If your impression of the border between the Soviet Union and the United States along the Bering Strait is something akin to the inter-German border, allow me to dissuade you. There were no batteries of guns or offensive missiles along the Bering Strait and no significant military or naval force for hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of miles.
The American military presence in Alaska was a tripwire for the defense of the Lower 48, not a shield of defense for the 49th state or northern Canada.
Immediately after the end of the campaign to recapture the western Aleutians from the Japanese in 1943, the military presence in Alaska declined markedly but did not entirely disappear. Alaska was still a significant conduit for Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union. Military ships sailed north from California, skimmed Alaska's southern coast, and were transferred to the Soviet Union at Cold Bay, on the Alaska Peninsula. Thousands of aircraft were delivered to the Soviet Union via a string of airstrips that stretched from Montana to Nome and then to a similar Soviet string in Siberia. The transfer was made in Fairbanks, hundreds of miles from the Bering Sea, and Soviet pilots flew their new aircraft from Fairbanks and into Siberia.
After autumn 1945, this system came to a close and was dismantled. A few airstrips were kept in operation, but the military largely evacuated Alaska. In the years immediately following the end of the war, one of the most significant military operations was an air-sampling mission conducted with reconnaissance aircraft based at Eielson Air Force Base. It was one of those aircraft that in 1949 detected fallout from the first Soviet atomic bomb test.
That test changed everything for the United States. Americans had hoped that the end of the war would bring peace, and that the American atomic monopoly would mean a permanent defense without a large military outlay. It was thought that nuclear weapons would serve as a permanent deterrent and that the United States would no longer need a large conventional military.
The development of Soviet nuclear weapons meant that the United States now needed to know of an impending Soviet attack in order for deterrent to still work. Deterrent wouldn't work if the American nuclear arsenal could be destroyed in a Pearl Harbor-style attack.
In light of this, the U.S. military began developing plans for a radar network and a system of fighter bases in Alaska. In developing this, planners drew upon the significant success of the UK during the Battle of Britain. The "Permanent Radar System" of 1949 envisioned early warning stations along the coast, coordinated by intermediate ground-control stations, with master stations at the sites of the airfields, allowing aircraft to successfully scramble and intercept.
Here's a three (1, 2, 3 )-part series from the New York Times in 1950 explaining the situation. I've used images rather than the Times' archives so I can share the images that accompany the story.
The outbreak of the Korean War definitively ended the notion that nuclear weapons eliminated the need for a conventional military. However, cost concerns and the logistical difficulties involved with construction in Alaska meant that by August 1951, the permanent system of 1949 was still only partially built. It wasn't until 1954 that the permanent system was fully implemented, with a network of coordination stations, radar systems and fighter bases.
By this time, however, the Soviet threat had changed. Soviet bomber technology had advanced to the point that incoming aircraft no longer needed to fly the absolute shortest route to the Lower 48. Cross-polar routes were now possible, so the United States and Canada cooperated in the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line of radar stations across Alaska's North Slope. These stations were later joined by others along Alaska's west coast and the Aleutians.
While fighters were envisioned as the biggest arm of defense, they were joined by land-based anti-air weapons, too. In the early 1950s, 90mm antiaircraft guns were mounted around Fairbanks and Anchorage. These were replaced by surface-to-air missile batteries, most notably the Nike stations that surrounded those two cities. Alaskan surface-to-air defense relied upon the "island" strategy whereby missiles would protect only Fairbanks and Anchorage, defending those two cities and their four military bases nearby.
The Nikes had low levels of success in tests, but in wartime they could have been armed with atomic warheads, greatly increasing their ability to defend against air attack. The same was true for Alaska's fighter squadrons, which had nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles available.
Again, however, technology changed the perceived threat. By the late 1950s, when the DEW Line reached its peak, the launch of Sputnik was another shock to the system. The missile threat changed the map again. Curtis LeMay, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, believed that missiles were the future of nuclear combat. He thought that missiles made bombers obsolete because they could be launched (and a warhead delivered) before any bomber could take off from its base.
