Word: radars
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...testimony, shaggy-browed, often emotional Dr. Edward Teller (TIME, Nov. 18) ran off a grim morning line on U.S. chances in the race for survival. The University of California physicist estimated that Russia is closing the gap in nuclear weapons, is about equal to the U.S. in aircraft and radar development, is ahead in ballistic missiles. Said Teller: "I would not say that the Russians caught up with us because they stole our secrets. They caught up with us because they worked harder. A Russian boy thinks about becoming a scientist like our young girls dream about becoming a movie...
...simplest countermeasure, says Klass, is radio jamming that drowns out enemy radar or communications by brute electronic force. This sort of thing is now considered as crude as bayonet fighting. The modern objective is to blind the enemy, make him see double or lead him astray, preferably without letting him know that anything is amiss...
Next step is to devise equipment that will cope in some way with the enemy's latest dodges. About the oldest passive electronic defense is "chaff"* strips of aluminum foil tossed from an airplane to give a reflection that an enemy radar mistakes for another airplane. This worked fine with the comparatively slow bombers of World War II, but the wind-drifted puffs of chaff are too easy to distinguish from fast-flying modern bombers. A promising improvement is to fire rockets loaded with chaff ahead of the bomber as a sort of smoke screen...
More interesting are active countermeasures, most of which depend on one of radar's basic weaknesses. Radar sends out radio waves that "illuminate" the target just like the light from a searchlight. Then it listens for reflections of its own waves and uses their timing and direction to tell where the target is. If the target is a well-equipped airplane, its countermeasures expert knows when he is being illuminated, and he usually knows it long before the reflections from his airplane get strong enough to be detected by the radar...
Warned in advance, he can play many tricks on the radar. One trick is to analyze its waves and then broadcast stronger waves that are just like them. If these are properly timed, the radar that picks them up will see a target at the wrong distance, and it may send a flight of interceptors to shoot down a bomber that is not there...