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AN/FPS-17

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The AN/FPS-17 was a ground-based fixed-beam radar system that was installed at three locations worldwide, including Pirinçlik Air Base (formerly Diyarbakir Air Station) in south-eastern Turkey , Laredo, Texas and Shemya Island, Alaska.

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125-574: This system was deployed to satisfy scientific and technical intelligence collection requirements during the Cold War . The first installation (designated AN/FPS-17, XW-1) at Diyarbakir was originally intended to provide surveillance of the USSR 's missile test range at Kapustin Yar south of Stalingrad - especially to detect missile launchings. The data it produced, however, exceeded surveillance requirements, permitting

250-400: A time delay line . In 1924, Robert Mathes of Bell Telephone Laboratories filed a broad patent covering essentially all electromechanical delay lines, but focusing on acoustic delay lines where an air column confined to a pipe served as the mechanical medium, and a telephone receiver at one end and a telephone transmitter at the other end served as the electromechanical transducers. Mathes

375-480: A " reverberation " effect in musical instrument amplifiers, or to simulate an echo. High-speed oscilloscopes used an analog delay line to allow observation of waveforms just before some triggering event. Radar systems used liquid delay lines to compare one pulse of radio to another, and after World War II these were used as computer memory systems. With the growing use of digital signal processing techniques, digital forms of delay are practical and eliminate some of

500-767: A German rebuilding effort set forth by western European countries in 1948, the US, Britain and France spearheaded the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in April 1949. The Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany the German Democratic Republic that October. Media in the Eastern Bloc was an organ of the state , completely reliant on and subservient to

625-665: A different feed horn array and beam scanning method. In 1961, the AN/FPS-80 tracking radar was constructed nearby. Blue Fox refers to a modification of the AN/FPS-80 tracking radar to the AN/FPS-80(M) configuration in 1964. These radars were closed in the 1970s when the Cobra Dane phased array radar was built to monitor missile tests. Shemya was redesignated from an Air Force station to an Air Force base in 1968. The AN/FPS-17 Detection Radar at

750-466: A few nanoseconds or several milliseconds, limited by the practical size of the physical medium used to delay the signal and the propagation speed of impulses in the medium. Analog delay lines are applied in many types of signal processing circuits; for example the PAL television standard uses an analog delay line to store an entire video scanline . Acoustic and electromechanical delay lines are used to provide

875-423: A five-inch (127 mm) intensity-modulated oscilloscope with the camera shutter open on a 35 mm film moving approximately five inches per minute. The range of an individual target was represented by its location across the width of the film, the time by a dotdash code along the length. In addition to this positional information, the target's approximate radial velocity (velocity in the direction of observation)

1000-438: A formal requirement for such a radar was established, and Rome Air Development Center was given responsibility for engineering the system. In October 1954 General Electric , which had experience in producing high-power VHF equipment and radars, was awarded a contract for the fabrication, installation, and testing of what was to be at the time the world's largest and most powerful operational radar. The contract stipulated that

1125-635: A general term, in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb", published 19 October 1945 in the British newspaper Tribune . Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear warfare , Orwell looked at James Burnham 's predictions of a polarized world, writing: Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery... James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is,

1250-715: A liquid medium. He used water or kerosene , with a 10 MHz carrier frequency, with multiple baffles and reflectors in the delay tank to create a long acoustic path in a relatively small tank. In 1939, Laurens Hammond applied electromechanical delay lines to the problem of creating artificial reverberation for his Hammond organ . Hammond used coil springs to transmit mechanical waves between voice-coil transducers. The problem of suppressing multipath interference in television reception motivated Clarence Hansell of RCA to use delay lines in his 1939 patent application. He used "delay cables" for this, relatively short pieces of coaxial cable used as delay lines, but he recognized

1375-510: A major propaganda effort began in 1949 was Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , dedicated to bringing about the peaceful demise of the communist system in the Eastern Bloc. Radio Free Europe attempted to achieve these goals by serving as a surrogate home radio station, an alternative to the controlled and party-dominated domestic press in the Soviet Bloc. Radio Free Europe was a product of some of

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1500-626: A neutral Germany to prevent West Germany's incorporation into NATO, but his attempts were cut short after he was executed several months later during a Soviet power struggle. The events led to the establishment of the Bundeswehr , the West German military, in 1955. In 1949, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong 's People's Liberation Army defeated Chiang Kai-shek 's United States-backed Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist Government in China. The KMT-controlled territory

1625-655: A new war". On 6 September 1946, James F. Byrnes delivered a speech in Germany repudiating the Morgenthau Plan (a proposal to partition and de-industrialize post-war Germany) and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely. As Byrnes stated a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people ... it was a battle between us and Russia over minds ..." In December,

1750-433: A patent for the mercury delay line with piezoelectric transducers . This delay line technology would play an important role, serving as the basis of the delay-line memory used in several first-generation computers . In 1946, David Arenberg filed patents covering the use of piezoelectric transducers attached to single crystal solid delay lines. He tried using quartz as a delay medium and reported that anisotropy in

1875-683: A plan envisioning an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already taken by the Soviets. In June 1947, in accordance with the Truman Doctrine , the United States enacted the Marshall Plan , a pledge of economic assistance for all European countries willing to participate, including the Soviet Union. Under the plan, which President Harry S. Truman signed on 3 April 1948,

