Going Public - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 91

burden for the multiservice program outside the Air Force is unclear. Either
way, backing from such top leaders as Assistant Secretary Donald Latham in
the Office of the Secretary of Defense saved the program, as that office rein-
stated funding each year. 32
The Air Force cuts did not help win support in Congress. During the fiscal
year 1982 defense budget authorization process, the House Armed Services
Committee recommended terminating the program. Some observers have
attributed this largely to the loss of the powerful committee member Rep.
Charles H. Wilson, a Democrat from California, whose district included the
gps contractor Rockwell International and other defense plants. 33 In 1980
Wilson lost the seat he had held since 1962 after the House censured him for
lying about cash gifts he accepted from a foreign operative who was trying to
influence a decision about pulling U.S. troops out of South Korea. Without
Wilson advocating for the program, the argument goes, committee members
adopted the narrow framework gao used to evaluate costs and beneits—merely
identifying existing users who would switch to gps without trying to assess
ways the system might transform military doctrine. 34 Visionary thinking may
not have been the strong suit of gao, but the Senate was more receptive to the
possibilities, issuing a remarkable (given the sums of money required) “build-
it-and they-will come” endorsement. “It may be difficult to understand the
full potential until the system is deployed and the vast number of potential
users are able to see what it will do for them,” stated the fiscal year 1981 Sen-
ate Authorization Report. 35 With President Reagan urging a massive defense
buildup, the Senate view prevailed.
Another factor probably influenced many lawmakers. Terminating gps would
have also killed a less publicized secondary use of the satellites, distinct from
its navigation mission but tied to its precise positioning capability—the Inte-
grated Operational Nuclear (Detonation) Detection System (ionds). 36 Arms
control verification relies on the ability to monitor nuclear weapons tests. The
United States first fielded ground sensors to detect nuclear detonations in the
late 1940s, and it launched space sensors aboard satellites in the mid-1960s. 37
These devices detect nuclear bursts using instruments highly sensitive to pro-
ton, electron, neutron, x-ray, and gamma radiation. Under the Vela (short for
velador , a Spanish term for a watchman or guard) Program, the Air Force began
launching satellites into high orbits—about a fifth of the way to the moon—six
days after the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed the
Limited Test Ban Treaty on August 5, 1963. 38 By 1970 the Air Force had launched