Army Air Defense Command (ARADCOM) 1966 US Army; The Big Picture; Nike-X ABM

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• published: 20 Jun 2015
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more at: http://scitech.quickfound.net/aviation_news_and_search.html "Army Air Defense Command (ARADCOM): The Inner Ring... This film shows how the soldiers of the Army Air Defense Command used the Nike Hercules and other missiles in their control to defend the U.S. against imaginary enemy attack. Scenes also describe the development of the newer Nike X missile." Hosted by Hollywood actor Darrin McGavin. "The Big Picture" episode TV-706 The Big Picture TV Series playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_hX5wLdhf_Jwfz5l_3NRAcCYURbOW2Fl Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Defense_Artillery_Branch_(United_States) The Air Defense Artillery branch of the US Army specializes in anti-aircraft weapons (such as surface to air missiles). In the US Army, these groups are composed of mainly air defense systems such as the Patriot Missile System, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), and the Avenger Air Defense system which fires the FIM-92 Stinger missile... Army Anti-Aircraft Command (ARAACOM) was created on 29 June 1950. The Army formed it to command the Army units allocated to the air defense of the Continental United States... On March 21, 1957, ARAACOM was renamed to US Army Air Defense Command (USARADCOM)... ARADCOM strength peaked in 1963, with 184 firing units (134 Regular Army, 50 National Guard)... On February 4, 1974, the U.S. Department of Defense announced that ARADCOM would be inactivated... ARADCOM headquarters was inactivated January 4, 1975... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike-X Nike-X was a proposed US Army anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system designed to protect major cities in the United States from attacks by the Soviet Union's intercontinental ballistic missile fleet. The X referred to its experimental basis, it was to be replaced by a more appropriate name when the system was put into production. This never came to pass; the original Nike-X concept was canceled and replaced by a much thinner defense system known as the Sentinel Program that used some of the same equipment. Nike-X was a response to the failure of the earlier Nike Zeus system. Zeus had been designed in the 1950s to face a few dozen Soviet ICBMs, and its design would mean it was largely useless by mid-1960s when it would be facing hundreds. It was calculated that a salvo of only four ICBMs would have a 90% chance of hitting the Zeus base, whose radars could only track a few warheads at the same time. Worse, the attacker could use radar reflectors or high-altitude nuclear explosions to obscure the warheads until they were too close to attack, making a single warhead attack highly likely to succeed. Nike-X addressed these concerns by basing its defense on a very fast, short-range missile known as Sprint. Large numbers would be clustered near potential targets, allowing successful attack right up to the few last seconds of the warhead's re-entry. They would operate below the altitude where decoys or explosions had any effect. Nike-X also used a new radar system that could track hundreds of objects at once, allowing salvos of many Sprints. Dozens of ICBMs would need to arrive at the same time in order to overwhelm the system. Nike-X considered retaining the longer range Zeus missile, and later developed an extended range version known as Zeus EX. It played a secondary role in the Nike-X system, intended primarily for use in areas outside the Sprint protected regions. Nike-X required at least one interceptor missile to attack each incoming warhead. As the USSR's missile fleet grew, the cost of implementing Nike-X began to grow as well. Looking for lower-cost options, a number of studies carried out between 1965 and 1967 examined scenarios where a limited number of interceptors might still be militarily useful. Among these, the I-67 concept suggested building a lightweight defense against very limited attacks. When the Chinese exploded their first H-bomb in 1967, I-67 was promoted as a defense against a Chinese attack, and this system became Sentinel in October. Nike-X development, in its original form, ended...