Word: alerted
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Command bases from Okinawa to Limestone, Me. to Morocco, one-third of SAC's force of about 1,500 nuclear 6-47 medium jet bombers. 200 6-52 heavy jet bombers ("the long rifles") and 300 6-36 propjet bombers squat on their ramps on 24-hour alert, with tanks topped with fuel and nuclear weapons preloaded. SAC's new commander, General Thomas Sarsfield Power, has decreed that one-third of SAC's planes must be ready to take off within 15 minutes after an alarm. Nowhere was the 15-minute way of life more in evidence...
...Sidi Slimane's dining hall, in briefing rooms and sleeping huts, the 6-473' three-man alert crews waited, always a few minutes' jeep ride from their aircraft, always together. ("It's like being married to these guys," says one young copilot, "only worse.") As Klaxon horns blared harshly and insistently through the sun-dried air, the combat crews dropped what they were doing and piled into their jeeps. (One coveralled pilot got notice of the alert when the warning light went on over the Catholic chapel altar, where he was at prayer.) Down premarked roadways...
...without opposition. In his climb to power, Khrushchev had downgraded the secret police, smashed the Stalinists, shaken up the bureaucrats who run Russian industry, and humiliated the army. Each of these victories had earned him new enemies in the middle ranks of Soviet officialdom-enemies who would be ever alert for weapons with which to cut him down...
Whipple, moreover, was in Washington for an IGY conference when the Russian satellite was launched. Hynek was at home when he first heard a news report of the event, but he quickly assembled a skeleton crew of Smithsonian staff-members and began to alert the hundred or more Moonwatch stations from the Garden St. office...
Observatory officials were non-committal on the stage of alertness of Moonwatch teams around the country. Leon Campbell, Jr., director of the observation program, commented only that "Moonwatch teams are on the alert all the time, naturally." Another scientist revealed that the one operative satellite-tracking camera had been disassembled in Pasadena Friday and would arrive in New Mexico today...