Site N-75C served as the control section of the Carrollton/Smithfield Nike-Ajax missile base, while the counterpart launch site, N-75L, stood at Carrollton Nike Park. The Cold War, from 1949 to 1990, took shape as a confrontation between the Warsaw Pact and NATO after Joseph Stalin kept the Soviet Army in Eastern Europe, and as the Soviet Union quickly gained intercontinental bombers and nuclear weapons in August 1949. In 1950, North Korea's attack on the South was viewed in the West as a Soviet-inspired move in a broader struggle for world domination. Beginning in 1951, the United States ringed major cities with World War II-era anti-aircraft gun batteries against the threat of nuclear bomber attack while also developing a replacement missile based on research from the German V-2 program. The U.S. Army successfully tested the supersonic Nike-Ajax, began production in 1953, and eventually built and deployed more than 13,000 missiles at several hundred sites in the United States and around the world. The Carrollton, Virginia, base was one of these installations, became operational by 1954, and remained ready to defend the nation until the longer-range nuclear-tipped Nike-Hercules made the Ajax obsolete. In 1961 the Carrollton base became an Army radio relay site and continued in that role until 1971. Isle of Wight County acquired the former base from the federal government in 1972 and developed a convenience center along with Carrollton Nike Park and the Jones Creek Boat Ramp. The Army designation N-75 identified it as part of the Norfolk Defense Area, one of eight Hampton Roads sites protecting major military and industrial facilities including Norfolk Naval Operating Base, Norfolk Naval Air Station, Langley Air Force Base, Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Oceana Naval Air Station, and Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, and the number 75 marked it as the 75th Nike-Ajax battery in the United States to become operational.