The Cold War, from 1949 to 1990, took shape as rivalry between the Warsaw Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after Joseph Stalin kept the Soviet Army in occupied Eastern European countries, while the Soviet Union soon gained intercontinental bombers and nuclear weapons in August 1949 and the West saw North Korea’s 1950 attack on the South as a Soviet-inspired move toward world domination. Beginning in 1951, the United States deployed hundreds of World War II-era anti-aircraft gun batteries around major U.S. cities against the perceived threat of nuclear bomber attack and, drawing on research from the German V-2 rocket program of World War II, developed the world’s first successful supersonic anti-aircraft missile, the Nike-Ajax. Production began in 1953, and more than 13,000 missiles were eventually built and deployed at several hundred locations in the U.S. and around the world, including the base in Carrollton, Virginia. Operational by 1954, this installation was designated N-75 because it was the 75th Nike-Ajax battery in the U.S. to become operational, with N signifying the Norfolk Defense Area, one of eight sites in the Hampton Roads area protecting major military and industrial installations, and L identifying the launch site where missiles were stored in concrete underground magazines near the N-75C control site. The base stood ready until longer-range nuclear-tipped Nike-Hercules missiles made the Ajax obsolete; in 1961 it became an Army radio relay site that operated until 1971, and in 1972 Isle of Wight County acquired it from the federal government and began developing a convenience center and the parks and recreation facilities now known as Carrollton Nike Park and Jones Creek Boat Ramp. The Norfolk defense was first organized with two Nike-Ajax battalions covering the Hampton Roads and James River area of Virginia, and in the fall of 1959 two Army National Guard battalions acquired several Ajax sites; Battery B, 4th Missile Battalion, 111th Artillery, later had the honor of retiring the Ajax from ARADCOM at site N-63 in Nansemond County, now Suffolk.