Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

Despite serious doubts that the United States could ever be protected against a nuclear attack, work began on an air defense and early-warning system. At the very least, the Joint Chiefs concluded, such a system would “provide a reasonable degree of protection for the essential elements of the war-making capacity”—SAC bases, naval bases, command centers, and nuclear weapon storage sites in the ZI. The Army erected batteries of Nike antiaircraft missiles to defend military installations and American cities. The Navy obtained radar-bearing “picket ships” and built “Texas towers” to search for Soviet bombers approaching over the ocean. The picket ships lingered about five hundred miles off the coast of the United States; the Texas towers were moored to the seafloor, like oil platforms, closer to shore. The Air Force assembled squadrons of jet fighter-interceptors, like the F-89 Scorpion, and developed its own antiaircraft missile, the BOMARC — infuriating the Army, which had traditionally controlled the nation’s antiaircraft weapons.

More important, the Air Force started to build a Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line of radar stations two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. Stretching from the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, across Canada, to Greenland, the DEW Line was supposed to scan the polar route from the Soviet Union and provide at least two hours’ warning of an attack. It was later extended west to Midway Island in the Pacific and east to Mormond Hill in Scotland, a distance of about twelve thousand miles. Its construction required the transport of almost half a million tons of building material into the Arctic, where thousands of workers labored in temperatures as low as –70 degrees Fahrenheit. A sense of urgency pervaded the effort; the United States seemed completely unprotected against Soviet planes carrying hydrogen bombs. Begun in February 1955, construction of the DEW Line’s fifty-seven Arctic radar stations — some of them featuring radio antennae forty stories high, airstrips more than a mile long, and housing for the civilian and Air Force personnel who manned the facilities around the clock — was largely completed in about two and a half years.

Through an agreement with the Canadian government, the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) was organized in 1957, with its headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. NORAD’s mission was to provide early warning of an attack and mount a defense against it. If Soviet bombers were detected approaching North American airspace, fighter-interceptors would be sent to shoot them down as far as possible from the United States. Antiaircraft missiles would be fired at enemy planes that managed to get past the interceptors — first BOMARC missiles, then Nike. Coordinating the many elements of the system during an attack would be an extraordinarily complex task. Signals would be arriving from picket ships, Texas towers, DEW Line sites, airborne radars. Hundreds of Soviet bombers might have to be spotted and followed, their positions sent to antiaircraft batteries and fighter bases separated by thousands of miles. During the Second World War, Army radar operators had tracked enemy planes and used shared information about their flight paths verbally. That sort of human interaction would be impossible if large numbers of high-speed bombers approached the United States from different directions. The Air Force proposed a radical solution: automate the system and transfer most of its command-and-control functions to machines.

“The computerization of society,” the technology writer Frank Rose later observed, was essentially a “side effect of the computerization of war.” America’s first large-scale electronic digital computer, ENIAC, had been built during the 1940s to help the Army determine the trajectory of artillery and antiaircraft shells. The war ended before ENIAC was completed, and its first official use was to help Los Alamos with early calculations for the design of a thermonuclear weapon. Los Alamos later relied on the more advanced MANIAC computer and its successor, MANIAC II, for work on the hydrogen bomb. Driven by the needs of weapon designers and other military planners, the U.S. Department of Defense was soon responsible for most of the world’s investment in electronic computing.