Safeguard Program
The Safeguard Program was a U.S. Army anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system designed to protect the U.S. Air Force's Minuteman ICBM silos from attack, thus preserving the US's nuclear deterrent fleet.
A new design emerged, Nike-X, with the ability to defend against attacks with hundreds of warheads and thousands of decoys, but the cost of the system was enormous.
In March 1969, incoming President Richard M. Nixon announced that Sentinel would be cancelled and redirected to protect the missile farms, and that its bases would be placed well away from any civilian areas.
In the public sphere, opinion by the late 1960s was anti-military in general, and in an era of ongoing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks the entire concept was derided as sabre rattling.
Nixon pressed ahead in spite of objections and complaints about limited performance, and the reasons for his strong support remains a subject of debate among historians and political commentators.
The remaining base in North Dakota, the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, became active on 1 April 1975 and fully operational on 1 October 1975.
Zeus had limited traffic handling capabilities, designed to deal with a small number of attacking missiles arriving over a period of as long as an hour.
This meant that much smaller rockets could carry these new warheads to the same range, greatly reducing the cost of the missile, making them far cheaper than bombers or any other delivery system.
When Nikita Khrushchev angrily boasted that the Soviet Union was producing new missiles "like sausages", the US responded by building more ICBMs of their own, rather than attempting to defend against them with Zeus.
[citation needed] Faced with these problems, both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations turned to the newly created ARPA to suggest solutions.
They proposed a system using a short range missile that could wait until the warhead was below 100,000 feet (30 km) altitude, at which point the decoys would have been decluttered.
[citation needed] In 1963, Robert McNamara cancelled the upcoming deployment of Zeus and announced that money would instead be provided for research into this new system, now known as Nike-X.
Construction on the new phased array radar and its associated computer systems began at the MAR-I site in White Sands Missile Range.
When presented with these numbers, McNamara concluded that deploying Nike-X would prompt to Soviets to build more ICBMs, increasing the risk of an accidental war.
[citation needed] In spite of all of these problems, which McNamara repeatedly made public in a series of talks, the Johnson administration was under intense pressure to deploy an ABM system.
[citation needed] Nixon, having campaigned that the Democrats were deliberately dragging their feet on the ABM, inherited the system with his election win.
He also inherited a massive NIMBY backlash that blew up in late 1968 when the Army chose to deploy the missiles in suburban locations to allow future expansion to be easier.
[citation needed] The issue came to a head at a meeting outside Boston, when an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 people showed up to express their displeasure in spite of a raging blizzard.
[citation needed] The PAR was a large passive electronically scanned array radar that was intended to detect incoming ballistic missile warheads as they crossed over the North Pole region.
Potential targets detected by the PAR would be sent to the Missile Site Radar (MSR) and to North American Aerospace Defense Command.
