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(Continued from page one) court and there are facilities for showing movies. “OPERATION UNDER STANDING,” a three-day project, started at Lunken Airport, Cincin nati last Tuesday. Aboard the spe cial plane were 17 others. They were mayors, commissioners, edit ors, TV and radio men. The itinerary included Ft. Bliss, Tex., and Colorado Springs. We were on a rigid schedule. We were given officers’ billets. We arose and shined at 5:45 a. m. daily. Each day was spent traveling by bus or plane, attending briefing sessions, watching demonstra tions. We had dinner one night in Juarez, Mexico at La Fiesta, the city’s finest restaurant. The food was pretty bad. “Something Smith and his Redheads”’ was the floor show feature. Our guide said the act was real big and had wax ed a lot of platters in the United States. But they didn't reach the Marsh-Hunter wave length. We're the Lawrence Welk type. The technical briefings about the missiles were conducted for the most part by sharp young men who gave the impression they knew their business. One member of our party commented, ‘‘How do they expect me to understand how a missile works, I carried an M-1 for four years and I'm still not sure how the thing worked.” We saw the Nike-Hercules, (the Army call it “The Hero ), raised from the horizontal to its near vertical firing position. We were scheduled to see an actual firing but it was postponed because of weather conditions. The Wilmington representatives received a special break in the in formation phase because we were accompanied most of the time by Lt. Col. Charles R. Arvin, the man who will take command of the Cin cinnati Defense Area Nike bases on Sept. 15. He’s a warm personal ity and he told us he’s looking for ward to establishing his residence in Wilmington Another outstanding personality on the tour was Maj. Gen. Wil liam H. Hennig, commander of Second Region, U.S. Army Air De fense Command. “The Army’s mission is to deter war,” he told us. “But if war should come, our job is to defeat the enemy.” AT WHITE SANDS, COLO., we missed by a few hours the partial ly successful launching of the Nike-Zeus missile. They told us that Zeus is under wraps and that even if we had been in the area at the time we would have been bar red. Information about the Zeus, (pronounced Zeos), is sketchy. It is apparently the answer to Rus sia’s ICBM, designed to intercept the ICBM. The Army has been as signed the task of developing the Zeus missile system with neces sary radar...Air Force has been assigned the task of developing anti-missile ballistic detection and early warning equipment.,,Zeus is designed for strategic placement throughout the continental United States. THE TOUR was wrapped up at NORAD Combat Operations Cent er, Colorado Springs. There is a lot of distance between Wilmington and the Hudson Bay area. But it seems to shrink when you look at a room size iluminated map which is being used to tell the story of a simulated attack on the North American Continent. Much has been said and written about inter-service squabbling. It's pretty easy to get the idea that each service is going its separate way in the business of defense. But we received a different slant on the subject as the drama of the invader unfolded on the giant map. This was NORAD. And NORAD is the United States Army Air Defense Command, the United States Air Force Air Defense Com mand, the Royal Canadian Air Force Air Defense Command and the United States Naval Forces. These components work as a unit. And it's a 24-hour-a-day ope ration. The elaborate communica tion system that permits operators to contact report points all over the world in a few minutes the co operative defense deployment, utilizing the forces of Canada and the U.S., the very atmosphere of NORAD relays a message that ev ery citizen should hear. WILMINGTON’S NIKE - HER CULES Battery is part of that de fense system. And it's just a stone's throw from Hudson Bay. After Nov. 15, “the Hero’ will be poised here ready to play its part if war takes the stage. The Hero will never be fired ex cept In anger. Pray to God there will be no anger NIKE RANGE —Douglas Marsh, Lt. Col. Charles R. Arvin and Tom Hunter. The tiny plane, back ground, is a remote control jet, used as a target for the Nike-Hercules missiles on the range o
Newspaper Details
Wilmington News Journal
Wilmington, Ohio, US
Mon, Aug 31, 1959
Page 3
Full Page
Clipped by
Shannon B.
USA 09 May 2026
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