The United States Air Force Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) was the first operational ballistic missile detection radar. The original system was built in 1959 and could provide long-range warning of a ballistic missile attack over the polar region of the Northern Hemisphere. The radars also provided satellite tracking data. The three installations are:
- Site I- A United States Air Force facility at Thule Air Base, Greenland,
(76°34′08″N 68°19′05″W / 76.569°N 68.318°W / 76.569; -68.318) - Site II-A United States Air Force facility at Clear Air Force Station, Alaska,
(64°15′22″N 149°11′08″W / 64.2561°N 149.1855°W / 64.2561; -149.1855) - Site III - A Royal Air Force facility at RAF Fylingdales, in the United Kingdom,
(54°21′42″N 0°40′11″W / 54.3616°N 0.6697°W / 54.3616; -0.6697)
BMEWS was the fourth radar warning system built during the decade of the 1950s in response to the Cold War with the former Soviet Union. It supplimented the Pine Tree Line, the Mid-Canada Line and the DEW Line (Distant Early Warning Line), which were designed to track bombers. None of these, of course, has ever detected a bomber or ballistic missile attack.
The three facilities operated their original 1950s vintage radars for more than four decades, but all have been upgraded with more modern phased array radars. The facility at Clear Air Force Station was the last to be upgraded and now operates a PAVE PAWS radar that was moved from Eldorado Air Force Station in Texas in 2001. Information received from the BMEWS radars is forwarded to the JFCC SPACE Missile Warning Center at Cheyenne Mountain Air Station, Colorado, where it is coordinated with data from other sensors, including other PAVE PAWS sites.
Read more about Ballistic Missile Early Warning System: Operations, Upgrades
Famous quotes containing the words missile, early, warning and/or system:
“... the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“In the early forties and fifties almost everybody “had about enough to live on,” and young ladies dressed well on a hundred dollars a year. The daughters of the richest man in Boston were dressed with scrupulous plainness, and the wife and mother owned one brocade, which did service for several years. Display was considered vulgar. Now, alas! only Queen Victoria dares to go shabby.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“What I am now warning the People of is, That the News-Papers of this Island are as pernicious to weak Heads in England as ever Books of Chivalry to Spain; and therefore shall do all that in me lies, with the utmost Care and Vigilance imaginable, to prevent these growing Evils.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid- twentieth century.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)