Episode 6: Nuclear Sites of the Adirondacks

Ghosts of the Cold War

What if the most remote parts of the Adirondacks weren’t just quiet, but armed?

In Episode 6 of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast, we travel deep into the forests of Upstate New York to uncover a Cold War legacy that was never meant to be seen. Hidden beneath the soil and scattered through remote clearings is a network of infrastructure built to survive and deliver nuclear war. This isn’t metaphor or folklore. It was a real front line in the most dangerous standoff in human history.

During the height of Cold War tension, the Adirondacks became home to missile silos, radar installations, and command systems that could have changed the course of civilization in a matter of minutes. Atlas-F ICBMs sat buried in hardened silos across Clinton, Essex, and Franklin Counties, ready to launch with warheads more than 200 times the power of Hiroshima. Plattsburgh Air Force Base, anchored by the 556th Strategic Missile Squadron, became a key node in America’s nuclear strike capability. B-52 bombers and KC-135 tankers were staged on one of the longest runways east of the Mississippi.

But it wasn’t just missiles and bombers. The Northeast played a critical role in the U.S. early warning system. Radar sites scattered through the region fed data into SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, a Cold War-era computing network designed to detect Soviet bombers flying over the Arctic. Smaller, sometimes fully automated Gap Filler radars were placed in rural areas, including the outskirts of the Adirondacks, to cover any blind spots in the detection grid.

For local residents, the transformation was surreal. One day the woods were just woods. The next, trucks arrived. Concrete was poured. Fences were built. Then silence. Something buried and watchful, just out of view.

This episode also explores the long-term environmental consequences. Trichloroethylene, or TCE, was used to clean missile components and leaked into the groundwater at multiple sites. In places like Champlain and Redford, wells were contaminated and residents raised concerns. The Cold War didn’t end cleanly. Some of its damage remains underground.

But this story is about more than military infrastructure. It’s also about our collective memory. The Cold War was defined as much by its cultural atmosphere as by its arsenals. Films like Threads, Red Dawn, By Dawn’s Early Light, The Day After, and Dr. Strangelove were not just entertainment. They were reflections of what the world feared and what many quietly believed could happen. They helped a generation understand what was often left unspoken.

Nuclear Sites of the Adirondacks is part history, part site report, and part cultural reflection. It is a story about proximity. To launch systems. To memory. To the brink. It is also a reminder of how close we came, how much was built to prepare for that moment, and how much still remains buried beneath the forest floor.

Discover Restoration Obscura’s Field Guide to the Night by John Bulmer

A hauntingly beautiful journey through how darkness has shaped human history, culture, and memory, from wartime blackouts and Cold War surveillance to ancient skywatchers and light‑polluted nights. Part memoir, part cultural history, this immersive field guide challenges us to step out of the glow and reconnect with what the night still has to teach.

Paperback ($14.99) / Kindle ($9.99) | 368 pages | Published June 1, 2025 | ISBN 979‑8218702731 | Restoration Obscura Press Available worldwide on Amazon (Prime eligible)

About Restoration Obscura

Restoration Obscura is where overlooked history gets another shot at being seen, heard, and understood. Through long-form storytelling, archival research, and photographic restoration, we recover the forgotten chapters—the ones buried in basements, fading in family albums, or sealed behind locked doors.

The name nods to the camera obscura, an early photographic device that captured light in a darkened chamber. Restoration Obscura flips that idea, pulling stories out of darkness and casting light on what history left behind.

This project uncovers what textbooks miss: Cold War secrets, vanished neighborhoods, wartime experiments, strange ruins, lost towns, and the people tied to them. Each episode, article, or image rebuilds a fractured past and brings it back into focus, one story at a time.

If you believe memory is worth preserving, if you’ve ever felt something standing at the edge of a ruin or holding an old photograph, this space is for you.

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