6 Bases during the Cold War

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Overseas facilities played a major role here. The U.S. utilized its WhiteCloud satellite system, part of its larger Classic Wizard system, for ocean surveillance,involving a variety of ELINT functions as well as use of interferometrytechniques to locate Soviet or other vessels. This system comprised foursatellites. The U.S. Naval Security Group operated ground stations which werepart of this system at Diego Garcia and Edzell, Scotland, as well as at Guam,Adak and Winter Harbor, Maine.The P3C Orion, known mostly for its ASW role, was also utilized for oceansurveillance. It had access to bases throughout the world: Clark AFB (the Philippines),Misawa (Japan), Kadena (Okinawa), Keflavik (Iceland), Rota (Spain),Sigonella (Italy), Ascension and Diego Garcia islands, Cocos Islands (Australia),Masirah (Oman), Mogadiscu (Somalia) and several others.For land-based ocean surveillance, considerable use was made of HF/DFsystems, which were also mounted on ships which, again, utilized various overseasport-facilities. Among the land-based HF/DF locales were those at DiegoGarcia, Rota (Spain), Edzell (Scotland), Keflavik (Iceland), Brawdy (Wales),Japan and Guam. Those in Scotland, Wales and Iceland were located near thecrucial GIUK–Gap chokepoint, which would presumably have been a majorpoint of contention at the outset of a major war in relation to North Atlantic sealines of communication and the Soviet submarine bastions near the Kola Peninsula.Richelson and Ball actually reported on some 40–50 HF/DF sites for oceansurveillance said to have been operated by the combined assets of the U.S.,U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.Space surveillance48During the Cold War, the proliferation of satellites and other man-made “spaceobjects” made their tracking and identification more vital. The U.S. had anextensive program intended to detect and track its own satellites, but also Sovietand other nations’ space vehicles.In the security realm this had a number of dimensions. Of course, both sideswished to mask some of their ground activities from surveillance and thereforesought the capacity to operate during gaps in surveillance. By detecting andtracking Soviet satellites, the U.S. Satellite Reconnaissance Advance Notice(SATRAN) System allowed the U.S. to avoid Soviet coverage of U.S. militaryactivities. As expectations mounted about a future which might have seenlarge-scale militarization of space, both sides increasingly perceived an interestin real-time surveillance of each others’ satellites, in the context of possible laterhair-trigger preemptive situations as applied to mutual interdiction of satellites.Of course, both sides desired maximally effective intelligence on the others’various military activities conducted from space: communications, ocean surveillance,SIGINT, nuclear detection, etc. In summary, as stated by Richelson:space surveillance helps provide the United States with intelligence on thecharacteristics and capabilities of Soviet space systems and their contribu-122 Bases during the Cold Warİ 2007 Robert E. Harkavytions to overall Soviet military capabilities ... Such data aid the UnitedStates in developing counter-measures to Soviet systems, provide a databasefor U.S. ASAT targeting and allow the United States to assess thethreat represented by Soviet ASAT systems.For many years the heart of the dedicated sensor system was a group of Baker-Nunn optical cameras, huge cameras which, according to one source, could“photograph, at night, a lighted object the size of a basketball over 20,000 milesin space.” In addition to the two in California and New Mexico, these cameraswere located outside the U.S. in New Zealand (Mt. John), South Korea (Pulmosan),Canada (St. Margarets, New Brunswick) and Italy (San Vito). Earlierthere were others on Johnston Island, in Alaska, and in Argentina, Brazil, Chile,Ethiopia, Greece, Iran, South Africa, Upper Volta and Curacao in the LesserArtilles, among others. Because of its limitations – slowness in data acquisition,processing and response time, absence of all-weather capability and inflexibletracking capability – this system was replaced by the Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) system.GEODSS, also with five locations, overcame several of the Baker-Nunnsystem’s shortcomings by allowing real-time data, better search capability andmore rapid coverage of larger areas of space – but was still limited by adverseatmospheric conditions. It was actually a system of three linked telescopes atPage 29Page 30
