248 – Distant Early Warning, SAGE and the F-106 Delta Dart
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Guest: Mike Milinkovich, Brian Jeffrey, Richard Embry, Bernd Ulmann
Host: Markus Voelter Shownoter: Jochen Spalding
In this episode we look back at (aspects of) the North American Air Defense system in the cold war. In particular, we look at the distant early warning line(s), the F-106 interceptor and the SAGE computer system. For DEW, we talk with Mike Milinkovich and Brian Jeffrey who have both worked on the DEW line; Brian also maintains a great website on DEW. For the F-106, we talk with Richard Embry who has flown the interceptor. And for SAGE, we speak with Bernd Ulmann, who has written a very detailed book on SAGE’s underlying AN/FSQ-7 computer system. Bernd has also been a previous guest on Episode 159 on analog computers.
The episode ends with some music from Arjen Lucassen’s new Ayreon Album, The Source. You might remember that Arjen was a guest on Episode 142, and I really love his stuff. The song is called The Day that the World Breaks Down and, together with several other songs of the album, is available on Youtube.
Here are a couple of videos by Brian: Brian’s visit to Hall Beach, 50 years later, the DYE3 Station in Greenland and the The BMEWS system.
Finally, here is some info about the “Skyking” Emergency Action Messages: Skyking Radio Blog, defconwarningsystem.com.
Mike: Introduction
00:03:19Mike Milinkovich | Early-warning radar | Distant Early Warning Line (DEW-Line) | Mid-Canada Line | Pinetree Line | Photos: The DEW Pinetree Line | Locations of all DEWLine Sites in Canada, Alaska & Greenland | Ryerson Institute of Technology Toronto | Bell Canada | Cold War | Sputnik 1 | North American Aerospace Defense Command | Duck And Cover (1951) Bert The Turtle | John Diefenbaker | Ionospheric scatter | Tropospheric scatter | UHF / VHF / HF Radar | Doppler Radar
Mike: Operation stories
00:30:57Boeing B-52 Stratofortress | Identification friend or foe (IFF) | Cuban Missile Crisis | North Warning System
Brian: Introduction
00:46:20Brian Jeffrey | DewLine | Adventures from the Coldest Part of the Cold War | The DEWLine | Mid-Canada Line | Pinetree Line
Brian: Work at the DEW-Line
00:48:50North American Aerospace Defense Command | North American Aerospace Defense Command | Air traffic control radar beacon system | Boeing B-52 Stratofortress | Doppler Radar | Identification friend or foe | AN/FPS-30 | Tropospheric scatter | Teleprinter (Teletype) | Official NORAD Santa Tracker | CRT (Cathode ray tube) | Vacuum tube | FPS Radar Systems | Photos: The DEW Pinetree Line | Strategic Air Command | Fail-Safe (1964) | North Warning System | ATR (aircraft manufacturer) | Douglas DC-4 | Arctic char | Douglas DC-3 | Convair F-106 Delta Dart | Sage (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) | Duck And Cover (1951) Bert The Turtle
Richard: Introduction
01:42:34Lockheed T-33 | Convair F-106 Delta Wing | General Dynamics F-16 (AWACS - Airborne early warning and control) | Dew Line: Distant Early Warning, the miracle of America's first line of defense
Richard: The F-106
01:43:44Convair F-102 Delta Dagger | Pratt & Whitney J57 | Pratt & Whitney J75 | McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II | Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird | F-106 Speed Record | McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle | AIM-7 Sparrow | AIM-120 AMRAAM
Richard: Role of the interceptor
01:52:34Distant Early Warning Line | Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 | Electronic counter-countermeasure | Aerospace Defense Command | North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) | Sage | Back-Up Interceptor Control (BUIC) | Area Control Center
Richard: Weapons
02:03:08AIM-4 Falcon | Beam riding | Infrared homing | HIMARS | AIR-2 Genie | G-Suit | Afterburner | Aerial refueling | Richard: Exercises | OmegaTau Podcast "Chasing Bears with the Phantom" with former RAF pilot Nick Anderson | Boeing B-52 Stratofortress | Wing loading | Flap | Elmendorf Air Force Base
Richard: Dicks time as a controller and some last questions
02:28:00McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II | List of DEW Line Sites | Light gun | Stabilizer | INS (Inertial navigation system) | FlightSafety International Inc.
