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kaboomj's avatar

Consider the Rocky Mountain Arsenal - a Cold War nerve gas factory - just in the NE burbs of Denver. Now it's a nature preserve.

Also Rocky Flats. Once the US plutonium widget factory, it closed ~1990 and now has some of the better preserved prairie in the Colorado front range. Without the "bomb factory" that whole space between Broomfield and Boulder would now be a subdivision like everywhere else in the area.

In both cases, safety and security requirements provided for a pretty huge untouched buffer space around a small core of industrial-scale work on WMD stuff.

Jason Weisberger's avatar

San Francisco's golden gate national recreation area was largely bases and buffer space around bases.

SugarBear74's avatar

It's not about the military having been there @Jan Weisberger; It's about what the military was doing there. I don't think the military was live-firing/testing munitions in the vicinity of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.