A bumpy, narrow road in a tucked away portion of Moon Township serves as a portal to the past, a glimpse into the reality that faced those living during the height of the Cold War.

The road – if you can call it that – leads to a former military base operated by the Army National Guard, which was tasked with protecting the Pittsburgh area from aerial attack by America’s arch-nemesis, the Soviet Union.

The site is known as PI-71. Its battery of Nike Hercules missiles, outfitted with nuclear warheads capable of raining down 10 times the damage inflicted by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in the waning days of World War II, disappeared decades ago. Yet the site remains alive, thanks to the efforts of a local land trust, a military historian and a man who spent time working at a very similar location.

For the past year or so, the Hollow Oak Land Trust has been offering guided tours of the site, located – fittingly – off Nike Road. The most recent one took place last week and the next one is set for Sept. 17.

Approximately two dozen people took part in last week’s tour, which was the second of three planned for 2026. But due to popular demand, Hollow Oak is contemplating in adding a fourth, as long as historian Earl Edwards and retired U.S. Army 1st Sgt. George Millerschoen are willing to reprise their co-host duties.

It’s hard to imagine either one of them declining. Edwards, an 86-year-old Moon resident and township Historical Society member, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Cold War era – roughly from the late 1940s to the early 1990s – and seems to genuinely enjoy sharing that knowledge.

Edwards said Hollow Oak called him one day and shared that it was considering acquiring the old missile site and incorporating it into its 372-acre Montour Woods conservation area.

“They asked me what I knew about the Nike site,” Edwards recalled recently, “and that got me started on what I didn’t know.”

Edwards began researching the site and learned that it was one in a series of a dozen that formed a defense ring around Pittsburgh, which during the Cold War was a major steel manufacturer and a likely target for any U.S. adversary in the decades that followed World War II.

The first step in that defense plan was what Edwards referred to as the “guns in the cornfield” approach, which entailed establishing sets of anti-aircraft guns around Pittsburgh that could defend against an enemy bomber attack. Four such 90mm guns were put in place in the early 1950s at a small base at the end of a road in Robinson Township.

But when it became clear such a strategy would be no match for upgraded Soviet weaponry, the U.S. military in the mid-1950s moved to establish missile sites, first to deploy Nike Ajax missiles and later more powerful Nike Hercules models. The former carried conventional high-explosive warheads; the latter could deliver those as well as nuclear warheads.

The Moon site known as PI-71 was actually a pair of sites – the actual launch site off Nike Road and a companion integrated fire control (IFC)/radar command site, located on a hilltop on Leona Lane in Robinson. The command site featured ground-based radar and computer systems used to guide the missiles, when fired, to their targets.

The launch area contained three underground structures known as magazines, each of which could house up to six missiles. According to Hollow Oak’s website, the three reinforced concrete chambers were roughly 70 feet wide, 80 feet long and nearly 20 feet deep. The missiles were stored horizontally on rails and when needed, they would be taken to the surface via elevator and rolled into positions on above-ground rails and prepared for launch.

The two companion sites were about a mile apart from each other, as the crow flies, and those at the command site needed clear visibility to the launch site.

Edwards said transitioning from gun emplacements to missiles with nuclear capability was emblematic of the arms race at the time.

“They were building bigger, better, stronger,” he said.

But for the most part, that race was taking place without local residents being fully aware what was going on.

“It was a big secret,” Edwards said. “The Cold War was spy vs. spy, trying to keep everything as quiet as you could.”

Millerschoen, who grew up on Regina Drive in Robinson, said he had no idea what was transpiring at the two local sites until he himself entered the Army following his graduation from Montour High School in 1972. It was after he returned home that he noticed the structure on Leona Drive – and he pointed out to his parents.

“I said, ‘There’s the radar for a missile site,’” he recalled. “That’s what I had gone to school for [in the Army].”

Millerschoen said he had explored much of the woods in Robinson as a boy in the 1960s and early ‘70s and “never one time did I see anything to do with a missile site.”

“We were there our whole lives and didn’t know anything about it.”

Millerschoen learned all about it during his Army days, as he was stationed for a spell at a nearby sister missile site that was part of the Pittsburgh defense ring, this one operated by the U.S. Army in Finleyville. He also made annual treks to a site in Texas for several years to test fire missiles and conduct other drills. And he put his hands on nuclear warheads, which he described as half-round and about half the size of a 55-gallon drum with a large electrical component that had various wires attached.

“It had to make this implosion to make the explosion,” Millerschoen said of the nuke.

Millerschoen incorporates much of what he learned while on active duty during his Nike site tour presentation, which he gives while guiding participants around the grounds, stopping at the seven interpretive/informational signs erected on the site.

Millerschoen can rattle off facts as rapidly and as steady as machine gun fire, noting that the Nike Hercules missiles were 41 feet long, broke the sound barrier just seconds after lift-off and could reach an altitude of 100,000 feet in just 23 seconds. The sheer speed is in part what necessitated having the radar separated from the launch site; had the radar been located any closer, it wouldn’t have been able to track the missiles because they would have accelerated out of sight almost immediately.

Fortunately for all of us, those missiles never were fired in anger.

“If we were firing those missiles in the 1960s or ‘70s, we were literally being bombed by the Russians,” he said. “We were the last line of defense.

“God help us if we were firing these missiles.”