2000-505: A satellite orbit; one intersecting the Earth's surface describes a trajectory above the point of intersection. The parameters of the ellipse are iterated with the computer, establishing a best-fit ellipse constrained by a weighted least-squares criterion. Along this ellipse the target's track is computed -the history through time of latitude, longitude, altitude, and such velocity and angular parameters as may be of interest. A missile's actual range

2125-613: A secret 1950 document, the National Security Council proposed reinforcing pro-Western alliance systems and quadrupling spending on defense. Truman, under the influence of advisor Paul Nitze , saw containment as implying complete rollback of Soviet influence in all its forms. United States officials moved to expand this version of containment into Asia , Africa , and Latin America , in order to counter revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by communist parties financed by

2250-477: A source of intelligence. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the KGB perfected its use of espionage to sway and distort diplomacy. Active measures were "clandestine operations designed to further Soviet foreign policy goals," consisting of disinformation, forgeries, leaks to foreign media, and the channeling of aid to militant groups. Retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin , former head of Foreign Counter Intelligence for

2375-598: A three-letter code. Thus, the AN/FPS-17 represents the 17th design of an Army-Navy “Fixed, Radar, Search” electronic device. Experimentation with the detection of missiles by a modified SCR-270 radar in 1948 and 1949 at Holloman Air Force Base , New Mexico along with U.S. experience in the use of high-power components on other radars, created a basis for believing that a megawatt-rated radar could be fabricated for operation over much longer ranges than ever before. The need for intelligence on Soviet missile activity being acute,

2500-425: A three-second cycle to power each beam alternately for 1.5 seconds. There were antenna feeds for two additional beams which could be made to function with some patchwork in the wiring. The antenna feeds were positioned to produce in space the beam pattern depicted in the figure. Beams 1 and 18 were those not ordinarily energized. Beams 1 through 7 used the older of the two antennas; 8 through 18 were formed by

2625-530: A unified and neutral Germany was undesirable, with Walter Bedell Smith telling General Eisenhower "in spite of our announced position, we really do not want nor intend to accept German unification on any terms that the Russians might agree to, even though they seem to meet most of our requirements." Shortly thereafter, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade (June 1948 – May 1949), one of the first major crises of

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2750-502: Is probably shorter than that of its computed trajectory because of its non-elliptical thrusting path and atmospheric drag after its reentry. The difference is on the order of 10-nautical-mile (19 km) to 25 nautical miles (46 km) for short and medium range missiles, 50-nautical-mile (93 km) for ICBMs . GE and the Air Force recognized a need to conduct further research, development and testing that would not have been possible at

2875-685: Is then determined by using these parameters in the radar range equation where: Substituting, where: converting. and Sightings made by the fixed-beam system included vertical firings (for upper-atmosphere research vehicles or booster checkout ), ballistic missiles fired to the nominal 650-nautical-mile (1,200 km), 1,050-nautical-mile (1,940 km), and 2,000-nautical-mile (3,700 km) impact areas, launches of Cosmos satellites , orbiting satellites, and natural abnormalities such as ionospheric disturbances or aurora . Data on target missiles or satellites were recorded in each radar channel by photographing

3000-551: The Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic ". A week later, on 13 March, Stalin responded vigorously to the speech, saying Churchill could be compared to Adolf Hitler insofar as he advocated the racial superiority of English-speaking nations so that they could satisfy their hunger for world domination, and that such a declaration was "a call for war on the USSR." The Soviet leader also dismissed

3125-806: The Berlin Wall to prevent the citizens of East Berlin from fleeing to West Berlin , at the time part of United States-allied West Germany . Major crises of this phase included the Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949, the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1945–1949, the Korean War of 1950–1953, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Suez Crisis of that same year, the Berlin Crisis of 1961 ,

3250-852: The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the Vietnam War of 1964–1975. Both superpowers competed for influence in Latin America and the Middle East , and the decolonising states of Africa , Asia , and Oceania . Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, this phase of the Cold War saw the Sino-Soviet split . Between China and the Soviet Union's complicated relations within the Communist sphere, leading to

3375-837: The Eastern Bloc . Cominform faced an embarrassing setback the following June, when the Tito–Stalin split obliged its members to expel Yugoslavia, which remained communist but adopted a non-aligned position and began accepting financial aid from the US. Besides Berlin, the status of the city of Trieste was at issue. Until the break between Tito and Stalin, the Western powers and the Eastern bloc faced each other uncompromisingly. In addition to capitalism and communism, Italians and Slovenes, monarchists and republicans as well as war winners and losers often faced each other irreconcilably. The neutral buffer state Free Territory of Trieste , founded in 1947 with

3500-503: The KGB and involved in its intelligence operations, adhered to Moscow's line, although dissent began to appear after 1956. Other critiques of the consensus policy came from anti-Vietnam War activists , the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament , and the anti-nuclear movement . In early 1947, France, Britain and the United States unsuccessfully attempted to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union for

3625-506: The Kingdom of Greece in its civil war against Communist-led insurgents. In the same month, Stalin conducted the rigged 1947 Polish legislative election which constituted an open breach of the Yalta Agreement . The US government responded to this announcement by adopting a policy of containment , with the goal of stopping the spread of communism . Truman delivered a speech calling for

