sentences:  The accident, which occurred two years after the Palomares crash, signaled the immediate end of the airborne alert program, which had become untenable because of the political and operational risks involved.Scott Sagan, a political science academic and anti-nuclear writer, postulated that if the HOBO 28 monitoring aircraft had crashed into the BMEWS early warning array instead of Baffin Bay, it would have presented NORAD with a scenario (radio link to "Hard Head" aircraft and BMEWS both dead, no nuclear detonation detected) that also matched that of a surprise conventional missile attack on Thule, leaving the unreliable submarine telecommunications cable between Thule and the US mainland as the only source of information to the contrary.A satellite communications link was set up in 1974.