SCHOOL THESIS

3. Cruise Missile Warning
While ICBMs remained the preferred weapons for attacking strategic land targets,
beginning in the 1970s, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union began developing new subsonic
air-launched cruise missiles as a means of increasing the effectiveness of their
strategic bomber force, while complicating the air defenses used by the enemy. 12
To meet this new threat, beginning in the 1980s, NORAD air defense plans began
calling for the use of newly developed USAF Airborne Warning and Control System
(AWACS) radar aircraft. Using airborne platforms allowed NORAD to greatly extend its
ground-based radar surveillance coverage, thus enabling it to detect and warn against
enemy cruise missiles approaching the coast of North America. (See Figure 6.)
Figure 6. AWACS Airborne Early Warning (AEW) Aircraft 13
12 Federation of American Scientists, “Cruise Missiles,” accessed on 3 Apr 2015,
http://fas.org/nuke/intro/cm/index.html.
13 http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/images/Awacs3-onw.jpg. Accessed 21 Apr
2015.
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