3750-556: The Sino-Soviet border conflict , while France, a Western Bloc state, began to demand greater autonomy of action. The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred to suppress the Prague Spring of 1968, while the United States experienced internal turmoil from the civil rights movement and opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War . In the 1960s–1970s, an international peace movement took root among citizens around

3875-718: The Soviet boycott of the Allied Control Council and its incapacitation, an event marking the beginning of the full-blown Cold War and the end of its prelude, as well as ending any hopes at the time for a single German government and leading to formation in 1949 of the Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic . The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid for Western Europe, Greece, and Turkey. With

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4000-722: The Space Defense Center , and again there was almost no likelihood that an anomalistic object could, or would, be tracked. The success of the FPS-17 technology led directly to the development of the larger and more powerful Ballistic Missile Warning System (BMEWS). BMEWS detection and tracking radars were prototyped on Trinidad Island and the operational installations were made at Thule, Greenland; Clear, Alaska; and Fylingdales Moor, UK. [REDACTED]  This article incorporates public domain material from the Air Force Historical Research Agency Cold War The Cold War

4125-594: The Space Race . The US and USSR were both part of the Allies of World War II , the military coalition which had defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. After the war, the USSR installed satellite governments in the territories of Eastern and Central Europe it had occupied, and promoted the spread of communism to North Korea in 1948 and created an alliance with the People's Republic of China in 1949. The US declared

4250-844: The Truman Doctrine of " containment " in 1947 as communist-led uprisings led to the Greek Civil War and First Indochina War , launched the Marshall Plan in 1948 to assist in Western Europe's economic recovery, and founded the NATO military alliance in 1949 (which was matched by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact in 1955). The Berlin Blockade took place, and Germany's occupation zones solidified into East and West Germany in 1949. The USSR tested its first nuclear weapon in August 1949, four years after

4375-593: The Turkish Straits crisis and Black Sea border disputes were also a major factor in increasing tensions. In September, the Soviet side produced the Novikov telegram, sent by the Soviet ambassador to the US but commissioned and "co-authored" by Vyacheslav Molotov ; it portrayed the US as being in the grip of monopoly capitalists who were building up military capability "to prepare the conditions for winning world supremacy in

4500-499: The United Nations Security Council Resolution 82 and 83 backed the defense of South Korea, although the Soviets were then boycotting meetings in protest of the fact that Taiwan (Republic of China), not the People's Republic of China , held a permanent seat on the council. A UN force of sixteen countries faced North Korea, although 40 percent of troops were South Korean, and about 50 percent were from

4625-450: The fall of the communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Western Bloc included the US and a number of First World nations that were generally capitalist and liberal democratic but tied to a network of often authoritarian Third World states, most of which were the European powers' former colonies . The Eastern Bloc was led by

4750-443: The 1960s and 1970s. If a new space object was sensed by the detection radar's fans, then the tracking radar could be oriented to achieve lock-on and tracking. The orientation was governed by knowledge of the appropriate "normal" object's astrodynamic laws of motion, or by an assumption as to launch point. Thus, if an unknown was detected, and if it followed an unusual path, it was unlikely that it could, or would, be tracked. Furthermore,

4875-460: The Cold War was in its essence a war of ideas. The United States, acting through the CIA, funded a long list of projects to counter the communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe and the developing world. The CIA also covertly sponsored a domestic propaganda campaign called Crusade for Freedom . The rearmament of West Germany was achieved in the early 1950s. Its main promoter was Konrad Adenauer ,

5000-459: The Cold War, preventing Western food, materials and supplies from arriving in the West Germany's exclave of West Berlin . The United States (primarily), Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several other countries began the massive "Berlin airlift", supplying West Berlin with food and other provisions despite Soviet threats. The Soviets mounted a public relations campaign against

5125-743: The Communist governments militarily. The fall of the Iron Curtain after the Pan-European Picnic and the Revolutions of 1989 , which represented a peaceful revolutionary wave with the exception of the Romanian revolution and the Afghan Civil War (1989–1992) , overthrew almost all of the Marxist–Leninist regimes of the Eastern Bloc. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control in

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5250-400: The KGB (1973–1979), described active measures as "the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence ." During the Sino-Soviet split , "spy wars" also occurred between the USSR and PRC. In September 1947, the Soviets created Cominform to impose orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control over Soviet satellites through coordination of communist parties in

5375-428: The Marshall Plan, seeing it as an effort by the US to impose its influence on Europe. In response, the Soviet Union established Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) to foster economic cooperation among communist states. The United States and its Western European allies sought to strengthen their bonds and used the policy of containment against Soviet influence; they accomplished this most notably through

5500-506: The Russian Civil War further complicated relations, and although the Soviet Union later allied with Western powers to defeat Nazi Germany , this cooperation was strained by mutual suspicions. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, disagreements about the future of Europe, particularly Eastern Europe , became central. The Soviet Union's establishment of communist regimes in the countries it had liberated from Nazi control—enforced by

5625-656: The Shemya AFB became operational in May 1960, and the AN/FPS-80 Tracking Radar became operational on April 1, 1962. Blue Nine refers to the project which produced the AN/FPS-79 Tracking Radar Set built by General Electric, used with the Air Force 466L Electromagnetic Intelligence System (ELINT). The Diyarbakir space surveillance site operated a detection radar (FPS-17) and a tracking radar (FPS-79) throughout

5750-475: The Soviet Union and its communist party , which had an influence across the Second World and was also tied to a network of authoritarian states. The Soviet Union had a command economy and installed similarly communist regimes its in satellites. United States involvement in regime change during the Cold War included support for anti-communist and right-wing dictatorships , governments, and uprisings across

5875-461: The Soviet Union was used to monitor dissent from official Soviet politics and morals. Although to an extent disinformation had always existed, the term itself was invented, and the strategy formalized by a black propaganda department of the Soviet KGB. Based on the amount of top-secret Cold War archival information that has been released, historian Raymond L. Garthoff concludes there probably

6000-556: The Soviet Union, which at the time was undergoing the Era of Stagnation . This phase saw the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introducing the liberalizing reforms of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("reorganization") and ending Soviet involvement in Afghanistan in 1989. Pressures for national sovereignty grew stronger in Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev refused to further support

6125-499: The Soviet Union. A number of self-proclaimed Marxist–Leninist governments were formed in the second half of the 1970s in developing countries , including Angola , Mozambique , Ethiopia , Cambodia , Afghanistan , and Nicaragua . Détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. Beginning in the 1980s, this phase was another period of elevated tension. The Reagan Doctrine led to increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on

6250-455: The Soviets accumulated after broken promises by Stalin and Molotov concerning Europe and Iran. Following the World War II Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran , the country was occupied by the Red Army in the far north and the British in the south. Iran was used by the United States and British to supply the Soviet Union, and the Allies agreed to withdraw from Iran within six months after the cessation of hostilities. However, when this deadline came,

6375-425: The Soviets agreed to withdraw from Iran after persistent US pressure, an early success of containment policy. By 1947, US president Harry S. Truman was outraged by the perceived resistance of the Soviet Union to American demands in Iran, Turkey, and Greece, as well as Soviet rejection of the Baruch Plan on nuclear weapons. In February 1947, the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance

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6500-404: The Soviets had permitted to retain democratic structures. The public brutality of the coup shocked Western powers more than any event up to that point, set in motion a brief scare that war would occur, and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress. In an immediate aftermath of the crisis, the London Six-Power Conference was held, resulting in

6625-426: The Soviets remained in Iran under the guise of the Azerbaijan People's Government and Kurdish Republic of Mahabad . Shortly thereafter, on 5 March, former British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous " Iron Curtain " speech in Fulton, Missouri . The speech called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing an "iron curtain" dividing Europe from " Stettin in

6750-455: The Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a US bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus between Republicans and Democrats focused on containment and deterrence that weakened during and after the Vietnam War , but ultimately persisted thereafter. Moderate and conservative parties in Europe, as well as social democrats, gave virtually unconditional support to the Western alliance, while European and American Communists , financed by

6875-447: The U.S. initiated contacts with China in 1972 . In the same year, the US and USSR signed a series of arms control treaties limiting their nuclear arsenals, which eased tensions in a détente . In 1979, the toppling of pro-US governments in Iran and Nicaragua and a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan again raised fears of war. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev rose to leader of the USSR and expanded political freedoms in his country, which led to

7000-462: The U.S.'s first test , thus starting an arms race. A major proxy war was the Korean War of 1950 to 1953, which ended in stalemate. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 installed the first communist regime in the Western Hemisphere, and in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis began after deployments of U.S. missiles in Europe and Soviet missiles in Cuba; it is considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into nuclear war . Another major proxy conflict

7125-434: The US assistance, the Greek military won its civil war . Under the leadership of Alcide De Gasperi the Italian Christian Democrats defeated the powerful Communist – Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948 . All major powers engaged in espionage, using a great variety of spies, double agents , moles , and new technologies such as the tapping of telephone cables. The Soviet KGB ("Committee for State Security"),

7250-476: The US government gave to Western European countries over $ 13 billion (equivalent to $ 189 billion in 2016) to rebuild the economy of Europe . Later, the program led to the creation of the OECD . The plan's aim was to rebuild the democratic and economic systems of Europe and to counter perceived threats to the European balance of power , such as communist parties seizing control through revolutions or elections. The plan also stated that European prosperity

7375-419: The US was trying to buy a pro-US re-alignment of Europe. Stalin therefore prevented Eastern Bloc nations from receiving Marshall Plan aid. The Soviet Union's alternative to the Marshall Plan, which was purported to involve Soviet subsidies and trade with central and eastern Europe, became known as the Molotov Plan (later institutionalized in January 1949 as the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance ). Stalin

7500-424: The USSR. In this way, this US would exercise " preponderant power ," oppose neutrality, and establish global hegemony . In the early 1950s (a period sometimes known as the " Pactomania "), the US formalized a series of alliances with Japan (a former WWII enemy), South Korea , Taiwan , Australia , New Zealand , Thailand and the Philippines (notably ANZUS in 1951 and SEATO in 1954), thereby guaranteeing

7625-412: The United Nations, was split up and dissolved in 1954 and 1975, also because of the détente between the West and Tito. The US and Britain merged their western German occupation zones into " Bizone " (1 January 1947, later "Trizone" with the addition of France's zone, April 1949). As part of the economic rebuilding of Germany, in early 1948, representatives of a number of Western European governments and

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7750-445: The United States a number of long-term military bases. One of the more significant examples of the implementation of containment was the United Nations US-led intervention in the Korean War . In June 1950, after years of mutual hostilities, Kim Il Sung 's North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea at the 38th parallel . Stalin had been reluctant to support the invasion but ultimately sent advisers. To Stalin's surprise,

