Published in the Asbury Park Press
by KIRK MOORE
STAFF WRITER
The name Bomarc was an acronym derived from prime contractors who built the missiles: the Boeing company and the Michigan Aeronautical Research Corp.
In the 1950s, American cities were threatened by Soviet nuclear bombers that could fly over the Arctic to attack with multi-megaton thermonuclear bombs. The Bomarc was conceived as a first line of defense -- a long-range missile carrying a nuclear warhead, packing a big shock wave that would knock down bombers before they reached the cities.
With stubby wings and twin ramjet engines, the 50-foot-long Bomarc resembled a miniature fighter jet. Launched from a vertical launcher with a rocket booster to supersonic speed, the Bomarc's ramjets would turn on, and the missile would roll into horizontal flight at 2,000 mph.
Ground controllers at McGuire Air Force Base could guide airborne Bomarcs toward incoming bombers using an early computer-radar network called SAGE (an acronym for the "Semi-Automatic Ground Environment" coordinating missile batteries and manned fighter interceptors). At close range, the Bomarc missiles' internal homing guidance would lock on to the target aircraft, and seek to explode their warheads over the bombers.
The 7- to 10-kiloton W40 warhead was slightly less powerful than the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima in 1945. Boeing fitted its missiles with an altimeter safety interlock to prevent detonations below 10,000 feet. That would keep fireballs from hitting the ground. Defense planners figured that shock waves and radiation effects of Bomarcs exploding over farm towns in Canada, upstate New York State and New England were the price to pay for saving tens of millions of lives in the major cities, says Donald Bender, a Livingston writer whose book "Cold War New Jersey" is to be published by Rutgers University Press.
The Plumsted missile base was one of the first activated in 1959 to protect the New York City-Philadelphia-Washington metropolitan corridor. After the 1960 fire it remained open until 1972, when the Air Force finally convinced Congress that Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles had made anti-aircraft defenses obsolete.
The last Bomarcs were taken away, their warheads removed, and the missiles converted to target drones. They were sacrificed at aerial ranges, blown up to test a new generation of non-nuclear anti-aircraft weapons.
Published: February 6, 2000
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