Peter Stickney wrote:
In article ,
"George Z. Bush" writes:

AIR, the "dew line" was established to give us 20 minutes notice of inbound
Soviet missiles, wasn't it? If so, I think the actual time when MAD became
our joint policies would have been in the middle fifties, or perhaps even a
little bit earlier, to coincide with our government having learned that the
Soviets had stolen our nuclear secrets and were acting on them.

The DEW Line was the line of conventional radar stations roughly along
the Arctic Circle. Not much good against ICBMs, but you'd get at
least an hour's "heads up" for a Bison/Bear/B-52 type transonic
bomber (and at least 2 hours vs. something like a Tu-4) reaching the
boundaries of the Contigous Radar Cover that began with the Mid-Canada
Line and ran all the way down to the U.S. Southern borders. They'd
have to grind their way down for an equivalant length of time to have
any worthwhile targets to hit - most of Candada's ppopulation, and
thus anything worth hitting, is within 200 miles of the U.S. border.

Once they hit the contiguous radar cover, theyre'd be enough tracking
information to allow them to be intercepted by whatever NORAD had at
the time. And there was an awful lot of NORAD, back then. When SAGE
came along in the late '50s, it became almost impossible to saturate
the defences, since the weak link - Human controllers sending voice
commands to the Interceptors - wasn't as important. I wouldn't
have wanted to in the Soviet Long Range Aviation, that's for sure.

That's one of the things that pushed the Soviets toward ICBMs rather
than somewhat bigger/faster winged aircraft (M-50 anyone?) that didn't
have a much better chance against the defences than teh slower
airplanes.

BMEWS was the response to the threat of ICBMs coming over the Pole.
But, in some ways, we were still further along than the Soviets wer in
building and deploying useful ICBMs and SLBMs. Kruschev was great at
showing off spactacular feats of missilery, and veiled, and not so
veiled threats to use his missiles, but that wasn't backed up by what
was in the field. Consider, if you will, that if the Soviets had had
a viable ICBM or SLBM force in 1962, they wouldn't have tried putting
the short-range missiles in Cuba. That whole business grew out of the
Soviet's knowledge that they couldn't effectively strike. (Either First
Strike or Second Strike)

That was all very interesting, and certainly did much to refresh flagging
memories. However, it still didn't resolve the starting date for MAD, because
it ignored the ongoing SAC airborne alerts and the nuclear armed subs roaming
the oceans. I personally have the feeling that the MAD doctrine evolved from
recognition of those SAC policies by the Soviets, which would place the date at
or before construction of the DEW line.

All guesswork on my part. What do you think?

George Z.