Word: command
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Poised around the U.S.S.R.'s 37,500-mile perimeter, the U.S. Air Force's Strategic Air Command, a 2,000-bomber force capable in a single sortie of hitting the U.S.S.R. with 2,000 times the total explosive power of World War II, took K.'s rocket-rattling with professional seriousness. SAC began to cut down the "reaction time" of its strike force-hundreds of bombers-from two hours to 15 minutes. This was the Air Force's best estimate of the warning SAC bases would get before an enemy missile strike (TIME...
...pressure on a foot pedal or hand lever is released, and the train automatically goes into an emergency stop. Fail Safe at SAC means that SAC bomber crews, launched in an alert, do not proceed toward their preassigned target beyond a preassigned coordinate point without a coded follow-up command. Only beyond the Fail Safe point are SAC crews permitted even to arm their nuclear weapons...
...specific procedure is that whenever unidentified and unidentifiable shapes show up on U.S. radar, e.g., the $500 million DEW line across Northern Canada and Alaska, or the ship-based radar networks in mid-Atlantic and mid-Pacific, a SAC alert is declared. In his underground command post at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, General Power or a deputy orders one of scores of Emergency War Plans-E.W.P.s-designed to meet every calculated contingency to be put into immediate operation. SAC flashes its orders-"PLAN BLANK"-to any or all of some 70 SAC bases worldwide. At the bases...
Should they get to Fail Safe point without getting coded follow-up orders to proceed, they must automatically turn around and head home. Should they get the order to go on-e.g., "Implement Plan Red Fox Eight"-they must still check the order with base command; they must go through several cross checks on message and frequency to ensure against decoy; they must get yet another confirmatory order to proceed. In a normal tactical situation, the only man who can give the final order to attack is the President of the U.S., who relays it to General Power...
Open Invitation. "If ever there was an open invitation to the concept of the 'man on horseback,' this proposal is it," he intoned. The President, he declared, was trying to set up "a Prussian-type supreme command" that would eliminate military responsibilities of the service Secretaries, grant too great flexibility to the Defense Secretary in spending congressional appropriations-in effect, shut out Congress' watchful eye. "I know of no concept more dangerous...