Previously Unavailable Histories of NORAD
From A History of the Dew Line, 1946-1964
NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) is in charge of defending the airspace of North America (and Mexico), and for decades it carried out this mission from its legendary underground command operations center deep inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Because it’s a binational military command run by the US and Canada, for some reason NORAD isn’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act, even though the rest of the US military is.
However, NORAD shares its headquarters and its commander with US Northern Command, and USNORTHCOM is subject to FOIA. So when my colleagues at Government Attic dug up a USNORTHCOM document referencing 22 internal histories published by NORAD, the Air Force’s Air Defense Command, and other related/interlocking military components, I knew what I had to do. Specifically, these histories had been digitized (presumably by NORAD) and sent to USNORTHCOM for posting on its website. From what I could tell via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, they had never been posted. Then the plan apparently was that NORAD would post them on its own site, but that never happened either.
So I FOIAed USNORTHCOM, and they sent me all 22 papers.
At some point after fulfilling my request, USNORTHCOM posted 13 of these reports to its FOIA reading room, but 9 remain unposted until now. (I’ve highlighted in bold the reports they didn’t post.)
Related: Photos from Inside NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center [The Memory Hole 2]
If you appreciate my FOIA request that released 2,600 pages of previously unavailable NORAD reports, please donate so I can keep at it.
NORAD and USAF Air Defense Command Historical Reference Papers and Studies
A Handbook of Aerospace Defense Organization, 1946-1986
A History of the Dew Line, 1946-1964
ADC and Antibomber Defense, 1946-1972
Historical Data of the Aerospace Defense Command, 1946-1973
Air Defense of Alaska 1940-1957 (1957)
Air Defense Theory and Practice, 1918-1945
Command and Control Planning, 1958-1965
Efforts Toward U.S.-Mexican Air Defense Arrangments (1965)
Fifteen Years of Air Defense 1946-61 (1962)
Historical Review of North American Aerospace Defense 1946-1970 (1970)
History of Air Defense Weapons, 1946-1962
Nineteen Years of Air Defense (1965)
NORAD-CONAD Participation in the Cuban Missile Crisis (1963)
NORAD’s Quest for Nike Zeus and a Long Range Interceptor (1962)
NORADs Underground Combat Operations Center, 1956-1966 (1966)
Nuclear Armament and Manned Interceptors, 1951-1963
Seaward Extension of Radar 1946-1956 (1955)
Seventeen Years of Air Defense (1963)
The Fighter Interceptor Force, 1962-1964
The Identification Problem in the Air Defense of the United States, 1946-1954
