DEFENSE: 3,000-Mile Watchdogs

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Near Thule, Greenland, and Clear, Alaska, the U.S. Air Force is quietly building two huge long-range radar stations designed to cover the Communist land mass from the Pacific to Poland and give early warning of Communist missile strikes at a range of 3,000 miles. Name of project: Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, or BMEWS (pronounced be-muse). Cost: $1 billion. The Air Force hopes to complete the Thule station this year, the Clear station in 1960, hopes to get BMEWS operational by the time the Communists are expected to begin deploying sizable intercontinental missile forces in 1961.

The 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 150-ft. domes—three at Thule, two at Clear—will track the incoming missiles, feed data on speed, course, etc. into computers to determine at what point the missiles are aimed in the U.S. The Air Force expects to build a third and close-in BMEWS station in Scotland to track missiles that might be fired westward across the Atlantic.

BMEWS, locked into existing U.S. radar chains, including the $600 million DEW line across North Canada-Alaska, will instantaneously feed its data on the incoming missiles into North American Air Defense Command at Colorado Springs and into the Air Force's Strategic Air Command. Theoretically, SAC would have 20 minutes or so to get thermonuclear bombers airborne while the President or his authorized deputies take the decision whether or not to launch the bomber counterstrike. The President or his deputies will also decide—in perhaps five minutes—whether or not to launch the U.S.'s handful of intercontinental missiles, which, unlike aircraft, cannot be recalled. Tactical assumption: the Communists, if attacking the U.S., will fire clouds of missiles, which will be unmistakable on BMEWS screens, thus making the counterstrike decision inevitable.

The Air Force's BMEWS has its critics, notably in the Army, who point out that BMEWS is not specifically designed to lock into the Army's developing Nike Zeus system, in which antimissiles will be fired automatically at incoming missiles, once detected. But in BMEWS, in the general sense, the U.S. will get a welcome new weapon for the missile gap until more advanced systems of early-warning-and-missile defense become available. Among the wild-blue-yonder possibilities: 1) observation of the Communist land mass from space satellites in the 1960s (see SCIENCE); 2) creation of anti-missile radiation belts—"death rays"—that might make sectors of sky impassable to missiles by the 1970s-1980s, much as they have in space fiction for years.