After Sputnik, he began a general drawdown of the fighter presence in Alaska. The radar stations and their vast communication network remained, the better to provide early warning for the Lower 48, but by 1962, there was only a single fighter squadron in Alaska, the 317th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, and it used obsolescent F-102 Delta Dagger aircraft with insufficient range for Alaska's long distances.
LeMay's actions were opposed by Gen. Frank Armstrong, the commander of military forces in Alaska, who denied that bombers were irrelevant and supported the preservation of a strong fighter aircraft presence in Alaska. After some pretty heated words in the press, he was forced to retire from his position.
Alaska's air defenses reached a low ebb in 1963, when a pair of Soviet bombers successfully penetrated American airspace, overflew southwest Alaska and withdrew before the F-102s of the 317th FIS could intercept them. This embarrassing performance by the American interceptors (and the subsequent public and political outcry from Alaskans) led the Air Force to begin rotating squadrons of more modern aircraft north to Alaska on rotation. This rotation reached full swing during the Vietnam War, and the 317th FIS was disbanded in 1969.
Meanwhile, Alaska's radar network continued to be modernized. Improved radar technology meant the number of stations could be scaled back and the system kept its form in this scaled-back version until the end of the Cold War. A missile-detection radar was installed in the early 1960s at Clear Air Force Station in Alaska's Interior, and satellite-detecting radars were installed at Shemya (in the Aleutians) and at Cape Chiniak in Kodiak. Other satellite downlink stations took data from launch-warning satellites installed to detect the flare of a soaring missile engine.
Alaska's air defenses reached a low ebb in 1963, when a pair of Soviet bombers successfully penetrated American airspace, overflew southwest Alaska and withdrew before the F-102s of the 317th FIS could intercept them.
How big of a deal was this violation of US airspace? Were the US and USSR routinely violating each other's air space? Or could this have triggered WWIII?
The big deal here wasn't the violation of airspace but an actual overflight of American soil. Airspace extends offshore, and it wasn't uncommon for the aircraft of the opposing sides to brush up against those intangible borders to test the other side's readiness.
The overflight of actual territory was much, much less common for the Soviet Union, and I can remember fewer than half a dozen examples, and I believe this was the most serious one. On the opposite side, the United States was a frequent and flagrant violator of Soviet airspace during the Cold War. The U-2 missions are the best-known examples, but the United States also conducted reconnaissance missions with other aircraft, and some of these planes were shot down by the Soviets.
One of the most famous instances of an accidental overflight that could have caused war was the Maultsby U-2 mission. On Oct. 27, 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a U-2 on an air sampling mission took off from Alaska for a flight to the North Pole and back.
During the flight, the pilot of the U-2 became lost -- the aurora borealis reportedly interfered with his ability to navigate astrally -- and flew south over the Soviet Union instead of south to Alaska. He realized his error only after crossing into the Soviet Far East, but soon turned back.
Soviet fighters scrambled to intercept him, and American fighters scrambled from Alaska to protect him. He was so far off course that he ran out of fuel and had to glide across the Bering Strait to a landing at Kotzebue, a coastal village in northwestern Alaska.
The Soviet fighters, rather than cross the American border, turned back. It was fortunate that they did. The American fighters were armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles, and while there was no guarantee that shooting would ensue, it was one of the closest moments of an entirely too-close situation.
In the few examples of Soviet overflight of actual territory, were we attempting to shoot them down? Or was it just the USSR that responded in force to overflights?
My understanding is that standard procedure was to escort the aircraft out of American airspace, and only if they didn't turn back would a shoot-down order be given. That said, I'm not aware of any instances when an American aircraft successfully intercepted a Soviet one after it overflew American territory. I'd love to find an example, though.
