PLATTSBURGH — One is the site of a $2.3 million luxury home. One was used for tracking cosmic rays and has now been historically restored into a state-of-the-art residence. They’ve been used for businesses, town highway garages and envisioned as refuges for the doomsday set.

They’ve caused headaches for municipalities and insurance companies and have been magnets for trespassers and vandals. Multiple lives were lost in their construction and reclamation.Their coming to the North Country was first announced in January 1960, the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a brief time, they waited for a nuclear attack that never came.

They’re the 12 Atlas-F missile silos of the 556th Strategic Missile Squadron of the Strategic Air Command. Built for $18 million each in 1960 dollars in a 22- to 44-mile ring around Plattsburgh Air Force Base, they took 2,000 workers nearly three years to complete. Obsolete, decommissioned and abandoned practically before the last nuclear-capable projectile was lowered into its shaft, they form an increasingly forgotten link to a very historic and unsettling time.

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