The Bomarc's origins stretch back to 1944, when the U.S. Army Air Force concluded that anti-aircraft guns would be useless against the coming generation of jet bombers. Two competing concepts emerged: a short-range rocket that flew directly at its target, assigned to Army Ordnance, and a long-range pilotless aircraft that would cruise to its target like a fighter, assigned to the Air Force. Bell Laboratories won the Army contract -- that became Project Nike. Boeing won the Air Force contract for a design called Ground-to-Air Pilotless Aircraft, or GAPA. When the Michigan Aeronautical Research Center joined the project, the missile got its name: Bomarc, a portmanteau of Boeing and MARC. The Air Force even classified it as an airplane, assigning it the fighter designation F-99. What followed was one of the most bitter interservice rivalries of the Cold War. The Air Force and Army fought in Congress, in the press, and in public. One Air Force graphic showed Washington, D.C. being destroyed by nuclear bombs that the Army's Nike Ajax had failed to stop. The New York Times ran a headline: "Air Force Calls Army Nike Unfit To Guard Nation." The missiles became proxies in a larger battle over which branch would control America's air defense.

The Bomarc was an engineering marvel, even if it was a strategic dead end. Stored horizontally inside concrete shelters with sliding roofs, the missile would be erected vertically and launched by a liquid-fueled rocket booster. Once it reached altitude and speed, twin ramjet engines ignited and the weapon tipped over into horizontal flight, cruising at Mach 2.5. Ground controllers guided it toward the target using the SAGE air defense computer network. When the missile reached the target area, it dove and switched to onboard active radar homing for the final intercept. A proximity fuse triggered the warhead -- either conventional explosive or, in later models, the W40 nuclear warhead. The Air Force originally envisioned 52 Bomarc sites ringing America's major cities, each holding 120 missiles. But development problems and budget cuts slashed those numbers repeatedly. Fifty-two sites became sixteen. Sixteen became eight in the United States and two in Canada. The first operational squadron at McGuire AFB had exactly one working missile on its activation date.

Canada's involvement with the Bomarc became one of the most divisive political episodes in that country's Cold War history. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservative government agreed to deploy the missile at two sites -- RCAF Station North Bay, Ontario, and RCAF Station La Macaza, Quebec -- and then controversially scrapped the Avro Arrow, a supersonic manned interceptor aircraft, arguing that the Bomarc made it unnecessary. But when the question arose of whether the Canadian Bomarcs should carry nuclear warheads, Diefenbaker balked. The dispute fractured his cabinet and brought down his government in 1963. His successor, Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson, won the subsequent election in part by promising to accept the nuclear weapons. The first nuclear-armed Bomarcs arrived in Canada on December 31, 1963. Pearson's own wife, Maryon, resigned her honorary membership in the anti-nuclear group Voice of Women in protest.

The Bomarc's legacy was not just political. At McGuire Air Force Base, a 1960 accident involving a nuclear-armed missile caused a plutonium contamination event that lingered for decades. Between 2002 and 2004, nearly 22,000 cubic yards of contaminated debris and soil were excavated and shipped to a disposal facility in Utah. The cleanup raised questions about how many other Bomarc sites might harbor similar contamination beneath their abandoned bunkers. By the late 1960s, the missile that was supposed to shield a continent from Soviet bombers had become an artifact. Deactivations began in 1969, and by 1972 every Bomarc site in both the United States and Canada had been shut down. The surviving missiles found a final, ironic use: repurposed as high-speed target drones, they helped test the next generation of air-defense missiles. A handful of Bomarcs survive today in museums from Florida to Alberta, though several have been pulled from display because of concerns about the thoriated magnesium in their airframes.

The Bomarc site cataloged here sits in Ontario's near-wilderness, at the coordinates of the former RCAF Station North Bay complex where 446 SAM Squadron operated from 1962 to 1972. The concrete bunkers and ancillary facilities remain at the site, slowly being absorbed by the boreal landscape. Nearby, the Canadian Shield's granite ridges and dark spruce forests give no hint that nuclear-tipped missiles once waited here on alert, ready to launch at supersonic speed toward incoming Soviet bombers that never came. The Bomarc even left a mark on popular culture: a pop group called the Bomarcs formed among servicemen at a Florida radar tracking station, a record label took the missile's name, and the Canadian pop group The Beau Marks drew their name from the weapon system. In the end, the CIM-10 Bomarc was less a shield than a mirror -- reflecting the Cold War's paranoia, its interservice politics, and its tendency to build weapons for the last war rather than the next one.