United States Defense

Vice President Al Gore, courting a major veterans' group his Republican rival addressed the day before, said Tuesday that he would back a military pay raise to keep the U.S. military the "best-trained, best-equipped, best-led fighting force in the entire world, bar none." Gore, who ended a four-day riverboat trip down the Mississippi on Monday, took pains to counter rival George W. Bush's portrayals of a U.S. military in disrepair.

Specially trained National Guard units will help local and state officials respond to potential terrorist attacks from chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said Tuesday. "These teams will arrive quickly, assess the scene and help ensure these affected areas get the federal assistance" they need, Cohen said in a speech at the National Press Club.

Behind a barbed-wire fence, maintenance workers were busy Sunday removing nuclear bombs from B-52s. For the first time in 40 years, the planes would sit with their bellies empty. The "alert" facility here, home base for the men and women who were poised for war on a moment's notice, was a ghost town Sunday. Nearly everyone had gone home. "It's kinda like winning the war," said Capt. Bruce Adams, a B-52 bomber commander who has served eight years at Fairchild, intermittently on alert.

The undetected flight of a Soviet-built MIG from Cuba to Key West, Fla., exposed gaps in the nation's southern air defense that military officials say may be all but impossible to plug. The March 20 incident has prompted an internal investigation by NORAD, the U.S.-Canadian command charged with protecting North American airspace, spokesman Maj. John Niemann said.

The United States is preparing to withdraw 10% to 12% of its military forces from South Korea, Japan and the Philippines over the next three years, according to a classified Pacific strategy plan being prepared by the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney will present the plan to South Korean defense officials today as he begins 10 days of high-level meetings with leaders of the East Asian allies.

The Air Force, bidding farewell to an era, on Monday dismantled one of its most colorful and controversial Cold War commands and christened a successor designed for a world of Persian Gulf-style conflicts. Under rainy skies, the Strategic Air Command laid down its organizational shield in a cavernous hangar thundering with the sound of martial music.

A U.S. Titan 2 nuclear missile crew was performing a routine launch drill in Kansas in 1980 when a real launch sequence suddenly began, threatening to fire the weapon, a report on nuclear accidents revealed Thursday. Scrambling, the crew managed to prevent the launch by hastily disconnecting the main power supply. Meanwhile, nuclear-armed B-52 bombers were being readied to respond to the false computer alarm of a "nuclear attack."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave authority in 1957 to senior U.S. military commanders to retaliate with nuclear weapons if the president could not be reached or was otherwise unable to respond to a nuclear attack against the United States, according to declassified documents released this week.

The Air Force is developing a new high-speed, high-altitude spy plane designed to elude enemy radar, defense industry sources said Sunday. The new stealth-type aircraft, a successor to the 25-year-old SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane, will be built by Lockheed Aeronautical Systems Group in Burbank, which also built the SR-71 and the F-19 stealth fighter, the sources said. Lockheed and Defense Department officials would not comment on the secret program.

Defense Secretary Les Aspin declared "the end of the 'Star Wars' era" on Thursday, ordering a change in the name and the direction of the Pentagon missile-defense program that set out to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" a decade ago. After reviewing the Pentagon's Strategic Defense Initiative, Aspin said the program now will focus primarily on the deployment of ground-based systems like the Patriot missile to protect troops against short-range missiles.