AN/FPS-24 Radar Tower, Mt. Umunhum, Los Gatos, CA, 2024.
All the pixels, none of the incoming enemy bombers, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/53796724938
#photography
AN/FPS-24 Radar Tower, Mt. Umunhum, Los Gatos, CA, 2024.
All the pixels, none of the incoming enemy bombers, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/53796724938
#photography
It’s unclear if the SAGE system would have actually been effective in detecting incoming bombers, which presumably would have employed radar jammers and other countermeasures. Fortunately, we never found out.
The huge rotating antenna (not shown) was removed shortly after the site’s decommissioning in 1980, but the building, a prominent local landmark visible from downtown San Jose, has been preserved.
I have mixed feelings about these cold war relics. On the one hand, they’re artifacts of what was perhaps humanity’s most dangerous folly to date, locking the world in a deadly game where the stakes only went up with each round. This doesn’t seem like something to commemorate or celebrate.
On the other hand, these objects, many now destroyed or decayed, serve as visible evidence of just how close to oblivion we are willing to go. And looked at from the right angle, they have stories to tell.
@mattblaze@federate.social
File in the same category as Auschwitz-as-museum, perhaps? As slave-plantation that actual condemns slavery (vs. that fucking thing in LA that burned down… 🔥 )?
@mattblaze@federate.social plus all those bomb shelters. I remember one girl hosting sleepovers in the one her parents built. Must have been circa 1961
@mattblaze@federate.social The contemporaneous Nike missile system was amazing as well–20-kiloton warheads on missiles with a range of 87 miles in “air defense” of cities across the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Nike
@mattblaze@federate.social One can only learn from history if you remember it right? Too many people today don’t really understand the destruction that a single nuclear weapon can wreak. That the bombs dropped in Japan would be considered “tactical” today. These edifices serve to remind us a bit of that threat.