6 Bases during the Cold War

mock raids mounted by U.S. units in Turkey and elsewhere – resulted in someserious incidents in which U.S. ferret aircraft were shot down and their crewskilled or captured. Some flights originating at Brize Norton in the U.K. apparentlytraversed the entire Soviet Arctic coastline, emerging at the Barents Sea.The area between the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Azov was also apparently afocal point of U.S. surveillance missions utilizing Turkish and Iranian airspace,some staged originally from West Germany and Cyprus.U.S. use of ground-based SIGINT stations, obviously crucial to variousaspects of nuclear deterrence, dates well back into the postwar period. Onesource reported that this had earlier involved some 40 stations in at least 14countries, ranging from small, mobile field units to sprawling complexes such asthe Air Force Security Headquarters in West Germany. These were said to haveinvolved some 30,000 personnel, with a minimum of 4000 radio-interceptionconsoles operated in such varied locales as northern Japan, the Khyber Pass inPakistan and an island in the Yellow Sea off the coast of Korea.Further, these COMINT land stations had to be supplemented by numerousairborne and seaborne radio-interception facilities, particularly after Soviet andaligned nations’ military forces switched to VHF radios during the 1950s, afterwhich adequate coverage demanded getting closer to transmitters and overcomingterrain features such as mountains. At any time, several dozen airborneBases during the Cold War 107İ 2007 Robert E. Harkavylistening posts were said to have been in intermittent operation, flying out ofsuch bases as Kimpo Airfield in Korea, Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines,and many others. Added to these were some 12 to 15 spy ships, such as the illfatedPueblo and Liberty, which also presumably required access to foreignports for replenishment.Strategic nuclear forces: missile launchers and platforms15Generally speaking, the late Cold War period saw the U.S. and the USSR leftwith only minimal dependence on foreign facilities – Soviet dependence wasrelatively less for their strategic nuclear launchers, involving the familiar triad ofICBMs, SLBMs and long-range bombers. Of course, this is not to ignore thefact, particularly as it pertained to U.S. forces, that some launchers designated astheater weapons could serve strategic purposes in that their warheads could havebeen delivered into the Soviet Union.All of the U.S. ICBMs (450 Minuteman IIs, 550 Minuteman IIIs and a fewremnant Titan IIs which were phased out as the new MX-Peacekeeper wasphased in) were housed in silos within the continental U.S. – they representedover 2100 accurate warheads. Similarly, the Soviet ICBM forces (448 SS-11s,60 SS-13s, 150 SS-17s, 308 SS-18s, 360 SS-19s, 72 SS-25s), of some 1398ICBMs with some 6354 warheads, were sited entirely within the USSR.The Soviet SSBN forces (983 SLBMs in 77 submarines, of which 944SLBMs and 62 submarines were under the SALT Treaty; and 39 SLBMs on 15submarines were outside it) were based entirely at Soviet homeland bases, in theKola Peninsula area at Polyarny and Severomorsk, and at Petropavlovsk andVladivostok in the Far East. No foreign bases were used for refueling, maintenanceor crew changes. By contrast to the U.S. only some 15–20 Soviet submarineswere normally away from their bases; perhaps 10–12 on station at anygiven time.The U.S. SSBN force, which earlier made extensive use of facilities at HolyLoch (Scotland), Rota (Spain) and at U.S.-owned Guam, utilized only the firstnamedof these, with its other three main bases in the continental U.S. at KingsBay (Georgia), Bangor (Washington) and Charleston (South Carolina). Thedevelopment of the longer-range Poseidon and Trident missiles (with ranges of4000 miles) allowed for utilization of firing stations nearer U.S. bases andfurther from the USSR, hence reducing requirements for firing stations in thewestern Pacific (Guam) and in the Mediterranean (Rota).Little was publicly known about where these submarines patrolled, but theyare thought to have transited to firing stations in the Arctic, North Atlantic andNorth Pacific oceans and in the Mediterranean Sea, with about 30 percent of theforce on station on day-to-day alert, and a roughly equal proportion in transit oron training missions. The use of Holy Loch as a forward base (for submarineshomeported at Groton, Connecticut) allowed more to be on station than otherwisewould have been feasible, and it is also to be noted that 400 Poseidon warheadsdeployed on submarines operating out of Holy Loch were designated forPage 15