The 15-Year Alert

Three days after the Korean War began, in June 1950, the U.S. hurriedly put a few rickety, World War II fighters at Long Island's Mitchell Air Force Base on 24-hour alert against the threat of an attack by Soviet intercontinental bombers. Both the threat and the alert have proved to be enduring. This week the U.S. Air Defense Command (ADC) rounds out 15 years of continuous, round-the-clock alert status--and it has come a long way from the time when P47 Thunderbolts and F-51 Mustangs were among the hottest items in its inventory.

"In those days," recalls an ADC officer, "we were begging and borrowing whatever we could." Except for a few F-86s, the ADC had no interceptors or all-weather fighters. Its radar system included many "lash-up" sites, so called because the radar was literally lashed to the tops of telephone poles. Where there were gaps in the radar coverage, a Ground Observer Corps of housewives and farmers, gas station attendants and even commuters stood ready to phone in aircraft sightings.

From such patchwork beginnings, the ADC has evolved into a 100,000-man force with $8 billion worth of equipment, a $1 billion-a-year budget and 1,500,000 miles of communications circuits. The largest component of the multiservice North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) at Colorado Springs, ADC is commanded by Lieut. General Herbert B. Thatcher, who flew one of the F-51s at Mitchell 15 years ago. Its major missions:

sbDETECTION. ADC has developed a radar network that includes the Pinetree Line along the northern U.S. border, the Mid-Canada Line, the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line at the Arctic Circle, and Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) bases at Clear, Alaska; Thule, Greenland; and Fyling-dales Moor, England. Under development: over-the-horizon radar capable of detecting missiles on actual launching from Russia or China, which will give the U.S. 30 minutes of warning instead of the present 15.

sbDESTRUCTION. Down from its 1957 peak of 88 squadrons and 2,000 planes, ADC still has 59 squadrons, 1,400 fighters. Among the weapons they carry are infra-red Falcon missiles, heat-seeking Sidewinders, Genie air-to-air rockets, capable of toting nuclear warheads for demolishing enemy bomber formations. The fighters are linked to radar sites by the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment System (SAGE), which guides them straight to their targets, does everything but fire their weapons. ADC also mans six Bomarc surface-to-air missile squadrons in the northeastern U.S.; two Bomarc squadrons in Canada and hundreds of Army Hawk and Nike-Hercules missile batteries in the U.S. are under control of the parent NORAD command.

Despite this impressive array of hardware, ADC and NORAD officers are pushing for at least three new defense systems: 1) the 2,000-m.p.h. YF-12A manned interceptor; 2) the Airborne Warning Control System (AWACS), using high-flying radar planes to detect low-flying bombers that try to sneak in under regular radar; 3) the Army's Nike-X system (TIME, June 18), designed to destroy enemy missiles. So far, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has not given a go-ahead on any of the three.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.