Cold War playground equipment

In 1959, Popular Mechanics wrote that a Kiwanis Club in Ontario, California was "in tune with the times" when it erected a three-story rocketship in a local playground.

A row of tree trunks installed in a Kansas City, Missouri park could elicit "any game an imaginative child might think up," including "an array of ICBMs on a launch pad.

A task force established to investigate the removal found the rocket ship had "very limited play value," and had "hazardous conditions that present a great danger to young children.

[2] Author Fraser MacDonald wrote "nuclear weapons were made intelligible in, and transposable to, a domestic context" through children's toys and playground equipment featuring Cold War symbols.

In Baikonur, Kazakhstan, where Yuri Gagarin was launched into orbit in 1961, rocket-shaped playground equipment and other mementos of Soviet space exploration were installed around the village.