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DEW Line. To carry out both functions without delay, NORAD must rely on the almost instantaneous coordination of all its parts, beginning with the outlying alarm bells of the newly completed, $600 million Arctic portion of the DEW line. Stretching for 3,000 miles along the northern rim of the continent, this line includes more than 50 stations whose surveillance radars interlock like an electric warning fan twelve miles high, from Alaska's Cape Lisburne to Canada's Baffin Island.
Dug in for their first winter of blizzards and long, lonely nights, 600 Americans and Canadians (98% of them civilian technicians who earn up to $13,800 a year) man the isolated DEW line stations, watching luminescent oscilloscopes in darkened rooms. Without the ability to intercept or even to defend themselves (an attack on them would in itself constitute a warning, and thus fulfill the DEW line's purpose), they have a single mission: to detect penetration of the radar fence by unidentified aircraft.
Once this occurred, warning would be flashed southward within seconds through the system to the Alaskan Air Command in Anchorage or Pepperrell Air Force Base in Newfoundland, R.C.A.F. headquarters at St. Hubert near Montreal and NORAD at Colorado Springs. From there, over "hot line" red telephones, the alert would be relayed to SAC headquarters in Omaha and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington for immediate consultation with President Eisenhower, whose decision to give SAC's bombers the "go ahead" could be made and dispatched within five min utes from the time the warning came from the DEW line.
Protecting the flanks of North America are DEW line extensions far out to sea, maintained by relays of radar-equipped Navy destroyer escorts and WV2 Super Constellations. These mid-ocean lines stretch from the Aleutians to the mid-Pacific and from Newfoundland to the mid-Atlantic. Backing them up will be chains of underwater "listening" lines, now being built parallel to the coasts, to detect and intercept missile-launching submarines several hundred miles out at sea. In addition, a ground DEW line extension is also under construction across the arc of the Aleutian Islands; other holes are plugged by the Alaskan Air
Command, by SAC's own forward installations in Greenland and Iceland, and by AC&W (aircraft control and warning) stations along the northeastern Canadian coast.