The Pulsing Heart of SAC (film)

[bluehawk15]

Those of you had the honor of serving in SAC, will love this. Recently
released film from the National Security Archive about SAC's nuclear command
and control system. I knew about the "red phone," but this is the first
I've heard of the "gold phone." Says the Air Force made this movie to make
people feel secure after seeing "Doctor Strangelove" and "Fail Safe," but for
some reason never released it.

A lot of footage of B-52's and KC-135's, with a couple of glimpses of a B-58 or two.


_http://www.gwu.http://www.gwuhttp://wwwhttp://www.gwuhtt_
(http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ ... film03.htm)

[bluehawk15]

By the way, thanks DZ, for sending this. I thought the WIXers would enjoy it as well!

[Craig59]

As a fomer SAC trained killer, I was fortunate enough to visit the command post at Ground Zero...er...Offutt AFB once. Amazing place - thanks for posting. Ith it jutht me or duth the narrator have a bit of a lithp?

[bluehawk15]

I sure hope that at least some of the equipment has been updated. Those rotary dial phones on the panels brought a smile to my face!

[wendovertom]

cool stuff!

Tom P.

[paul smith]

I was processing Air Force One flight plans at Andrews using WWII dated teletypes in 1972. They punched holes similar to braille in a reel of paper tape that you had to manually feed into a separate reader/sender unit which read the holes with little pins and transmitted the data by tones to Washington Center at Leesburg, Va. over a dedicated landline. It automatically sent back a received OK signal which told you the computer swallowed it or barfed it back up in which case you had to send a query over a writer unit by which you wrote with a pen which was connected mechanically to a similar unit at the other end which mimicked your handwriting exactly (?)- to find out which part of the proposed route it didn't like. They wrote back. If you couldn't understand the problem, you had to go to the phone booth in the hall and dial the number to speak to the FAA guys. Later we got our own phone, but it wasn't red.

All this equipment was whiz-bang stuff back then. This modern age in which we lived.

P

[bluehawk15]

Wow, Paul! And here we always think of the Air Force as having cutting edge technology! Thanks for sharing!