Distant Early Warning Line Radars: The Quest for Automatic Signal Detection

■ In the early 1950s, the threat of manned bombers carrying nuclear weapons across the arctic region was of paramount concern in continental defense. The 1952 Summer Study at MIT recommended the development of an earlywarning radar line across the northern reaches of Alaska and Canada, from Cape Lisburne on the northwest corner of Alaska to Cape Dyer on Baffin Island on the east coast of Canada. It was an ambitious undertaking, particularly since the radar system had not yet been developed or designed and a new detection process had yet to be invented. Among other innovations the radar net was proposed to use automatic-detection techniques to reduce drastically the heavy manpower requirements and unacceptable time delays characteristic of manual radar operations of the period. After the U.S. Air Force accepted the Summer Study recommendation in December 1952, Lincoln Laboratory was contracted to deliver ten radar sets by 30 April 1953, a period of less than five months. F. Robert Naka was assigned the task of developing the automated radar signal processing and alarm system. The article reviews the primary author’s experiences with this challenging radar project. While the technical problems sound primitive in view of today’s radar capabilities, they were met and solved at a pace that was easily ten times faster than today’s Department of Defense developments.