Word: commandingly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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ROUND the clock, day and night, twelve B-52s armed with hydrogen bombs cruise over the U.S. and Canada, carrying maps, charts and radar photos of Soviet targets. They are part of the Strategic Air Command's 1,500-plane retaliatory strike force, but they have a special distinction: because the twelve are always on station at their high-altitude guard posts, they constitute a brand-new weapon in the U.S. arsenal. They are the airborne answer to the threat of Soviet Russia's growing missile force, the minimum strike-back punch that the U.S. can deliver even...
Tethered & Armed. Through the whole period in the air, the crews are tethered by SAC's worldwide communications system to an airborne commander, who flies out of SAC headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha on twelve-hour shifts. Point of the flying command post is to provide battle direction in case all or one of SAC's surface communications centers are bombed. The airborne commanders are SAC's generals, and the flagship is a converted KC-135 jet tanker loaded with communications equipment and capable of flying, if necessary, for 15 hours without refueling...
...guard against accidental triggering of H-bomb war, the SACmen are schooled in a complicated, checks-and-balances, fail-safe system that is not only foolproof but "damnfool-proof." Before an alert plane would start toward its target, the coded string of electronic signals from the command post must be authenticated by two crewmen as well as by the pilot. When that is done, the crew begins the arduous process of arming the bombs. No one crew member can do it alone; for each man who arms the bomb, regulations require that another must be in attendance and watching closely...
...five-ton Soviet space vehicle carrying a female dog named Chernushka (Blackie) and "other biological objects" last week spun into a low orbit around the earth. Announced the U.S.S.R.: "After fulfilling the outlined research program, the vessel landed on command at a preset area of the Soviet Union on the same...
...site where George Washington took command of the American Army . . .," Volpe declared, "although situated in Cambridge, belongs historically not only to all residents of the Commonwealth, but to all people in the free world who today are seeking freedom just as our forefathers did when they marched from the Cambridge Common to Charles town and fought one of the most important battles in the War for Independence...