The U.S. has spent half again as much (nearly $3 billion) on radar as on atomic bombs. As a military threat, either in combination with atomic explosives or as a countermeasure, radar is probably as important as atomic power itself. And while the peacetime potentialities of atomic power are still only a hope, radar already is a vast going concern—a $2 billion-a-year industry, six times as big as the whole prewar radio business.
To fighting men, radar by now is as routine a war tool as a rifle, but it has rewritten the textbooks of warfare. It has also given man a sharp sixth sense which projects him into a world where almost any fantasy seems possible.
The Beam That Sees. An electronic supergadget which "sees" as well in the dark as in the light, radar projects a radio beam which, on striking an object near or far, returns an echo that is translated into a visual image on the radar screen. Radar can see the flight of a shell, the wake of a ship, the explosion of a target, the fall of a hit plane. At sea, it can detect buoys, reefs and other ships more than 20 miles away.
From the air, by night or day or through the thickest cloud, it lays open the terrain below like a relief map, showing coastlines, ships, harbors, jetties, mountains, lakes, rivers, bridges, cities. At close range, with the narrowest radar beam, it is possible to see a city's river fronts, avenues, even buildings.
Normally the screen shows the size but not the exact shape of the detected object. Occasionally it may get an effect of almost photographic sharpness (the screen in Artzybasheff's drawing, though an exaggerated animation, is based on a ''shadow effect" actually caught in one freakish radar picture of a plane a couple of hundred yards away).
Battle Results. Radar's fantastic capabilities have been dramatized again & again in battle. It was radar that enabled a .U.S. warship to smash the battleship Jean Bart at Oran with one salvo from 26 miles away. German radar-directed fire sank the British battle cruiser Hood, and British radar in turn tracked down the Bismarck. It was a radar operator who gave the tragically ignored warning of approaching Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor.
Radar was chiefly responsible for defeating the U-boat and the buzz-bomb. The British say that radar and 300 R.A.F. pilots won the Battle of Britain. It was a vital aid to airmen and paratroopers over Normandy on cloudy Dday, and to the U.S. Navy in sinking the Japanese fleet. Radar opened the roof of Hitler's Europe for the day-&-night, all-weather body punching that crippled the Wehrmacht—and it lifted the Nipponese lid.
For all these uses and countless others, an amazing variety of radars have been developed. There are "early warning" radars which can pick up a plane more than 100 miles away and show how fast and in what direction it is flying; fire-control radars which automatically aim and fire a machine gun or antiaircraft gun more accurately than a human gunner; special radars that provide eyes for night fighter pilots, guide planes to blind landings (called G.C.A., "Ground-Controlled Approach"), observe stratospheric weather balloons and detect storms. Engineers think that it may even be possible some day to develop a missile that will guide itself to a target by radar.