Kwajalein Atoll—The Ronald Reagan Missile Test Site
Kwajalein Atoll was then the western terminus of the Pacific Missile Test Range. Then and now, Kwajalein functions as a critical facility that tests the accuracy of U.S. ICBM missiles and their Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) nuclear warheads. [...]
Johnston Atoll and the Origins of Space Warfare
Iknew Kwajalein was going to be a very different place, but I didn’t understand that getting there would turn out to be a surprise, too. Northwest Airlines, with its distinctive fleet of red-tailed passenger jets, had a contract with [...]
NORAD and Cheyenne Mountain
My following visit to Cheyenne Mountain and NORAD’s Headquarters wasn’t just interesting and useful. It turned out to be absolutely fascinating as well. NORAD was a joint U.S.-Canadian command that had begun in the 1950s with its backbone being the [...]
Huntsville, Alabama, and the Army Missile Command
As I thought about what it would take to do the counterintelligence study correctly, it quickly became apparent that I needed to get out of the Pentagon and talk firsthand to the people who were or would be designing, [...]
The Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile System
Though large antiwar demonstrations and racial disturbances were a common part of the American scene when I was in the Army between 1968 and 1971, they weren’t demanding all my time by any means. One project that I devoted [...]
The Blue U and CIA Training
In June 1969, just as I turned 27, I was selected to join a dozen other Army counterintelligence agents at a special school conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Training. The focus of the two-week course was [...]
The Army Operations Center (AOC)
The 1967 emergency deployment to Detroit had caught the Army by surprise, and Secretary Vance had also recommended that a new war room in the Pentagon be built to coordinate up to 25 simultaneous deployments of Regular Army troops [...]
Bernardine Dohrn-The SDS Revolutionaries Then and Now
Bernardine Dohrn Attends the Class of 1967's 55th Reunion of the University of Chicago Law School Bernardine Dohrn Takes Questions from her Law School Classmates in 2022 Family Ties Prove Bill Ayers' Point In summer 1968, I had been [...]
Directorate of Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations
One of Vance’s recommendations after Regular Army troops had been sent to quell the extreme violence in Detroit in 1967 was to create a joint service command unit to oversee the mission of controlling civil disturbances when the Army [...]