Word: sacs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Strategic Air Command. The U.S. mowed down in one day's U.N. Security Council debate the U.S.S.R.'s propaganda charges against "provocative" SAC flights over the Arctic (TIME, April 28), mustered up such a huge majority (possibly nine to one) that the U.S.S.R. withdrew the complaint. Then the U.S. called on the U.N. Security Council to reopen debate on the U.S. proposal, rejected by the U.S.S.R. last summer, for an Arctic "open skies" inspection zone...
...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...
...today's kind of instant warfare, SAC will know long before the alert crews get to the Fail Safe point whether the attack upon the West is real or just a commonplace false alarm. Chances are overwhelming that the alert airplanes will be recalled long before they get to Fail Safe point...
...actual practice-contrary to United Press President Frank Bartholomew's report* on an imaginary SAC flight that the Kremlin was waving around as the basis for its propaganda onslaught-SAC planes have never reached their Fail Safe points in an emergency scramble caused by unidentifiable radar blips, let alone flown beyond Fail Safe points. This is the basis of the U.S.'s denial of the U.S.S.R.'s charges. But SAC constantly scrambles on real and test alerts; so realistic are SAC scrambles that SAC crews always head out toward Fail Safe point not knowing whether their mission...
...would be a major propaganda victory indeed if Khrushchev could bamboozle the West into keeping SAC's bombers on the ground. For then Khrushchev could rattle his rockets without fear of successful contradiction...