Word: sacs
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...backing of its allies. The summit meeting came at a time when all evidence indicated that in the competition between the U.S. and Russia, the U.S. was doing well. The revelation that U.S. planes had been flying over Russia for four years helped to reassure the nervous that SAC still could deliver its deterrent blow despite Khrushchev's vaunted rockets, and was an encouraging indication that U.S. intelligence had resources more sophisticated than those of Brooklyn-based Soviet Agent Rudolf Abel, now serving 30 years in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for his spying. Where the varied dissatisfactions of the Chinese...
...have been energetically improving and expanding far northern airbases from the Kola Peninsula near Scandinavia to the Chukotski Peninsula opposite Alaska. Crews of some 1,000 medium Badger bombers and 200 heavy Bisons have been training hard at airborne refueling operations, are currently rated on a par with U.S. SAC crews. Some of these planes have been seen landing on floating ice islands, which the Russians maintain as emergency landing strips in the Arctic...
Hound Dog was developed in record time of 30 months. Back in August of 1957, SAC put in a hurry call for an air-launched missile. The order: get it ready by 1960. To meet the deadline, Air Force Research and Development people made a missile out of existing systems. They...
Sentries & Showers. But SAC rarely runs an alert beyond Alpha (crew in the cockpit) or Bravo (engine run-up), never beyond Coco (takeoff position on the runway). SAC does not fly cocked aircraft. Reason: any change in a plane's ground alert status is regarded as "uncocking" and lessens the alert capability. Alert planes returning from a practice mission would be in no shape for a real-life turn-around to actual war missions: if they were in the landing pattern when the klaxon sounded the real thing, they would have to be refueled and their crews would need...
Nevertheless, SAC crews play their deadly game of Beat the Clock as if each alert were the real thing. And when they get the sign-off, they return to their moleholes to await again the sound of that eerie klaxon; it could come again in five minutes or five hours. Usually, though, the alert crews can count on enough time to clean up. "The only time you dare take a shower," says one pilot, "is right after an alert. Some day they'll fool us and blow the horn again just after we get back...