reptilestip

The military and secrecy are often two sides of the same coin. Never was this truer than the heightened paranoia and constant one-upmanship shrouded in secrecy that existed between the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Yet another example of this Cold War military subterfuge surfaced in February 2019 courtesy of a retired US Air Force spy plane pilot and what he and a copilot witnessed back in late 1988. Robert Hopkins recounted his now-declassified experience witnessing what was long-rumored Soviet technology as secret as it was terrifying. Its name? The 'Dome of Light.'

Hopkins witnessed the event while flying a US spy plane flown out of the remote Shemya Air Force Base on the Aleutian Island chain near Alaska. At the time, he was a member of the 24th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron, 6th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska and was at Shemya for a routine two-week deployment.

It was known that the Soviets were conducting tests of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in the region at the time. That is why US spy planes were keeping a watchful eye on their adversary's missile capabilities in the North Pacific. These reconnaissance flights were critical to US national security at the height of the Cold War, with many missions originating out of the highly remote and windswept Shemya Air Force Base.

The Soviet Union's SS-20 Saber missiles were of particular concern to the US and its allies. It was an intermediate-range ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead, which was deployed by the Soviet Union from 1976 to their voluntary destruction in 1988. The missile initially had a range of between 370 to 3,110 miles, although the final model had a maximum range of about 4,700 miles. That meant it could be launched from deep inside the Soviet Union and still strike at targets in the US.

These Soviet missiles were considered so effective and such a threat to the West, that their deployment was considered a significant cause of NATO's 'Double-Track Decision,' which led to the deployment of more medium-range nuclear weapons in Western Europe. In fact, what the Soviets were doing was part of a provision of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, commonly known as the INF Treaty, as signed between the US and Soviet Union. A provision of the INF Treaty allowed for the destruction of 72 of 650 of the now-prohibited intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs).

This destruction was achieved by launching the missiles from a known test facility to a known impact site with unimpeded observation for verification purposes by the other side by what was called national technical means or NTM. In this case, the NTM was the RC-135S Cobra Ball being flown by Hopkins. The RC-135S Cobra Ball missile tracking plane was one of the US's most critical intelligence-gathering assets for collecting secret, high-fidelity data on adversary ballistic missile tests.

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