Bernd: Introduction
02:44:27Bernd Ulmann | AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central | Whirlwind I | The Computer Museum, Boston (Bernds Book "AN/FSQ-7 - the computer that shaped the Cold War")
Bernd: SAGE
02:45:42SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) | NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) (MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT Libraries - Project Whirlwind Reports (OmegaTau Podcast 159 – "Analog Computers" with Bernd Ulmann) | Vacuum tube | Air Defense Direction Center | Bell Telephone Company | Burroughs AN/FST-2 Coordinate Data Transmitting Set | Teletype | Magnetic drum system | Crossbar switch | Light gun | WarGames (1983) | Light pen | Oscilloscope | Grease pencil
Bernd: The computer!
03:10:42Wirlwind 2 | Semiconductor diods | Transistor | Core memory | IBM | Jay Wright Forrester | Ken Olsen | Digital Equipment Corporation | IBM 650 | Interrupt | Snapshot (computer storage) | Computer cluster
Bernd: How was this thing programmed
03:21:27Assembly language | Compiler | Subroutine | Recursion (computer science) | Stack (abstract data type) | Instruction set | Reduced instruction set computing | Complex instruction set computing | Cray XD1 | Processor register | Fortran | Waterfall model (Paper: Herbert D Benington - "Production of Large Computer Programs") | Agile software development
Bernd: So, was it useful?
03:28:57Intercontinental ballistic missile | Air traffic control | Back-Up Interceptor Control | Joint Surveillance System | C (programming language) | Ada (programming language) | Documents Library bitsavers.org | Sage documents bitsavers.org
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Just by coincidence in my effort to cope up with the archive I had this episode literally directly after #159. Brilliant!
Ever since listening to the episode with Bernd about analog computers, where briefly his book about AN/FSQ-7 was mentioned, I was hoping for a follow-up episode about SAGE. So, I was very excited when this one was released and was not disappointed, what a great episode it is. Listened to it in one go. Great to mix these different perspectives to get an overview of the whole. I can only wish this episode had been longer, thanks!
Even longer :-) ?
What an episode! 4 guests, 4+ different perspectives. Wow!
I guess the strange fascination for this era comes from the fact that projects that seem impossible with the available technology from our perspective were just done. As a techie, one would love to see that kind of determinism today, however not for military use but to solve the energy, climate and social problems. Look at this, German federal government/Telekom and tell me again that it is not possible to dig in some fibre cables.
In the AN/FSQ-7 section, I could not get the picture of the evil scientist stored in the computer from the Captain America movie out of the back of my head. I wondered if they ever thought about MTBFs when they designed this thing.
Maybe the most common implementation of a Lightgun that many listeners might be familiar with is the Nintendo NES Zapper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu-Hoj4EIjU
Being both an ex-saltflier and somewhat of a logistic planning geek my history paper at the Surface Warfare College was a reference review of the initial staging delivery of DEW line supply via the Arctic Sea route (specifically MSTS-P572-1955) witch in itself is a quite astonishing story of forward planning for a very large never before even contemplated task and indeed the NUA (Normal Unforeseen Adventures) made exponentially worse by everything Arctic and hitherto mostly uncharted.
That is one long and complicated sentence :-)
I also saw the CPU of the AN/FSQ-7 at the Computer Museum when it was in Boston. The story of how they achieved high availability with vacuum tubes was fascinating – as I recall they planned on a maximum uptime of 15 minutes before they switched to the hot standby.
On the side of the display was an Intel 8080 chip, which compared more than favorably with the multi-ton CPU used in SAGE.
Marcus, nice of you to note my sentence length… and yes it was on purpose ;-P
Excellent episode, well worth the effort. Of course, as a proper (computer) scientist I enjoyed the part about the AN/FSQ-7 even more than the aircraft stuff ;-).
I listened to this a long time ago, but forgot to leave feedback, so here it is.
I think this is one of your best episodes, the subject matter is absolutely classic for all cold war nuts. The guys were great, all the technical detail, the non-tech stuff (life in the north and fishing, for example) and everything in between. I’m glad that you’re doing these podcasts, finding people who have actually been there, asking intelligent questions, being interested in these historical matters that I’m sure some people find non-relevant or boring, but are very fascinating to us connoisseurs of military history. Thanks, thanks, thanks!
Wow, what an amazing episode! Great job! This covered three of my favorite topics…. I am a computer scientist by training (end of the punched-card era) and also a pilot and also build valve electronics, so I just loved it all. The AN/FSQ-7 is an incredible piece of work for the time. I got Bernd’s book about it and I’ve already gotten halfway through it. The level of detail is such I feel as if I could build one, or at least a simulator (if I lived to be 150!)
Thanks so much!
Great episode. The radar process is fascinating and SAGE was incredible.
And just after listening, I saw this article about how these types of sites are still crewed today. Ever thought of doing an update on the current/more recent system?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/workers-wanted-to-watch-russia-must-tolerate-isolation-cold-walruses-11562943025