radar picket

In 1960, the nuclear-powered radar picket submarine USS Triton departed New London, Conn., on the first submerged circumnavigation by a vessel.

The radar picket line is at least two years from completion, and other promised equipment has yet to be delivered.

Alive with radar screens, computers and scrambled-speech telephones, the Blue Fire command post will eventually anchor a "radar picket line" along the porous 2,000-mile. border with Mexico, the passageway for one-third of the drugs entering the U.S.

The big ships, guarded by antisubmarine frigates and nuclear-powered hunter submarines, were as close as 90 miles to shore, while destroyers interposed themselves between the islands and the mainland to set up a radar "picket" about 100 miles west of the Falklands.

But critics maintain that when the Soviets develop new defensive weapons, including look-down radar and radar picket planes, like the AWACS, the B-l will become obsolete.