7875-401: The United States announced an agreement for a merger of western German areas into a federal governmental system. In addition, in accordance with the Marshall Plan , they began to re-industrialize and rebuild the West German economy, including the introduction of a new Deutsche Mark currency to replace the old Reichsmark currency that the Soviets had debased. The US had secretly decided that

8000-405: The United States. Analog delay line An analog delay line is a network of electrical components connected in cascade , where each individual element creates a time difference between its input and output. It operates on analog signals whose amplitude varies continuously. In the case of a periodic signal, the time difference can be described in terms of a change in the phase of

8125-450: The Warsaw Pact's primary function was to safeguard Soviet hegemony over its Eastern European satellites, with the pact's only direct military actions having been the invasions of its own member states to keep them from breaking away; in the 1960s, the pact evolved into a multilateral alliance, in which the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members gained significant scope to pursue their own interests. In 1961, Soviet-allied East Germany constructed

8250-423: The Western agencies paid special attention to debriefing Eastern Bloc defectors . Edward Jay Epstein describes that the CIA understood that the KGB used "provocations", or fake defections, as a trick to embarrass Western intelligence and establish Soviet double agents. As a result, from 1959 to 1973, the CIA required that East Bloc defectors went through a counterintelligence investigation before being recruited as

8375-457: The accuracy and resolution of the range measurement, which was of course a function of the interval between transmission and return. A delay line was an artificial transmission detour that served to retard the signal, made up with series inductances and parallel capacitances that yielded a constant delay. Pick-off points at 20-microsecond intervals permitted these sub-pulses to be extracted in such sequence that they all arrive together, to achieve

8500-402: The accusation that the USSR was exerting increasing control over the countries lying in its sphere. He argued that there was nothing surprising in "the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, [was] trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries." Soviet territorial demands to Turkey regarding the Dardanelles in

8625-432: The allocation of $ 400 million to intervene in the war and unveiled the Truman Doctrine , which framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes. American policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalists in an effort to expand Soviet influence even though Stalin had told the Communist Party to cooperate with the British-backed government. Enunciation of

8750-417: The basis of these values an initial estimate of the elliptical trajectory was made. In computing the elliptical path, the earth is physically considered a rotating homogeneous sphere and geometrically considered an ellipsoid -that is, its equatorial bulge is ignored in the gravitational computation but not with respect to intersections of its surface. An ellipse not intersecting the Earth's surface represents

8875-426: The bureau responsible for foreign espionage and internal surveillance, was famous for its effectiveness. The most famous Soviet operation involved its atomic spies that delivered crucial information from the United States' Manhattan Project , leading the USSR to detonate its first nuclear weapon in 1949, four years after the American detonation and much sooner than expected. A massive network of informants throughout

9000-693: The chancellor of West Germany, with France the main opponent. Washington had the decisive voice. It was strongly supported by the Pentagon (the US military leadership), and weakly opposed by President Truman; the State Department was ambivalent. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 changed the calculations and Washington now gave full support. That also involved naming Dwight D. Eisenhower in charge of NATO forces and sending more American troops to West Germany. There

9125-508: The communist party. Radio and television organizations were state-owned, while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the local communist party. Soviet radio broadcasts used Marxist rhetoric to attack capitalism, emphasizing themes of labor exploitation, imperialism and war-mongering. Along with the broadcasts of the BBC and the Voice of America to Central and Eastern Europe,

9250-401: The compression effect. The total azimuthal coverage was from 18° to 49.7°. The system normally detected missiles or satellites launched from Kapustin Yar at a nominal range of 800 nautical miles (1,500 km); it tracked one type of missile out as far as 1,625 nautical miles (3,010 km). The missiles and satellites were not sensed at their maximum detectable range because the coverage of

9375-492: The country and was banned following the 1991 Soviet coup attempt that August. This in turn led to the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the collapse of Communist governments across much of Africa and Asia. The Russian Federation became the Soviet Union's successor state, while many of the other republics emerged from the Soviet Union's collapse as fully independent post-Soviet states . The United States

9500-458: The derivation of missile trajectories, the identification of earth satellite launches, the calculation of a satellite's ephemeris (position and orbit), and the synthesis of booster rocket performance. The success achieved by this fixed-beam radar led to the co-location of a tracking radar (AN/FPS-79), beginning in mid-1964. Together, these radars had the capability for estimating the configuration and dimensions of satellites or missiles and observing

9625-578: The digital data. The Oscar equipment and human operator thus generated a deck of IBM cards for computer processing which contains the history of each target's position through time. The first step in the computer processing was to translate Oscar units into actual radar range, "Z" (Greenwich mean) time, and beam number, the latter fixing the azimuth and elevation of the return. During this first step, three separate quality-control checks were made on each IBM card to eliminate erroneous data. Those observations that succeed in passing all these tests were taken to

9750-452: The director of the radar could make a decision that the unknown object detected is not of interest (because of the location of the FPS-17 fan penetration or because of the lack of prior information on a possible new launch). In the absence of detection fan penetration (the fan had a rather limited coverage), the FPS-79 tracking radar was tasked to follow other space objects on a schedule provided by