Millerschoen said the Hercules missiles were designed to destroy incoming medium- to high-altitude Soviet bombers after they made their way over the polar ice cap, intercepting them near the U.S.-Canadian border. The Hercules’ nuclear cargo wasn’t meant to hit a specific incoming plane, but rather to explode in an area where the planes were projected to be. The missiles would inflict their damage in the form of the initial shock wave, the intense heat and the electromagnetic pulse, the last of which would have penetrated the planes’ electrical systems and rendered them useless.

Millerschoen sprinkles in personal anecdotes with hard facts while leading the tour. He notes the intense security that was in place at all the missile bases, including two sets of fencing and around-the-clock security complete with guard dogs.

He recalls one time when he and some others were on the grounds of their base in Finleyville when one of the guard dogs bolted toward them. “We were about 50 feet from the guard shack when we heard his handler scream, ‘Sinbad, stop! Sinbad, halt! Freeze, guys!’” Millerschoen said. “Here’s this 140-pound German shepherd running 100 mph right toward us. We froze. The guy to my left almost fainted. The dog stopped 75 feet away from us, the handler caught up and put his leash on.”

Millerschoen also recalled an instance that occurred during a conflict involving Israel and Egypt during October 1973 – the so-called Yom Kippur War. Tensions had escalated to the point where the use of nuclear weapons was not out of the realm of possibility.

“We were at DEFCON 4,” he said, referring to those working on the Hercules base at the time. “We were called in and the missiles were on the launch pad. All we had to do was plug them in.”

Millerschoen said a higher-up ordered him to run to an adjacent building and bring back some important folders. “He said, ‘Boy, this is real.’ I ran over there as fast as I could and grabbed the folders. I ran back up to the trailer to go inside, and I heard someone yell across the road. Up on the hillside were three kids laughing, playing with a dog and their soccer ball.

“They had no concept of what was going on 400 yards away. They lived so close to that site and had no idea.”

Several of those who toured the site last week said they enjoyed what they saw and heard, although admitted it was a challenge to imagine what the place looked like during the 1960s and into the early ‘70s, despite Millerschoen’s suggestion to “use your imagination and picture this place completely barren for a quarter-mile.”

The last missiles were removed from the site after it was decommissioned in 1974 and back then, it was completely clear of all vegetation. Today, it’s wooded and includes native species that Hollow Oak Land Trust has been planting and will continue to plant.

Scott Keener, who attended last week’s tour, said the site has less infrastructure than he thought it might have. “But [Millerschoen] was so illustrative the way he talked about it, you could almost see it,” said Keener, whose father was a civilian engineer who worked for a company charged with upgrading and maintaining the area missile guidance systems.

“You could almost experience it.”

Keener said his father didn’t reveal much about his work. “I was too young to ask any probing questions,” Keener said. “But he was also tight-lipped about anything that had to do with national defense.

“He had a young wife and babies in the house – and he would disappear for days, like during the Cuban Missile Crisis, without a word.”

Annete Condeluci said the interpretive/educational signs were most helpful in giving people an idea of what the base looked like while it was operational. Condeluci said creating a small-scale replica of some of the facilities would be “kind of cool – something you could look at and understand better.” But she acknowledged that might be cost-prohibitive.

Angela Cross, another tour participant, has lived on nearby Norman Drive since 1991 and said she’s always been aware that the Nike site existed but didn’t know much more than that it housed missiles at one time.

“When our kids were little, we’d take them over there and they’d ride their bikes,” she said, referring to a time before Hollow Oak acquired the property. “Let’s just say it had a lot of character then – blacktop, broken glass.

“Once Hollow Oak bought it, they really started taking better care of the trails and making it (nicer).”

Autumn Anderson, a conservation ranger, education and outreach coordinator with the Hollow Oak, said the land trust is working to help reclaim the Nike site by planting native plants and creating a pollinator habitat.

“But we don’t want to lose the history that is here,” added Anderson, who noted that the organization hopes to create six more “sister signs” to go along with the seven existing signs. The new signs, Anderson said, would discuss the restoration efforts at the site “as it moves toward its new future while respecting the past.”

To that end, the land trust, which is working to create a 10-mile greenway loop connecting several of its conservation areas in the Airport corridor, has applied for a state grant to create a master development plan for the Nike site.

Sean Brady, Hollow Oak’s executive director, said the plan would include research, public input and analysis for the full development of the site, which the land trust acquired from the Moon Township Community Baseball Association in December 2021. An emphasis would be on Cold War interpretation by way of museum and military affiliations – including the Heinz History Center and the American Legion – ADA trail design and public outreach to determine options for improving access. As of now, the road into the site is quite narrow and people must park below the site and walk to it.

Brady said of the 12 former Nike missile launch sites that protected Pittsburgh and its assets during the Cold War, none of them have been preserved or interpreted for their historical significance.

“This is the only location where such interpretation and public education can be done regarding Pittsburgh’s national importance from the 1950s through the 1970s,” Brady wrote in his grant application to the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

Brady said the land trust wants to find a way to address acres of old asphalt left behind when the former military base closed its doors for good. Hollow Oak staff and volunteers have planted acres of native species in an effort known as “Missiles to Milkweed” to support monarch butterflies.

Brady said the site certainly is worth protecting and improving.

“It is one of the most important military historical sites in greater Pittsburgh,” he said. “And no one knows about it.

“This is an exciting opportunity to combine really important human history with public access to nature.”

For more information on the Nike site in Moon, visit the Hollow Oak website.