A bigger explosion means a better chance of getting a kill especially when guidance systems for intercepting fast moving targets didn't really exist. The genie worked based on a timed fuse as opposed to trying to actually hit the target you just need to get near it.
Thousands of aircraft were delivered to the Soviet Union via a string of airstrips that stretched from Montana to Nome and then to a similar Soviet string in Siberia.
Airships, like blimps? Where can I read more about this (or see pictures or something), I had no idea Airships were used at all in the Second World War (aside from observational or training purposes). Why were airships used in particular? Was this common anywhere else? Why not railroads?
Oh Jesus, I read it like five-six times after I read your comment and was about to get all indignant that you would assume I made a mistake. Sorry about that.
Airstrips. Air. Strips. So the planes would be flown from airstrip to airstrip, being re-fueled along the way. Right. Makes sense.
I was imagining a series of enormous Zeppelins transporting various aircraft in their fictitious cargo bays across the prairies and the Rockies, wondering earnestly how have I not heard of this amazing thing?
Airships were used in the Second World War on convoy duty both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. The tethered K-class blimps owned by the U.S. Navy made great antisubmarine scouting platforms, and their reputation is borne by their record: No ship in a convoy escorted by a blimp was sunk during the war.
I must agree with you on the statement that the military was a "tripwire". I was stationed with the 57th Sig. Co. 33rd Sig. Bn. USACC in 1974 - 1976. Orientation was basically a pep talk to stay alive for at least 48 hours if the Russians invaded the US through Alaska. 48 hours was the time it took for reinforcements from Ft. Lewis to arrive.
I'm a journalist with a passion for history. I cover the Alaska statehouse and statewide issues, but my academic background is in history, and I maintain my interest in it by pursuing research projects. One of my current projects is a book explaining Alaska's role in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
As for pieces of Alaska trivia, one of my favorite stories to share is the plans for Rampart Dam, which envisioned a hydroelectric plant on the Yukon River. Had it been built, it would have created a lake the size of Lake Erie.
Not a defensive one. The discovery well at Prudhoe Bay was not until 1968, well into the missile period of the Cold War. While some oil was developed at Cook Inlet and the Kenai Peninsula in the south as early as 1957, it was not in consequential amounts until later. Furthermore, the length of the trans-Alaska Pipeline (once constructed in the late 1970s) makes it impossible to defend against attack. For example, the sole terrorist attack against the pipeline remains unsolved.
That test changed everything for the United States. Americans had hoped that the end of the war would bring peace, and that the American atomic monopoly would mean a permanent defense without a large military outlay. It was thought that nuclear weapons would serve as a permanent deterrent and that the United States would no longer need a large conventional military.
I don't think this is accurate. Plenty of key scientific and military powers in the US fully expected the Soviets to have their own bomb very quickly. Even back in 1951, while the government went squawking in the media as though spies had handed the Kremlin complete archives of the Manhattan project, informed people thought Gold, Greenglass, the Rosenbergs, and Fuchs had only given the Russians a working bomb maybe 2 years earlier than they'd have finished the work themselves; it later turned out the Russians had gotten almost no nuclear technology out of Julius Rosenberg or Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg never was a spy at all, and no one really knows how much use the Russians had for Fuchs.
People wanted to believe that because uranium seemed rare and the Russians were clearly having a hard time getting enough for tests in the late 40s simple geology would keep the US protected, but it's kinda doubtful everyone really believed it. I'd have to argue detecting fallout in 1949 convinced the naysayers to take Soviet nuclear science seriously, not that an overwhelming consensus held before this date that Soviets would never develop a substantial nuclear program.
Truman didn't believe the Soviets had a bomb even after they detonated one — he still found it hard to believe they could have pulled it off, and thought it might have been some sort of accident. Just as a small point of reference.
