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By Doc Vega
Prior to the first visitation by the US Navy’s Nautilus nuclear powered submarine beneath the northern polar ice cap in 1957, the newly formed US Air Force was forced to patrol the skies over the North Pole, Bering Straights, and Aleutian Island Chain that ran perilously close to the Siberian border of the Soviet Union. B-29 Super Fortresses, the same bomber that had carried the plutonium or A Bomb to Nagasaki and Hiroshima to end World War II, now conducted aerial reconnaissance over the Arctic.
In these vast regions of ice fields and frozen arctic oceans the carefully guarded boundaries of the Soviet Union and United States maintained a tense peace time patrolled by bombers, first generation targeting radars, and the navies of the two super powers as the “Cold War” played out. Everyday Air Force bomber crews maintained vigilance over thousands of miles of ice and snow fields occupied by tiny Inuit villages in the most remote and brutal conditions that man could claw out an existence in.
In 1949 Wendell Stevens commanded one of the early warning patrols that scanned the skies and frozen terrain for enemy movements, threats of invasion, or attempted aerial intrusion into American air space. These men flew long hours in sometimes treacherous conditions to insure a safety for the American homeland that only vigilance could insure in the face of hostile political ideologies that threatened to clash at anytime. As the Russians developed their plans for their first nukes and began building huge rockets from captured V-2 plans using German scientists prisoners, the American military, being the first to ever deploy nuclear bombs was now locked in an arms race with the Soviet Union......
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