9875-497: The elevation and azimuth of the observing beam, were automatically converted to serial form, encoded in standard teleprinter code, and punched on paper tape for transmission. Data was thus received at Wright-Patterson Foreign Technology Division (FTD) first by teleprinter and then on film, the latter accompanied by logs giving data on the target as read by site personnel and data on equipment performance such as peak transmitted power, frequency, and receiver sensitivity. Upon arrival,

10000-561: The equipment was to be in operation at Site IX near Diyarbakir within nine months: by 1 June 1955. Construction began in February, and the scheduled operational date was missed by fifteen minutes. The original antenna installation was a large D.S. Kennedy parabolic reflector , 175 feet (53 m) high by 110 feet (34 m) wide, radiating in the frequency range 175 to 215 megahertz. Standard GE high-power television transmitters, modified for pulse operation, were used initially. Surveillance

10125-433: The film when was edited and marked to facilitate reading on the "Oscar" (preliminary processing) equipment. Targets were sorted by differences in range and rate of range change, and the returns on each were numbered in time sequence. The FTD Oscar equipment consisted of a film reader which gave time and range data in analog form, a converter unit which changed them to digital form, and an IBM printing card punch which received

10250-433: The fixed beam configuration did not conform with the test range layout. The electrical characteristics of each of the channels were: To illustrate how the capability of the system is calculated, we can take typical logs which show channel 4, for example, operating with the following parameters: Channel 4's maximum range of intercept capability for a target one square meter in cross section

10375-454: The formation of NATO , which was essentially a defensive agreement in 1949. The Soviet Union countered with the Warsaw Pact in 1955, which had similar results with the Eastern Bloc. As by that time the Soviet Union already had an armed presence and political domination all over its eastern satellite states, the pact has been long considered superfluous. Although nominally a defensive alliance,

10500-492: The insulated wire could be wound around a conducting core to achieve the same effect. Much of the development of delay lines during World War II was motivated by the problems encountered in radar systems. In 1944, Madison G. Nicholson applied for a general patent on magnetostrictive delay lines. He recommended their use for applications requiring delays or measurement of intervals in the 10 to 1000 microseconds time range. In 1945, Gordon D. Forbes and Herbert Shapiro filed

10625-518: The kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of "cold war" with its neighbours. In The Observer of 10 March 1946, Orwell wrote, "...after the Moscow conference last December, Russia began to make a 'cold war' on Britain and the British Empire." The first use of the term to describe

10750-483: The late 1950s increased interest in Shemya Island , Alaska at the western Aleutians as a location for monitoring missile tests from the far northeastern Soviet Union. Old site facilities were rehabilitated and new ones constructed on the island, including a large detection radar (AN/FPS-17), which went into operation in 1960. Each of three antenna reflectors were similar to the initial FPS-17 at Diyarbakir but employed

10875-414: The most prominent architects of America's early Cold War strategy, especially those who believed that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means, such as George F. Kennan. Soviet and Eastern Bloc authorities used various methods to suppress Western broadcasts, including radio jamming . American policymakers, including Kennan and John Foster Dulles , acknowledged that

11000-429: The newer, "cinerama" antenna, whose 300-foot (90 m) width gave them their narrow horizontal dimension. Beams 2 through 9 were projected in horizontal array; 10 through 17 (although 10 actually lies in the horizontal row) were grouped as the vertical component. All beams of each group were powered simultaneously. Except for being controlled by a master timing signal, each of the eight channels operated independently of

11125-485: The operational site in Turkey, so a similar FPS-17 was installed near Laredo, Texas, to facilitate that work. The location was sometimes known as Laredo Test Site, Laredo Tracking Site, or Laredo AFS, but is not to be confused with Laredo AFB. The site was declared operational on 29 February 1956 and a mechanical tracker, designated AN/FPS-78 was added around 1960. The site shut down in 1962 or 1963. Some documents claim Laredo

11250-420: The others. Each transmitter was on a slightly different frequency to prevent interaction with the others. The transmitted pulse, 2000 microseconds long, was coded, or tagged, by being passed through a tapped delay line which may reversed the phase at 20-microsecond intervals. Upon reception the returned signal was passed through the same tapped delay line and compressed 100:1, to 20 microseconds in order to increase

11375-409: The period. The post-1958 Pirinçlik system had eight separate radar sets or channels, each with its own exciter , transmitter , duplexer , receiver , and data display unit. These eight channels fed electromagnetic energy into sixteen fixed beams formed by the two antennas, each channel, or transmitter-receiver combination, being time-shared between two beams. Pneumatically driven switches operated on

11500-661: The policy change. Once again, the East Berlin communists attempted to disrupt the Berlin municipal elections , which were held on 5 December 1948 and produced a turnout of 86% and an overwhelming victory for the non-communist parties. The results effectively divided the city into East and West, the latter comprising US, British and French sectors. 300,000 Berliners demonstrated and urged the international airlift to continue, and US Air Force pilot Gail Halvorsen created " Operation Vittles ", which supplied candy to German children. The Airlift

11625-441: The political decision-making level on either side. Similarly, there is no evidence, on either side, of any major political or military decision that was prematurely discovered through espionage and thwarted by the other side. There also is no evidence of any major political or military decision that was crucially influenced (much less generated) by an agent of the other side. According to historian Robert L. Benson, "Washington's forte

