Origins
On October 4, 1957, from the Tyuratam range in the Kazakh SSR, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite. The event, while a scientific triumph, also signified that the Soviet Union now had the capability to attack the United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The R-7, the booster rocket that launched Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2, could be loaded instead with a hydrogen bomb, bringing the threat of a surprise nuclear Pearl Harbor-style attack on the United States and Canada. To give an early warning of any Soviet sneak ICBM attack, the governments of the United States, Canada, and Denmark (with the authority over Greenland, where the main radar station built at Thule, Greenland) agreed to build the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS). This system would use radar to detect incoming ICBM warheads and give about 20 minutes of warning of an ICBM attack.
However, this system was hampered by the inherent limitations of radar systems and the curvature of the Earth. Due to the location of the Soviet Union on the other side of the Northern Hemisphere, the potential Soviet ICBM sites were thousands of miles over the horizon from the BMEWS radar stations that were under construction at Thule and Point Barrow, Alaska (and later on, in Scotland), and the BMEWS stations, as huge as they are, could not detect the ICBM warheads immediately after their launching. Only when the warheads had risen above the horizon could they be detected and warnings passed on by the U.S. Air Force.
Accurate calculations had already shown that the BMEWS system would give just ten to 25 minutes of warning in the case of an ICBM attack. The MIDAS system, as planned, would extend this warning time to about 30 minutes, giving the extra time needed for all of the Strategic Air Command's nuclear-armed heavy bombers to take off from their air bases, and hence proving to the Soviet government that it could not destroy these bombers in a sneak attack. Hence, the Soviets would be deterred from launching such an attack by a valid threat of nuclear retaliation. In addition, the MIDAS system should have been able to confirm radar detections from BMEWS of a thermonuclear attack, hence reducing the chances of an accidental nuclear false alarm from the radar system.
Read more about this topic: Missile Defense Alarm System
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