During the "Cold War" opposing sides threatened each other, mainly missiles with nuclear ammunition.However, leaders who led the opposing blocks and has the most powerful arsenal of deadly weapons, namely the Soviet Union and the United States, understood that success in the case of the transfer of the war from the "cold" to "hot" stage is possible only if the majority of the issued opponentmissiles will in time detected and intercepted, and the surprise factor - offset.Thus arose the concept of "early detection."
work was done on both sides, they were top secret.Himself level of preparedness of the country to repel a nuclear attack was a state secret no less, and perhaps even more than the number of warheads and their delivery systems.
In the USSR, the issues of development of detection systems launches of ballistic missiles engaged in a special Research Institute DAR, headed by chief designer FAKuzminsky, since 1960.
system design as the main factor detecting hostile missiles use reflection from the ionosphere, perturbing signal generated at the time of start-up and generated by the torch nozzle.
By 1970 experimental radar "Duga", namely, the name given to the project was almost ready and tested on Soviet rockets launched from planned from Baikonur, Pacific Fleet ships and land-based launchers in the Far East.Radar showed a good performance in a low noise level of the ionosphere.The government has decided to build a powerful radar "Duga" in the Mykolaiv region.The place was chosen not by chance, this station could control all the space above the Black Sea, Turkey, Israel and much of Europe, within a radius of 3,000 kilometers.How could unfold further the foreign policy situation at the moment, you can only guess.
horizon radar "Duga" embarked on combat duty on the day of the 54th anniversary of the October Revolution.Despite the situation at privacy, completely eliminate the leakage of information was difficult at the tracking station had huge dimensions, antenna height of 135 meters, and the length was hundreds of meters.In addition, the radar "Duga" Radio interference created in the form of pulses resembling knocking, for which he received, almost immediately, the nickname "Russian woodpecker" NATO in the military dealing with electronic intelligence.However, some awareness of the potential enemy might have been useful.It inhibits excessive arrogance and belligerence and cooled the hot heads in the Pentagon instituted arising margin in the number of nuclear warheads, as well as the presence of armed cruise missiles flat trajectory "Tomahawk", which was detected by conventional radar difficult.
radar "Doug" was very energy-intensive, so the following two of her sample were mounted far away from the power plants.After the Chernobyl accident, one of them had to be closed for obvious reasons.Low resistance of the signal received at the highest level of ionospheric disturbances induced to abandon the operation of the other two.They were replaced by a system of early detection of the new generation.