each site, providing variable coverage by altitude. The five locations were inHawaii (Maui) and New Mexico (White Sands), within the U.S. and externallyin South Korea (Taegu), Diego Garcia and Portugal.Systems used primarily for early warning – BMEWS, FSS-7, PAVE PAWS,Enhanced Perimeter Acquisition Radar Attack Characterization System(EPARCS) and FPS-85 radars – were usable as collateral space-trackingsensors. Of these, BMEWS – based at Thule (Greenland), Fylingdales (U.K.)and Clear (Alaska) – involved extensive use of foreign access. Additionally,COBRA DANE (Shemya Island, Aleutians – 120 arc, 46,000-km range againstspace targets) and also the AN/FPS-79 (Pincirlik/Diyarbakir, Turkey) radar wereusable in a space-surveillance role, as supplementary to the primary missions ofmonitoring missile-test re-entry trajectories.Numerous other foreign facilities were used as part of the U.S. SatelliteTracking and Data Acquisition Network (STADAN) network of installationsused to track and monitor U.S. space activities, including the down-rangecourse of launches. Among these were facilities in: Australia (Orooral Valley,Toowoomba), the U.K. (Winkfield), Ascension, Bermuda, the Canaries (Tenerife),Spain (Madrid), Brazil (Fernando de Noronha) and Antigua, in connectionwith space surveillance and under the heading of “miscellaneous radars.”Earlier STADAN tracking facilities were operated, among other places, inChile, Ecuador, the Malagasy Republic, Grand Turk Islands, South Africa andZaire.Bases during the Cold War 123İ 2007 Robert E. HarkavySatellite control stations49One of the most secret or classified areas of overseas bases was that of satellitecontrol stations. Ford, in his work on command and control, in analyzing thevulnerable and non-redundant nature of the U.S. early-warning system involvingthe DSP East satellite, its down-link facility in Australia and the communicationslink from there to the satellite control facility in Sunnyvale, California,provided some indication of what was involved. Thus, according to him:There are several dozen U.S. defense satellites now in orbit – providingcommunications, photoreconnaissance, electronic intelligence, navigational,meteorological, and other data-and they require contact with the Sunnyvaleground control station and its seven substations around the globe in order toremain functional. A great deal of fine-tuning, for example, is needed tosteer the satellites in precise orbits and to keep their sensors, and antennasaimed properly. . . . A catastrophic loss of this control center would result ina major disruption of communications, tracking, and control of its spacesystems . . .And, further:Other officials are less optimistic. “We lose the SCF and the satellites basicallygo haywire,” a Pentagon expert who has studied this subject told me.“The communications satellites drift off to Pluto.” Certain intelligencegatheringsatellites in low-earth orbit would be in especially bad shape, hesaid, since the Sunnyvale facility has to “feed them” with instructions everytime they complete an orbit. “You should see them scrambling when one oftheir satellites comes within range.” Desmond Ball estimated that thetypical U.S. defense satellite might be able to remain in operation for threeto four days without the Sunnyvale SCF; the most critical satellites, such asDSP East, which require a great deal of caretaking attention from theground, could go out of service within hours.The seven sub-stations linked to Sunnyvale comprised three within the U.S. –at Manchester AF Station in New Hampshire, Kaena Point in Hawaii and VandenbergAir Force Base (AFB) in California. Others outside the U.S. were atThule, Greenland – collocated with various other technical facilities as well as abomber and tanker base – at Guam at Andersen AFB, at Oakhanger in the U.K.and at Mahe in the Seychelles. Mahe had long hosted a U.S. satellite controlfacility (SCF) collocated with a DSCS ground terminal. This facility was apparentlyimportant in relation to reconnaissance satellites and for monitoring injectioninto orbit of satellites launched from Cape Canaveral. Earlier, up to 1975,the U.S. also had what apparently was an SCF at Majunga in the MalagasyRepublic, one also used to monitor satellites launched from Cape Canaveral.U.S. access to this facility was then lost at a time when Tananarive shifted124 Bases during the Cold Warİ 2007 Robert E. HarkavyPage 31
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6 Bases during the Cold War

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