Word: norad
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This ability to spot a missile is the result of a mammoth effort. It took 2,900 firms two years to build and equip the Thule station and three years to build a similar station at Clear, Alaska. Both were turned over to NORAD on New Year's Day, 1962. A third station under construction at Fylingdales Moor in England will complete this Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS...
...detect satellites, NORAD has a new electronic fence across the Southern states of the U.S. Its transmitters hurl radio energy hundreds of miles from the earth; its receivers catch satellite reflections for quick triangulation and tracking. It has detected space junk as small as a 14-ft. strand of wire from an old satellite. Says Captain Orville Greynolds, a spacetrack officer in Colorado Springs: "No one could launch a space vehicle and keep it a secret. We are positive we have checked and tracked all Russian objects now in space...
...NORAD has also completed a four-station, $113 million Eastern extension to its 4½-year-old Distant Early Warning radar, which now stretches some 4,500 miles across the Arctic to provide aircraft detection. Just supplying the DEW line takes $14 million a year, involves 45,000 tons of cargo, shipped by air, tankers, LSTs and barges. Backing up the DEW lines are the mid-Canada line of radar stations on the 55th parallel, along with gap-plugging, low-altitude radar eyes spotted throughout the U.S. and Canada, seagoing picket ships, airborne radar and Texas towers...
...system is such that a NORAD officer can point to a mark on the headquarters battle map, indicating a plane above Siberia, push a readout button and, in seconds, learn the plane's height, speed, direction and how long it would take to reach any major U.S. city. If a strike should come, NORAD's fighter-interceptors are so equipped that a single commander on the ground can, through computers, coordinate hundreds of them in a defensive attack...
Frets & Fears. For all its wonders of communications, coordination and electronics, there are some gaps in NORAD's shield-and no one is more aware of them than NORAD's integrated U.S. and Canadian staff, which is directly responsible to the U.S. Joint Chiefs and the Canadian Chiefs of Staff Committee. NORAD directs some 50 fighter-interceptor squadrons, and has absorbed the former Air Defense Commands of the two countries. Most of the detection system's aircraft-seeking radar and all its missile-hunting antennas are poised toward the north, in logical anticipation of a possible polar...