In the early 1970s, the Cold War had reached a particularly frigid moment, and U.S. military and intelligence officials had a problem. The Soviet Navy was becoming a global maritime threat—and the United States did not have a global ocean-surveillance capability. Adding to the alarm was the emergence of a new Kirov class of nuclear-powered guided-missile battle cruisers, the largest Soviet vessels yet. For the United States, this situation meant that the perilous equilibrium of mutual assured destruction, MAD, which so far had dissuaded either side from launching a nuclear strike, could tilt in the wrong direction.
It would be up to a top-secret satellite program called Parcae to help keep the Cold War from suddenly toggling to hot. The engineers working on Parcae would have to build the most capable orbiting electronic intelligence system ever.
“It was becoming obvious what the challenges were,” says Lee M. Hammarstrom, an electrical engineer who over a 40-year period beginning in the 1960s was in the thick of classified Cold-War technology development. His work included the kind of satellite-based intelligence systems that could fill the surveillance gap. The Soviet Union’s expanding naval presence in the 1970s came on the heels of its growing prowess in antiaircraft and antiballistic missile capabilities, he notes. “We were under MAD at this time, so if the Soviets had a way to negate our strikes, they might have considered striking first.”
Reliable, constant, and planetwide ocean surveillance became a top U.S. priority. An existing ELINT (electronic intelligence) satellite program, code-named Poppy, was able to detect and geolocate the radar emissions from Soviet ships and land-based systems, but until the program’s last stages it could take weeks or more to make sense of its data. According to Dwayne Day, a historian of space technology for the National Academy of Sciences, the United States conducted large naval exercises in 1971, with U.S. ships broadcasting signals, and several types of ELINT satellites attempting to detect them. The tests revealed worrisome weaknesses in the country’s intelligence-gathering satellite systems.
That’s where Parcae would come in.
Even the mere existence of the satellites, which would be built by a band of veteran engineers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., would remain officially secret until July 2023. That’s when the National Reconnaissance Office declassified a one-page acknowledgment about Parcae. Since its establishment in 1961, the NRO has directed and overseen the nation’s spy-satellite programs, including ones for photoreconnaissance, communications interception, signals intelligence, and radar. With this scant declassification, the Parcae program could at least be celebrated by name and its overall mission revealed during the NRL’s centennial celebration that year.