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Monday, January 25, 2010

The Pulsing Heart of SAC

My buddy Chris turned me on to this story last week and I'm just now getting around to sharing it with all of you. It's the story of how the USAF and Strategic Air Command, first of all implemented what they felt would be "fail safe" procedures to prevent any accidental or misguided releases of our country's atomic arsenal and then produced this film to explain the procedures to the public. The film is a trip into Strategic Air Command's Command Post. Get a fresh cup of coffee, sit back and prepare to be entertained by a half hour of the USAF's finest people and hardware show off their skills and capabilities.

Except that this film, produced in 1963 and 1964 never saw the light of day! It was apparently produced to reassure the public that the movie "Doctor Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"

couldn't possibly happen because of all the safeguards put into place.

I loved watching this film especially for the views of B-52s performing an elephant walk down the taxiway and the views of the young enlisted guys wearing their service dress uniforms while performing the most routine of daily tasks. It really is a fine bit of USAF history and it's worth watching just to be reminded how serious (paranoid?)the US was about defending the population from nuclear armageddon.

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