JPS #6:

I don’t think that there was any specific announcement about moving to Launch on Warning but I don’t know of anyone in the USAF who thought we would ever adopt that philosophy.

Before the Peacekeeper missile was deployed there was some discussion that the increased vulnerability of our strategic forces to the later Soviet ICBMs would force a Launch on Warning approach.

In reality the world situation would determine much of what would happen. Today I can’t imagine Launch On Warning occurring. But if in the 70′s and 80′s we were in the midst of some kind of specific confrontation with the USSR, such as a Soviet invasion of Iran or Saudi Arabia or Soviet threats that we better stay out of an Iraq-Kuwait conflict, with increasing DEFCONs occurring I can imagine a Launch on Warning decision if it looked like a major nuclear attack were underway.

A fellow USAF officer once told me of an incident where a computer at a site he was at in Alaska got stuck in a Do loop and counted one radar track, probably a meteorite, over and over, reporting thousands of incoming missiles to NORAD. And then the comm to NORAD went down. He finally got through via an alternate path to tell them of the problem, but no doubt Cheyanne Mtn had other sources with which to confirm what was going on, SAMOS, and other ground radars.

In the 80′s they recognized that one vulnerability was the POTUS. Get him and we potentially were hamstrung. Studies and tests were underway for a limited ABM system (and a really cool one by the way) to protect DC but the ABM treaty shut that down. Too bad; just the test program would have been the stuff of legends.

Few things show the difference between now and then than does the fact that Cheyanne Mtn is shut down and in caretaker status, with NORAD operating out of a much softer facility.