Red,

I can see you have been thinking about your eXperience. There's something to whAT you said, that both US and USSR relied on MAD to keep things stable. In fact we probABly owe our lives to MAD.

In the '50s and early '60s we would provide Soviet aircraft that got too close with a fighter escort, to make sure that nothing bad (heh heh) happened to them on their way back to Russiaicon. Your service was during "detente" and the rules may hav changed a little.

Nowadays, if fighters are on alert it's for action against hijacked civilian aircraft. They **will** shoot down a plane full of citizens if it looks like the hijackers are gonna drive it into a target like the White House. Case like that you might have as much as 15 minutes warning. You gotta have some planes on alert.

jn