Whilst appearing relaxed, Norad’s technicians are simply highly professional. They make their jobs look like just another day in the office. To complete the picture, they work eight hour shifts, live in the suburbs of the local town and commute to work. They could be filing clerks, secretaries or check-out girls. Hollywood’s hype - from War Games to Armageddon - makes the real Norad seem almost mundane, suburban and cliché-ridden. 

I’m promised that all this will change within a few seconds of an conventional enemy launching a strike at America’s heart. The characteristic flare of a rocket’s exhaust gases, the slow take-off of heavily-laden bombers, or the nuclear flare of an anti-satellite weapon, will be picked up by Norad’s satellites and ground-based radars as fast as a technician can blink his eyes.

Within four minutes, Norad will know everything its possible to know about the impending Armageddon. Seconds later, the President will be contacted via the telephone in his infamous emergency briefcase. Two minutes later, the President and his aides will be deep in counsel deciding the fate of humanity. As he discusses his options, the most powerful military machine the world has ever known will be preparing for its final conflict.

As the seconds tick by, long dormant circuits in missile silos will awaken and bombers will be given emergency take-off clearance. Two minutes later, the President’s men will have started issuing the codes to launch a thousand missiles. A further 2,000 will be launched fifteen minutes later. As the skies over America light up with nuclear fire, another ten thousand weapons will start their long flight to Russia, China or whoever threatens American interests.

“We’re as concerned about nuclear war as everyone else,” says Major Mike Birmingham.

“But our role is like any other in the military. You train to do your mission. If the order comes in and it’s a lawful mission, you fulfil it. You get into the check-list mentality. We’re not cavalier about it. Our attitude is one of stoicism and calm professionalism. We’re the guardians of the high frontier.”

Now, as well as looking for incoming missiles, NORAD will use it’s formidable intelligence gathering powers to help fight the war against terrorism. Iran’s nuclear facilities and all of Osama Bin Laden’s conceivable hiding places will be watched and listened to from it’s network of satellites. Every scrap of information will be sifted and assessed for relevance before being forwarded to the President’s war committee.

On a typical day, Norad makes 80,000 observations although 200,000 are not uncommon. I’m assured that the full power of Norad will be used to provide America’s military with as much information on Iran as it’s technology allows.

Powerful though Norad is, it is not half as impressive as its ambitions for the future. Norad is part of the United States Space Command or SpaceCom. This was set up to fight for American interests in space and has its core aim the domination of space for US business. It wants nothing less than the total domination of space for America. With that will come, claim critics, the complete domination of the Earth to the American way of doing business. The aim is to be able to strike any part of the Earth’s surface at will from space.

“Space is the ultimate high ground,” says General Howell Estes III, head of SpaceCom. He wants America to be “guardian of the high frontier”.

SpaceCom sees the domination of space as central to America’s future in the same way that ruling the waves allowed Britain to carve-out the biggest empire the world has hitherto known.

To dominate the “high frontier”, SpaceCom is developing an array of weapons that would surprise even Captain Kirk.

In the near future, SpaceCom will be capable of crippling an enemy’s computer networks, blacking-out whole cities and disabling weapons systems, by blasting them with electromagnetic radiation from space. SpaceCom is also working on high-powered lasers to blow missiles, satellites and aircraft out of the skies. Such weapons could also be used to blast Iranian nuclear facilities or incinerate the camps suspected of harbouring terrorist. But it’s most effective weapon is derived from one that’s thousands of years old. They are working on hypersonic javelins - traveling at thousands of miles per hour - that will penetrate hundreds of feet of concrete to disable Iranian armoured nuclear fracilities  - or knockout the subterranean bases of suspects like Osama Bin Laden. Ironically these hypersonic javelins are the direct descendants of those javelins used by the ancient Greeks in their battles against the Persians 2,500 years ago.

These “clean” weapons could also slice through enemy planes, satellites and missiles and destroy even the toughest of tanks and armoured personnel carriers.  But just as Space Command is growing in power, its critics are getting louder and asking, why, nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War, is America preparing the ground for a war in space?William Peden, spokesman for Greenpeace, says: “The Americans should turn SpaceCom and Norad into a centre for monitoring a treaty banning nuclear weapons. They have the technology. It should be used to benefit humanity not take our greatest folly to the heavens.”

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