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they could threaten sea lines of communication that linked the United States and its allies
with petroleum producers astride the Persian Gulf. The North American Air Defense
Command (NORAD) in the early 1960s draped 81 Distant Early Warning (DEW) stations
across the arctic from the Aleutians to the Atlantic as safeguards against a Soviet surprise air
attack over the North Pole. A generous group of gap-filler radars and picket ships augmented
the Mid-Canada and Pine Tree Lines farther south. Three huge Ballistic Missile Early Warning
Sites (BMEWS) located in Clear, Alaska, Thule, Greenland, and Fylingdales Moor, England
kept a sharp lookout for Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) shots, with assistance
from surveillance satellites that scanned for submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well as
ICBMs. ~2
Appropriately located islands often make ideal stepping stones. Propeller-driven transport
aircraft that spanned the Pacific during the Korean War hopped from Travis AFB near San
Francisco to Honolulu, Midway, and Wake Island (which looked like a postage stamp from
the air), then on to Tokyo. Flights over the Atlantic at that time called at Goose Bay, Labrador
and Keflavik, Iceland. U.S. weapons, equipment, and supplies bound for Tel Aviv during the
1 973 Arab-Israeli conflict arrived rapidly only because Portugal granted refueling rights in
the Azores.
POLITI C,~kL I i'l I-II ~ITIOIN~
Manmade boundaries, which are merely lines on maps, impose political obstacles that
sometimes inhibit military operations as much as physical barriers when allies or neutrals
forbid the armed forces of outsiders to violate their land or territorial waters. Transgressors
who nevertheless choose to do so may pay political, economic, or military prices, the nature
and intensity of which are not always obvious beforehand.
High stakes coupled with low risks in relation to likely gains encourage aggressors to
ignore political boundaries. Hitler clearly felt free to ride roughshod over neutral Belgium,
Luxembourg, and the Netherlands on his way to France in 1940. Low stakes coupled with
high risks in relation to likely gains contrariwise encourage caution. British-based U.S.
bombers on April 15, 1986, made long dog-legs over the Bay of Biscay and back through
Gibraltar en route to hit Tripoli and Benghazi because the French Government denied them
overflight rights when President Ronald Reagan directed retaliation for a Libyan-backed
terrorist attack in Berlin. ~2
Privileged sanctuaries behind sacrosanct boundaries, which permit adversaries to fight
when they wish and then run away, also impose political inhibitions, although such asylums
seem to survive only if probable penalties for disturbing them surpass potential benefits.
Manchuria comprised such a shelter throughout the Korean War, first as a Chinese supply
base for North Korea, then as a haven for defeated North Korean troops who fled across the
Yalu River on floating footbridges and, after October, 1950, as a springboard for Chinese
Communist offensives. The U.N. Command could have lanced that boil if so directed but
declined to do so for fear that such action would precipitate "the wrong war, at the wrong
place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." ~4 Communist sanctuaries inside
Cambodia fared less well after President Nixon authorized U. S. armed forces to conduct
cross-border raids in 1970 and again in 1971.1s The United States maintained sanctuaries
in Japan, Okinawa, Thailand, and the Philippines throughout the Vietnam War, although
many observers overlooked that fact.
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16 PART ONE: PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY