American Nukes

About Bomarc

SAGE stands for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. (If you ever wanted proof that the acronym comes first, then the words that justify the acronym second, then here is that proof.) It was a computer-based system of identifying, tracking, and attacking Soviet bombers approaching the United States, and it went operational in 1959, a year or two after the Soviets demonstrated their first ICBM. SAGE was already far down the road to obsolescence the day it was introduced.

The idea was to use the data available to military planners—information coming in from long-range radars, from surveillance ships, from aircraft flying watchful patrols, from new kinds of radar stations, from weather reports, and from travel-plots of known civilian and friendly military airplanes—to create a real-time understanding of a surprise attack.

Although the Air Force was little interested in any such system before 1949—they never worried much about Soviet bombers in North America since the Air Force would be busy attacking the Russians elsewhere—the detonation of Joe-1, the West’s nickname for the first Russian nuclear test, changed (almost) everyone’s mind, putting pressure on the Air Force from the highest levels of government and from the public to do something to protect the homeland.

So they built SAGE, investing massive amounts of money to create almost two dozen data centers, with dual computers for redundancy at each center, each computer covering nearly 11,000 square feet of floor space. Connected by phone lines and developing technologies that would look familiar today—magnetic core memories, and graphical user interfaces, among many others—the SAGE project was an opportunity of a lifetime. IBM, for example, transformed into a computing powerhouse due to SAGE, its largest contract of the 1950s, with 80% of its profits in the first half of the decade coming from just this one contract. SAGE transformed the computing industry as well, at its peak employing eight hundred programmers, twenty percent of the programmers in the world, and spinning off countless companies.

SAGE took in data from a myriad of sources but its outputs were far fewer. It could be used to order an attack on incoming blips on the radar screen by fighter-interceptors or it could be used to command the launch of missiles, potentially hundreds of miles away from the human pushing the button. One of the key weapons in the Air Force’s arsenal for SAGE was the Bomarc, resembling a fighter jet in many ways, it was a nuclear weapon ultimately based at eight sites in the US and two more in Canada (though the Air Force had once dreamed of fifty-two such sites).

The great rival of the Bomarc was the Army’s Nike-Hercules and the great rival of the Air Force was the US Army itself, with debates about the two weapons systems, and the mountain of money that went along with them and other nuclear arms projects, spilling over again and again into press, driven by high-level leaks within each branch. War planning is a nasty business.

The missiles themselves lived in above-ground “coffins,” in the gaps between two protective, reinforced buildings. A removable roof would pull away, the missile would elevate and launch, guided by ground signals until it acquired the target itself.

There were two versions. The first was a liquid-fuel model which took valuable time to gas up, its fuel too corrosive to be left inside the missile, not to mention the fuel’s propensity to self-ignite. A Bomarc at McGuire AFB in 1960 caught fire—just after the missile was introduced—and resulted in the nuclear warhead melting down in a radioactive puddle. The second version used solid propellant, where the missile could be kept in a ready-to-go state at all times, a welcome improvement. The less bulky fuel also allowed the new version greater range.

But like SAGE (a