11750-456: The possibility of using magnetostrictive or piezoelectric delay lines. By 1943, compact delay lines with distributed capacitance and inductance were devised. Typical early designs involved winding an enamel insulated wire on an insulating core and then surrounding that with a grounded conductive jacket. Richard Nelson of General Electric filed a patent for such a line that year. Other GE employees, John Rubel and Roy Troell, concluded that

11875-474: The presence of the Red Army —alarmed the US and UK. Western leaders saw this as a clear instance of Soviet expansionism, clashing with their vision of a democratic Europe. Economically, the divide was sharpened with the introduction of the Marshall Plan in 1947, a US initiative to provide financial aid to rebuild Europe and prevent the spread of communism by stabilizing capitalist economies. The Soviet Union rejected

12000-458: The problems with dissipation and noise in analog systems. Inductor – capacitor ladder networks were used as analog delay lines in the 1920s. For example, Francis Hubbard's sonar direction finder patent filed in 1921. Hubbard referred to this as an Artificial transmission line . In 1941, Gerald Tawney of Sperry Gyroscope Company filed for a patent on a compact packaging of an inductor–capacitor ladder network that he explicitly referred to as

12125-420: The quartz crystals caused problems. He reported success with single crystals of lithium bromide , sodium chloride and aluminum . Arlenberg developed the idea of complex 2- and 3-dimensional folding of the acoustic path in the solid medium in order to package long delays into a compact crystal. The delay lines used to decode PAL television signals follow the outline of this patent, using quartz glass as

12250-561: The reentry of manned or unmanned vehicles. A second FPS-17 installation was made at Laredo, Texas, which was used primarily as a research and development site. The final operational installation was made at Shemya Island, Alaska, for missile detection. Under the Joint Electronics Type Designation System (JETDS), all U.S. military radar and tracking systems are assigned a unique identifying alphanumeric designation. The letters “AN” (for Army-Navy) are placed ahead of

12375-466: The residuals were weighted accordingly. A standard deviation from this curve was established, and any raw datum point showing a deviation as large as three times the standard was discarded. Then second-degree curves were similarly fitted to the azimuth/time and elevation/time data. The three second-degree polynomials - for range/time, azimuth/time, and elevation/time - were used to generate a value for position and velocity at mean time of observation, and on

12500-406: The second step of computer processing, with fitting of a second-degree polynomial curve to the raw range/time data in accordance with least squares criteria. In this method, a mathematical function was fit to best approximate a series of observations where the sum of squares of its residuals (deviations from the raw data) was least. If there was systematic irregularity in the reliability of the data,

12625-405: The signal. One example of an analog delay line is a bucket-brigade device . Other types of delay line include acoustic (usually ultrasonic ), magnetostrictive , and surface acoustic wave devices. A series of resistor–capacitor circuits ( RC circuits ) can be cascaded to form a delay. A long transmission line can also provide a delay element. The delay time of an analog delay line may be only

12750-462: The source of the term, Lippmann traced it to a French term from the 1930s, la guerre froide . The roots of the Cold War can be traced back to diplomatic and military tensions preceding World War II. The 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent Treaty of Brest-Litovsk , where Soviet Russia ceded vast territories to Germany, deepened distrust among the Western Allies. Allied intervention in

12875-463: The specific post-war geopolitical confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States came in a speech by Bernard Baruch , an influential advisor to Democratic presidents, on 16 April 1947. The speech, written by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope , proclaimed, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war." Newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency with his book The Cold War . When asked in 1947 about

13000-405: The two superpowers , though each supported opposing sides in major regional conflicts known as proxy wars . Aside from the nuclear arms race starting in 1949 and conventional military deployment , the struggle for dominance was expressed indirectly via psychological warfare , propaganda campaigns , espionage , far-reaching embargoes , sports diplomacy , and technological competitions such as

13125-411: The world, while Soviet involvement in regime change included the funding of left-wing parties , wars of independence , revolutions and dictatorships. As nearly all the colonial states underwent decolonization and achieved independence in the period from 1945 to 1960, many became Third World battlefields in the Cold War. At the end of World War II, English writer George Orwell used cold war , as

13250-473: The world. Movements against nuclear weapons testing and for nuclear disarmament took place, with large anti-war protests . By the 1970s, both sides had started making allowances for peace and security, ushering in a period of détente that saw the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the 1972 visit by Richard Nixon to China that opened relations with China as a strategic counterweight to

13375-497: Was 'signals' intelligence - the procurement and analysis of coded foreign messages." leading to the Venona project or Venona intercepts, which monitored the communications of Soviet intelligence agents. Moynihan wrote that the Venona project contained "overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names, dates, places, and deeds." The Venona project

13500-587: Was a period of global geopolitical tension and struggle for ideological and economic influence between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc , that started in 1947, two years after the end of World War II , and lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term cold war is used because there was no direct fighting between

13625-412: Was a strong promise that West Germany would not develop nuclear weapons. Widespread fears of another rise of German militarism necessitated the new military to operate within an alliance framework under NATO command. In 1955, Washington secured full German membership of NATO. In May 1953, Lavrentiy Beria , by then in a government post, had made an unsuccessful proposal to allow the reunification of

13750-547: Was also fearful of a reconstituted Germany; his vision of a post-war Germany did not include the ability to rearm or pose any kind of threat to the Soviet Union. In early 1948, following reports of strengthening "reactionary elements", Czech Communists executed a coup d'état in Czechoslovakia (resulting in the formation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (9 May 1948)), the only Eastern Bloc state that

