasize about here for some reason in the United States. It’s an awful, awful ideology.”

With the Cold War Museum, Sturdevant has played an active role educating the public about this era of history, such as presenting in towns across the Midwest. He is also very involved with the history of Waukesha’s Nike missile control site, often giving tours to groups and students. 

The Nike Program

Waukesha’s Nike control site, designated M-74, played a very important role in national defense from 1956 to 1971. The site contained the complex radar and computer systems needed to detect threats, and direct missiles to intercept them. It also included a barracks and mess hall to house troops. A mile south of this site, a second location housed the Nike Ajax surface-to-air missile battery, ready to defend against Soviet bombers.

This was part of a larger defensive missile array surrounding Milwaukee, with seven other similar sites located in Muskego, Lannon, Cudahy, Brown Deer, Hales Corners and Milwaukee. One of the former Milwaukee sites is now the Summerfest grounds.

If Soviet aircraft had invaded from the north, radar at these sites would have detected them. Each of the eight Nike sites had at least a dozen conventional Nike Ajax missiles ready to intercept.  

“They realized really quickly that the Soviets would have come in with a squadron,” Sturdevant pointed out. This led to the U.S. military replacing many Nike Ajax missiles with Nike Hercules missiles at several sites in the early 1960s, including Waukesha, Brown Deer and what is now the Summerfest grounds. Unlike conventional Nike Ajax missiles, Nike Hercules missiles had nuclear warheads to allow them to intercept several aircraft at once. The presence of Nike Hercules missiles highlights how high the stakes were during the Cold War. 

“You can just picture if we hadn’t stopped the invasion over Canada or Northern Wisconsin,” said Sturdevant. “The fallout had to go somewhere, it would have gone straight down and blown around. That would have probably been the last gasp we would have had during the Cold War here if that would have come to fruition.”

By 1971, the military had decommissioned all Wisconsin Nike sites, as the threat of inter-continental ballistic missiles had rendered Nike missiles largely obsolete. Despite this, the Nike program played a very important part in national defense in the years previous.

Fears of the Cold War in Wisconsin

As Sturdevant explained, these military sites were not tightly-kept secrets, but instead public symbols of national defense. “It had open houses here in Waukesha when they opened up in the 50s,” he said. “So groups would go visit and could see a missile coming out of the pit. It was very much a public thing, they wanted people to feel welcome.” 

Even in Wisconsin, the possibility of nuclear war was very frightening to people. Often after Sturdevant finishes speaking about the Cold War, he said, “There have been a lot of people over the years that will come up to me and say, ‘let me tell you something Chris, when I was a kid, my auxiliary group or my cub scout group, girl scouts, whatever the case was, would go out on top of the school building and look for Russian planes or bombers.’ That was their job. And this was all over the state of Wisconsin … People would have such a fear of these incoming bombers and fighters that they had put these people up there, for lack of probably anything else better to do, to make them feel they were part of defending the United States from nuclear attack.“

“So that aspect, the fallout shelters, the duck-and-cover drills,” he added, “It was real. It was real what people were preparing for.”

Some of the Nike sites were built next door to already built civilian houses, such as the Waukesha site, but people did not mind their presence too much, Sturdevant argued, saying, “They recognized the threat that Communism was.”

To many who lived during this time, the Cold War never truly ended but is instead reflected in current events. Micheal Stubbe, a retired Army veteran who served in Wisconsin during the height of the Cold War and member of the Okauchee Lake American Legion, talked about this. Over the phone, when talking about the Soviet Union and U.S. Stubbe said, “We have two different sets of opinions. They love to run it their way and they want the whole world, and we’re saying, ‘no that’s not correct,’ and so we got half the world and Russia got the other half.”

Preserving Hillcrest Park

In 1971, the Waukesha Nike sites were decommissioned, and the following year the land was given to the City of Waukesha, becoming Hillcrest and Missile Parks.

Sturdevant has defended the preservation of the park’s history over the last two decades. During this time, the Cold War Museum has shown interest in establishing a Midwest chapter of the museum in the park. In 2005, the sons of CIA pilot Gary Powers and Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev, Francis Gary Powers Jr. and Sergei Khruschev, visited the site together representing the Cold War Museum. Sturdevant has since made two proposals to the City of Waukesha to establish a museum there. He says that although the City of Waukesha was not against these proposals, funding is the limiting factor. Although there is not currently any plan for a museum in Waukesha, he has not given up on this dream.

In recent years, the City of Waukesha has become very involved with improving and preserving Hillcrest Park. The City of Waukesha says they have been meeting with National Guardsmen who served at the site to better understand its history. Since 2016, the city has made improvements to the parking lots, streetlights and sidewalks to make the park more accessible. Last year, they converted the original target tracking radar tower structure into a covered shelter. The city plans to add interpretive signage to the shelter next year.

The Cold War’s Legacy Lives On

The Cold War’s legacy continues to live on in Wisconsin in many ways, such as the Milwaukee spy-themed SafeHouse restaurant and bar. The restaurant, created in 1966 by Dave Baldwin, contains a maze of themed rooms featuring a mixture of pop-culture and real-life historical memorabilia, making it a sort of unconventional and interactive museum about the Cold War and espionage. In 2015, the Marcus Corperation purchased the SafeHouse, although the restaurant has largely remained unchanged other than menu changes.

In 2021, the Chicago-based Pritzker Military Museum & Library created a design contest for a Cold War veteran’s memorial to be in Sommers, Wisconsin, near Kenosha. The following year, they announced the winning design, titled Orbits, created by Oyler Wu Collaborative. The museum plans for this memorial to be a part of their nearly-completed Pritzker Archives. A timeline for the memorial’s construction is not yet clear.

Sturdevant strongly believes the Cold War is important to remember and learn about, saying “When you’re talking history, it never really goes away. It stays with us, and it is important I think to recognize what is going on and the actors that are still involved in world policies.”