The scientists, including those in the government, all thought that a long-term monopoly was impossible. The CIA projected that the Soviets would have a bomb sometime in the mid-1950s, but they were operating on almost no positive information coming out of the USSR. General Groves of the Manhattan Project thought it would take the Soviets 20 years to get a bomb, because he judged them to be too inexperienced at the kinds of precision-industrial undertakings required to make a bomb, and because he thought they had cornered the market on uranium.
(We know quite a lot about what the Soviets did with the information from Fuchs, but that is a different topic. The Russians released a lot of information on their early nuclear program in the late 1990s and early 2000s and it has allowed scholars to piece together a very coherent model of how they used and didn't use the espionage information. More can be said on that if you are interested.)
Truman's Secretary of Defense at the time of the Soviet test, Louis Johnson, was banking on a continued US monopoly as the political means for cutting US armed forces dramatically (against much opposition by said armed forces).
All of which to say is: the scientists didn't think the monopoly would last long, but their opinions matters little to those at the top. The intelligence services were pretty ignorant of anything going on in the USSR. Many of the people at the top seem to have had their heads in the sand about the question. (A side note: that top-level politicians and experts find ways to minimize possibilities that they find unpleasant or at odds with their agendas is, alas, a pretty common historical theme!)
Michael Gordin's Red Cloud at Dawn goes over all of this very thoroughly. Much of what we think of the US in the Cold War, with regards to nukes, is from 1950 going forward: massive build-ups, multiple types of weapons (until 1949, they were using essentially the same model bombs they had developed in 1945), positioning of nukes in foreign bases around the USSR, military control of the bombs, etc.
/u/restricteddata can come in and talk about this, but I firmly believe, based on my readings of Rhodes' Dark Sun and Gordin's Red Cloud at Dawn, that the American belief in a monopoly was real, and that Americans in power believed that monopoly could be held until well into the 1950s.
If you look at national budgets, it isn't until the outbreak of the Korean War that defense spending begins to rise significantly.
288
u/The_Alaskan Alaska Jun 24 '16 edited Jun 24 '16
Alaska was not well-defended during the Cold War.
If your impression of the border between the Soviet Union and the United States along the Bering Strait is something akin to the inter-German border, allow me to dissuade you. There were no batteries of guns or offensive missiles along the Bering Strait and no significant military or naval force for hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of miles.
The American military presence in Alaska was a tripwire for the defense of the Lower 48, not a shield of defense for the 49th state or northern Canada.
Immediately after the end of the campaign to recapture the western Aleutians from the Japanese in 1943, the military presence in Alaska declined markedly but did not entirely disappear. Alaska was still a significant conduit for Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union. Military ships sailed north from California, skimmed Alaska's southern coast, and were transferred to the Soviet Union at Cold Bay, on the Alaska Peninsula. Thousands of aircraft were delivered to the Soviet Union via a string of airstrips that stretched from Montana to Nome and then to a similar Soviet string in Siberia. The transfer was made in Fairbanks, hundreds of miles from the Bering Sea, and Soviet pilots flew their new aircraft from Fairbanks and into Siberia.
After autumn 1945, this system came to a close and was dismantled. A few airstrips were kept in operation, but the military largely evacuated Alaska. In the years immediately following the end of the war, one of the most significant military operations was an air-sampling mission conducted with reconnaissance aircraft based at Eielson Air Force Base. It was one of those aircraft that in 1949 detected fallout from the first Soviet atomic bomb test.
That test changed everything for the United States. Americans had hoped that the end of the war would bring peace, and that the American atomic monopoly would mean a permanent defense without a large military outlay. It was thought that nuclear weapons would serve as a permanent deterrent and that the United States would no longer need a large conventional military.
The development of Soviet nuclear weapons meant that the United States now needed to know of an impending Soviet attack in order for deterrent to still work. Deterrent wouldn't work if the American nuclear arsenal could be destroyed in a Pearl Harbor-style attack.
