"David Stinson" wrote in message
...
Trying to identify a vacuum tube based missle seeker head.



Can anyone ID this? The box said "NIKE AJAX."



"Nike Ajax" was one of the first anti-aircraft city defense systems ever.
It was ably designed by Bell labs to act like a short-range detection,
tracking, and interception system.

But if you do the math of coastlines vs radar vs missle range vs costs, you
quickly discover you'd need about 600 times the GNP of the USA to put up
enough of these to intercept 75% of the bombers. Oh, and they knew that
very soon the bombers would be obsoleted by ICBM's, which would completely
obsolete the whole Nike shebang.

Even in the free spending 1950's there was only enough spare $ to put up a
miniscule shield. Many of the Nike sites were put up in full view of major
public thoroughfares, to reassure the public that the US govt was on the
job!

When the Nike sites were tested against actual "attacking" bombers (ours),
the results were less than stupendous. No problem, the results were
classified.

To further boondoggle things, the Feds didnt want to run the sites, so they
somehow delegated the job to each state's National Guard. Mild
contradictions with the US Constitution, quickly fixed by a flurry of
individual "treaties" between the State Dept and the 50 states. Now you try
scheduling the part-time NG troops to man these sites 24/7 with any kind of
effectiveness.

My neighbor was a programmer on Nike-Ajax. IHRC they had a custom-designed
computer that tried to track targets in real-time. The computer had some
parallel-processing capability designed in by the Lab wizards. But the
programmers quickly found out that all that extra parallel hardware was
almost impossible to harness. (Much like the discoveries of later
generations!). So the computers couldnt keep up with a typical target mix,
much less with jamming or bad weather.

Count yourself lucky, you're one of the few people that have benefited from
Nike (the system, not the shoe) !