Degatina agreed. "Can you imagine people knowing that there was that magnitude of nuclear weapons in their neighborhoods? We had more power [in the Baltimore Washington area] than could ever be used in wartime, even today."

Now, federal law requires that surplus property turned over to local governments free must be put to community use.

The military wasn’t always so generous. The Defense Department held onto many of the sites nationwide until the 1980s, when officials tried unsuccessfully to sell them. Developers and local governments across the nation were discouraged by the cost of demolishing the old buildings to make way for new uses.

Since the Pentagon began unloading the sites, a New York county turned one into a homeless shelter. A Massachusetts county uses one for maximum security data storage that private companies rent. Anne Arundel County turned the Davidsonville site into its police academy, and the District of Columbia built a prison on part of a Nike site in Lorton in Northern Virginia. Most others have become parks.

Some of the most frequent visitors to the Marin Nike museum are filmmakers and composers, said site manager Milton Halsey.

"They like our sounds of gears grinding, whistles blowing and computers full of glass vacuum tubes that wheeze," he said. "They come out and tape the sounds of old machinery working TC for their films."

There is only one missile left from the Baltimore Washington ring of steel: on the lawn outside the Fort Meade Museum.

It has never attracted much attention, even from the weapons enthusiasts traditionally drawn to the museum. Some military historians speculate that people don’t want to remember the Cold War; others say the missiles were outdated before they were built and not worthy of attention.

Harrison Sandrock, one of seven men who serviced and repaired the nuclear warheads, sees it differently. He is the only one left; the other six have died of various forms of cancer. Standing in the missile’s shadow one recent afternoon, he paid little attention to the peeling rust dropping in chunks onto the grass.

He didn’t comment about the two bird nests inside the 20 foot barrel or the discarded plaque recently run over by a lawn mower.

"To this day, it’s awe inspiring," he said, touching the old missile for the first time in more than a decade. "I guess I don’t visit it because it’s something that’s antiquated and it makes me realize I’m getting old."

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