hastened by international outrage over human rights violations by his National Guard, whose atrocities were brought into clear focus when one of its soldiers was filmed murdering American TV newsman Bill Stewart in cold blood on June 20, 1979. President Carter refused to let Somoza settle in the United States; just over a year later, the exiled caudillo was assassinated in spectacular fashion in Asunción, Paraguay. Somoza died in a hail of bazooka and machine-gun fire that shredded him and his yellow Mercedes as it drove by a house that hid his ambushers.
Three years after Somozaâs assassination, the CIA began supporting Nicaraguan rebels whose goal was to overthrow the Sandinistas, who had established a dictatorship of their own, leftist brand. The CIA-backed insurgents, mostly exâNational Guardsmen, became known as the Contras, from counterrevolutionaries . On September 1, 1983, the same year the Contras were organized, a Soviet fighter plane shot down a South Korean airliner over the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 passengers and crew on board. An outraged President Reagan went on national television to denounce the Soviets for the planeâs downing and to announce stiff sanctions against Moscow. A couple of weeks later, the White House further announced that, to help pilots avoid Soviet airspace, the president would allow all nations free use of a revolutionary new constellation of navigation satellites the U.S. military was launching.
The still-incomplete array would consist of twenty-four satellites circling the earth every twelve hours in six orbital planes while emitting continuous radio signals. Read by the right kind of receiver, these radio signals would tell users their location, velocity, and the time of day with unprecedented precision. For the first time in history, humans or machines would be able to know where they were within a few yards, how fast they were traveling down to fractions of a mile per hour, and what time it was within a millionth of a second. Navigation Signal Timing and Ranging Global Positioning System was the name of this new technology; initially referred to by the acronym NAVSTAR, it later became known as GPS.
Interested in technology since he was a youngster, and familiar since his Blue Bird days with the difficulties of aerial navigation, Neal Blue found his imagination fired by the coming availability of GPS. He began following the systemâs development avidly, and when he heard of a Silicon Valley company named Trimble Navigation Ltd. that was already making products based on GPS applications, he flew to California to meet the firmâs founder. He came back with a new idea: theoretically, an unmanned aircraft equipped with a GPS receiver connected to an autopilot could be flown with great accuracy to any point on the globe that its aerodynamics and fuel capacity would enable it to reach. If such a drone also had a couple of hundred pounds of TNT in its nose, and was built cheaply enough, it could be a poor manâs cruise missile.
Neal had been following the turmoil in Nicaragua closely, and now it occurred to him that the Contrasâor a covert ally of theirs, perhapsâmight use a weaponized drone to destroy Managuaâs military aviation fuel supplies and thereby ground a fleet of attack helicopters the Soviets had given the Sandinistas in 1984. The heavily armed Soviet choppers had been chewing up the CIA-backed Contras. Well aware of the domestic and international pressure to stop supporting the Contras, Neal reasoned that the GPS-guided flying bombs might be just the covert weapon the Reagan administration needed. âYou could launch them from behind the line of sight, so you would have total deniability,â Neal explained some years later.
Neal also believed that if the GPS-guided drones were inexpensive enough, the U.S. military could use them to stop the swarms of Soviet tanks that analysts expected to pour through the Fulda Gap,
Three years after Somozaâs assassination, the CIA began supporting Nicaraguan rebels whose goal was to overthrow the Sandinistas, who had established a dictatorship of their own, leftist brand. The CIA-backed insurgents, mostly exâNational Guardsmen, became known as the Contras, from counterrevolutionaries . On September 1, 1983, the same year the Contras were organized, a Soviet fighter plane shot down a South Korean airliner over the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 passengers and crew on board. An outraged President Reagan went on national television to denounce the Soviets for the planeâs downing and to announce stiff sanctions against Moscow. A couple of weeks later, the White House further announced that, to help pilots avoid Soviet airspace, the president would allow all nations free use of a revolutionary new constellation of navigation satellites the U.S. military was launching.
The still-incomplete array would consist of twenty-four satellites circling the earth every twelve hours in six orbital planes while emitting continuous radio signals. Read by the right kind of receiver, these radio signals would tell users their location, velocity, and the time of day with unprecedented precision. For the first time in history, humans or machines would be able to know where they were within a few yards, how fast they were traveling down to fractions of a mile per hour, and what time it was within a millionth of a second. Navigation Signal Timing and Ranging Global Positioning System was the name of this new technology; initially referred to by the acronym NAVSTAR, it later became known as GPS.
Interested in technology since he was a youngster, and familiar since his Blue Bird days with the difficulties of aerial navigation, Neal Blue found his imagination fired by the coming availability of GPS. He began following the systemâs development avidly, and when he heard of a Silicon Valley company named Trimble Navigation Ltd. that was already making products based on GPS applications, he flew to California to meet the firmâs founder. He came back with a new idea: theoretically, an unmanned aircraft equipped with a GPS receiver connected to an autopilot could be flown with great accuracy to any point on the globe that its aerodynamics and fuel capacity would enable it to reach. If such a drone also had a couple of hundred pounds of TNT in its nose, and was built cheaply enough, it could be a poor manâs cruise missile.
Neal had been following the turmoil in Nicaragua closely, and now it occurred to him that the Contrasâor a covert ally of theirs, perhapsâmight use a weaponized drone to destroy Managuaâs military aviation fuel supplies and thereby ground a fleet of attack helicopters the Soviets had given the Sandinistas in 1984. The heavily armed Soviet choppers had been chewing up the CIA-backed Contras. Well aware of the domestic and international pressure to stop supporting the Contras, Neal reasoned that the GPS-guided flying bombs might be just the covert weapon the Reagan administration needed. âYou could launch them from behind the line of sight, so you would have total deniability,â Neal explained some years later.
Neal also believed that if the GPS-guided drones were inexpensive enough, the U.S. military could use them to stop the swarms of Soviet tanks that analysts expected to pour through the Fulda Gap,
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