13875-537: Was as much a logistical as a political and psychological success for the West; it firmly linked West Berlin to the United States. In May 1949, Stalin backed down and lifted the blockade. In 1952, Stalin repeatedly proposed a plan to unify East and West Germany under a single government chosen in elections supervised by the United Nations, if the new Germany were to stay out of Western military alliances, but this proposal

14000-590: Was carried out by six horizontal beams over the Kapustin Yar area. In 1958 a second antenna, 150 feet (46 m) high by 300 feet (90 m) long (called the Cinerama antenna), and new 1.2-megawatt transmitters were installed as part of a modification kit which provided three additional horizontal beams, a seven-beam vertical fan, and greater range capability. The elaborate system included automatic alarm circuitry, range-finding circuitry, and data-processing equipment; it

14125-648: Was contingent upon German economic recovery. One month later, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 , creating a unified Department of Defense , the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council (NSC). These would become the main bureaucracies for US defense policy in the Cold War. Stalin believed economic integration with the West would allow Eastern Bloc countries to escape Soviet control, and that

14250-501: Was determined by measuring the Doppler frequency shift in the radar signal when it returned. The doppler shift was found to within 500 cycles by determining which of eighteen frequency filters covering successive bands 500 cycles per second wide passed the return signal. This measurement of radial velocity ran from -4 to -f-4 nautical miles (7 km) per second in increments of 0.219-nautical-mile (0.406 km). All these data, together with

14375-479: Was equipped to make 35 mm photographic recordings of all signals received. A preliminary reduction of data was accomplished on-site, but the final processing was done in the Foreign Technology Division at Wright Patterson Air Force Base . From 15 June 1955, when the first Soviet missile was detected, to 1 March 1964, 508 incidents (sightings) were reported, 147 of them during the last two years of

14500-463: Was kept highly secret even from policymakers until the Moynihan Commission in 1995. Despite this, the decryption project had already been betrayed and dispatched to the USSR by Kim Philby and Bill Weisband in 1946, as was discovered by the US by 1950. Nonetheless, the Soviets had to keep their discovery of the program secret, too, and continued leaking their own information, some of which

14625-502: Was left as the world's sole superpower. In February 1946, George F. Kennan 's " Long Telegram " from Moscow to Washington helped to articulate the US government's increasingly hard line against the Soviets, which would become the basis for US strategy toward the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. The telegram galvanized a policy debate that would eventually shape the Truman administration 's Soviet policy. Washington's opposition to

14750-427: Was motivated by the problem of echo suppression on long-distance telephone lines, and his patent clearly explained the fundamental relationship between inductor–capacitor ladder networks and mechanical elastic delay lines such as his acoustic line. In 1938, William Spencer Percival of Electrical & Musical Industries (later EMI ) applied for a patent on an acoustical delay line using piezoelectric transducers and

14875-540: Was now restricted to the island of Taiwan , the nationalist government of which exists to this day. The Kremlin promptly created an alliance with the newly formed People's Republic of China. According to Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad , the communists won the Civil War because they made fewer military mistakes than Chiang Kai-Shek made, and because in his search for a powerful centralized government, Chiang antagonized too many interest groups in China. Moreover, his party

15000-403: Was parity in the quantity and quality of secret information obtained by each side. However, the Soviets probably had an advantage in terms of HUMINT (human intelligence or interpersonal espionage) and "sometimes in its reach into high policy circles." In terms of decisive impact, however, he concludes: We also can now have high confidence in the judgment that there were no successful "moles" at

15125-537: Was still useful to the American program. According to Moynihan, even President Truman may not have been fully informed of Venona, which may have left him unaware of the extent of Soviet espionage. Clandestine atomic spies from the Soviet Union, who infiltrated the Manhattan Project at various points during WWII, played a major role in increasing tensions that led to the Cold War. In addition to usual espionage,

15250-414: Was the Vietnam War of 1955 to 1975, which ended in defeat for the U.S. The USSR solidified its domination of Eastern Europe with the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Both powers used economic aid in an attempt to win the loyalty of non-aligned countries , such as India . After the Sino-Soviet split between the USSR and China in 1961,

15375-605: Was the first FPS-17 but this appears to derive from the period when the existence of Diyarbakir was a closely held secret. The Laredo FPS-17 underwent numerous reconfigurations over time. The antenna reflector was the same as Diyarbakir’s initial FPS-17 antenna, but the feed horn numbers and configurations changed several times (it is a curiosity that none of the three FPS-17 sites were exactly alike). Laredo tracked missiles from White Sands and conducted experiments in detection, meteor effects, ionospheric propagation effects and hardware testing. Soviet rocket tests to Kamchatka during

15500-625: Was turned down by the Western powers. Some sources dispute the sincerity of the proposal. Britain, France, the United States, Canada and eight other western European countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949, establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That August, the first Soviet atomic device was detonated in Semipalatinsk , Kazakh SSR . Following Soviet refusals to participate in

15625-483: Was weakened during the war against Japan . Meanwhile, the communists told different groups, such as the peasants, exactly what they wanted to hear, and they cloaked themselves under the cover of Chinese nationalism . Confronted with the communist revolution in China and the end of the American atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to escalate and expand its containment doctrine. In NSC 68 ,

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