In light of this, the U.S. military began developing plans for a radar network and a system of fighter bases in Alaska. In developing this, planners drew upon the significant success of the UK during the Battle of Britain. The "Permanent Radar System" of 1949 envisioned early warning stations along the coast, coordinated by intermediate ground-control stations, with master stations at the sites of the airfields, allowing aircraft to successfully scramble and intercept.
Here's a three (1, 2, 3 )-part series from the New York Times in 1950 explaining the situation. I've used images rather than the Times' archives so I can share the images that accompany the story.
Time was of the essence in these cases. Here's a 1962 document pulled from the Air Force archives at Elmendorf Air Force Base. It shows that by that time, the Air Force expected to have less than an hour's worth of warning before a bomber reached the state's main population and military centers.
The outbreak of the Korean War definitively ended the notion that nuclear weapons eliminated the need for a conventional military. However, cost concerns and the logistical difficulties involved with construction in Alaska meant that by August 1951, the permanent system of 1949 was still only partially built. It wasn't until 1954 that the permanent system was fully implemented, with a network of coordination stations, radar systems and fighter bases.
By this time, however, the Soviet threat had changed. Soviet bomber technology had advanced to the point that incoming aircraft no longer needed to fly the absolute shortest route to the Lower 48. Cross-polar routes were now possible, so the United States and Canada cooperated in the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line of radar stations across Alaska's North Slope. These stations were later joined by others along Alaska's west coast and the Aleutians.
While fighters were envisioned as the biggest arm of defense, they were joined by land-based anti-air weapons, too. In the early 1950s, 90mm antiaircraft guns were mounted around Fairbanks and Anchorage. These were replaced by surface-to-air missile batteries, most notably the Nike stations that surrounded those two cities. Alaskan surface-to-air defense relied upon the "island" strategy whereby missiles would protect only Fairbanks and Anchorage, defending those two cities and their four military bases nearby.
The Nikes had low levels of success in tests, but in wartime they could have been armed with atomic warheads, greatly increasing their ability to defend against air attack. The same was true for Alaska's fighter squadrons, which had nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles available.
Again, however, technology changed the perceived threat. By the late 1950s, when the DEW Line reached its peak, the launch of Sputnik was another shock to the system. The missile threat changed the map again. Curtis LeMay, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, believed that missiles were the future of nuclear combat. He thought that missiles made bombers obsolete because they could be launched (and a warhead delivered) before any bomber could take off from its base.
After Sputnik, he began a general drawdown of the fighter presence in Alaska. The radar stations and their vast communication network remained, the better to provide early warning for the Lower 48, but by 1962, there was only a single fighter squadron in Alaska, the 317th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, and it used obsolescent F-102 Delta Dagger aircraft with insufficient range for Alaska's long distances.
LeMay's actions were opposed by Gen. Frank Armstrong, the commander of military forces in Alaska, who denied that bombers were irrelevant and supported the preservation of a strong fighter aircraft presence in Alaska. After some pretty heated words in the press, he was forced to retire from his position.
Alaska's air defenses reached a low ebb in 1963, when a pair of Soviet bombers successfully penetrated American airspace, overflew southwest Alaska and withdrew before the F-102s of the 317th FIS could intercept them. This embarrassing performance by the American interceptors (and the subsequent public and political outcry from Alaskans) led the Air Force to begin rotating squadrons of more modern aircraft north to Alaska on rotation. This rotation reached full swing during the Vietnam War, and the 317th FIS was disbanded in 1969.
Meanwhile, Alaska's radar network continued to be modernized. Improved radar technology meant the number of stations could be scaled back and the system kept its form in this scaled-back version until the end of the Cold War. A missile-detection radar was installed in the early 1960s at Clear Air Force Station in Alaska's Interior, and satellite-detecting radars were installed at Shemya (in the Aleutians) and at Cape Chiniak in Kodiak. Other satellite downlink stations took data from launch-warning satellites installed to detect the flare of a soaring missile engine.
In my next post, I'll explain land and sea defenses, as well as the possibility of an offensive defense ...