A Polar Perspective

Abstract

April 14, 1955, began like any other day at the Barbersville, Maryland, trailer park. Located between the nation’s capital and Baltimore, the trailer park was a little more than a mile from a newly established Nike antiaircraft missile battery at Fort Meade. Shortly after 12:30 p.m., the day became unusual. Trailer park residents found their quiet, rainy Saturday shattered by a Nike-Ajax missile that escaped its launcher during a drill and slammed into a hillside. A cloud of aluminum fragments from the missile’s fuselage fell along the relatively new Baltimore-Washington Parkway; the clarion calls of multiple sirens from the state and military police, in addition to the fire department, became the ambient aural atmosphere. Officials followed the weapons’ truncated flight path, collecting debris and storing it in the trunks of their vehicles. From her kitchen window, Mrs. Nancy Bishop watched as space-suited figures in hazardous materials garments collected the fuselage’s larger pieces and toxic fuel from the hill behind her manufactured home. By nightfall, all that remained was a pair of holes, one much deeper than the other, and the memories of when the cold war had hit home.1