Word: thule
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Noon Alarm. On one famous occasion they worked too well. One October night in 1960, as the powerful pulses from Thule's radar swept rhythmically over the icecap, back came strong reflections that showed as targets on the radar screens. This was just what BMEWS was built for. Warning of possible missile attack flashed across ice and tundra to the North American Air Defense Command at Colorado Springs; a frantic flap spread over the continent. Airbases waited for red alerts, their bombers poised on the runways. Roused out of bed at home in Moorestown, Holmes listened carefully...
Open Secret. Two years ago, NORAD had no way to locate either missiles or satellites. Now, under the prodding of General Laurence Sherman Kuter, 56, commander in chief of the Pacific Air Forces from 1957 to 1959, NORAD can do both. At Thule, Greenland, two powerful beams fan northward over the Arctic from four antennas, each the size of a 3O-story building. While still ascending, an enemy missile would pass through the low-altitude beam, then the higher one, providing a fix for computers to crank out its speed, direction, probable point of impact. Fifteen minutes before the missile...
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...
They may never see their alma mater, and her football games come out of the radio. But last week more than 13,000 University of Maryland undergraduates began a new semester as eagerly as if they were back in College Park. Their campus is global, stretching from frigid Thule in Greenland to burning Dhahran on the Persian Gulf. Stationed at U.S. bases around the world, the students are members of Maryland's booming Overseas Program for American servicemen. Just ten years old, the program may be having as much impact on U.S. education as the invention of the junior...
...scope of BMEWS is rated by Air Force men as "something fantastic." While construction work by Army engineers goes on at Thule and Clear, Air Force engineers, electronics contractors and subcontractors are building monster radar screens, each half again as long as a football field, tough enough to stand against 185-knot gales. The screens-four at Thule, three at Clear-will detect Communist missiles along a direct line of sight tangential to the earth after the missiles have been airborne for five minutes of their 30-or-so-minute nights toward U.S. targets. Then smaller radars inside mammoth...