The National Reconnaissance Office At 50 Years: A Brief History

The history of the National Reconnaissance Office is a story of how opportunity, necessity, and determination converged to produce an intelligence organization unlike any that had come before. In the late 1950s, rocket and sensor technologies were just reaching a level of maturity so that, if pushed to the limit, they could assist the United States in facing the most challenging national security problem of the age: how to analyze Soviet military forces and avert a potential nuclear war.After providing the hard data that made it possible to understand and deter the Soviet Union, NRO systems later became the primary means that made possible the arms control agreements that defused U.S.-Soviet tensions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, NRO systems became ever more integrated into U.S. military capabilities, playing a critical role in the Gulf Wars, peacekeeping operations, and most recently, global operations against terrorists.In thinking about how far the NRO has come in the past fifty years, the challenge for the reader is to imagine how this national resource can continue to support U.S. security by testing the limits of technology in an era in which the American public expects greater openness and in which space operations have become commonplace. Hopefully, the lessons of scientists, engineers, and intelligence officers who created the NRO will inspire their successors, who will take the organization to even greater achievements.The objective of this monograph is to provide an account of the establishment, evolution, and accomplishments of the National Reconnaissance Office as it marks its fiftieth anniversary. It draws on the extensive body of unclassified and declassified material about the NRO that is available today to examine the agency's accomplishments and the challenges it will face in the future