Editorial: Cold War artifact tells a chilling story

Brett Blomberg’s mission in Vernon Hills doesn’t quite equate to pounding swords into plowshares, but it sure has a lot to say about the rumors of war. It’s a story worth listening to.

Daily Herald staff writer Russell Lissau told this week of the Lincolnshire village president’s effort to clean up and restore a site that is not just a significant piece of Lake County history but a stark local reminder of an era in the development of our nation when Americans, even at the most personal level, saw the world dwelling on the brink of obliteration.

Technologically, we are no less threatened by nuclear holocaust today than we were in the 1960s, to be sure, but the ever-looming worry of terrorist madness notwithstanding, we still do not wallow often in the dread of imminent global annihilation. We aren’t building bomb shelters in our back yards. We aren’t, most of us at least, hoarding canned goods against the possibility of an extended nuclear winter. We aren’t running our schoolkids through drills to hide under their desks or to bury their heads in their arms against the hallway’s concrete walls.

But there was a time not so long ago when all those things were woven intrinsically into the national consciousness. Blomberg rediscovered that time awash in floodwater and dripping with muck in the form of cavernous bunkers snaking underground at the site of the former Nike missile base in Lake County.

A Navy veteran, Blomberg became interested in the long-decommissioned Nike site a few years ago, and last February, aided by U.S. Naval Sea Cadets with whom he volunteers, he began work in earnest to restore the site to the condition reminiscent of its status as one of about 200 missile bases near major cities sprinkled around the country. Similar bases had been established in various cities around the Northwest suburbs, all of which had begun to be phased out even before the end in the early 1990s of the Cold War that spawned them.

He knows that the job before him and the Sea Cadets is a daunting one. But it’s also an important one, reminding us as it does of a conflict that raged — much like the Nike base itself — underground for most of the 20th century but whose effects and byproducts were not the detritus and materiel of a typical shooting war.

“You hear about the Cold War and read about it, but (here) you can touch it and feel it and know what it’s about,” Blomberg told Lissau.

What the Cold War was about, indeed, often had more to do with the imagination and the fostering of fear than with actual battles and warfare. Blomberg’s sludge-drenched tunnels are among the few tangible testaments to the psychology that shaped a generation and drastically revised our understanding of the nature of war.

He and his crews are to be thanked for the vision of their own that could one day tell a story of our region that only actual artifacts of history can tell. They may not be putting an end to war, but they’re doing a great service in helping us understand it.