The giant white airship, its balloon inflated by 250,000 cubic feet of helium, squirms in the wind like a recalcitrant toddler being held by the scruff of its neck. Half-a-dozen men in shorts and T-shirts try to keep it in position with ropes, while Captain Bart Van Beest, the Dutch pilot, wrestles with the controls.

The US Navy has invited The Times to this parched airfield, within walking distance of the Mexican border town of Tijuana, to demonstrate why the widely mocked blimp has made a comeback.

It is 66 years since the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg burst into flames above New Jersey in a disaster that killed 35 people. The navy, however, is now proposing to use antiquated airship technology, enhanced by state-of-the-art computer surveillance equipment, as the centrepiece of America’s Homeland Security programme.

The navy wants every big city in the United States to be watched over by three gigantic dirigibles, each to be shared between federal and state agencies such as the police and border patrol during normal duty, but redeployed by the navy in case of a terrorist emergency.

From a height of 2,000ft those blimps will be able to spot suspicious craft entering harbours, illegal immigrants crossing borders, gunfire in urban streets or a person making his way across a crowded city. They could even film a drug-dealer handing crack cocaine to a customer.

"Persistent surveillance — that’s what everybody wants," Mr Plumb, of Science & Technology International, the private Hawaiian firm that built the so-called spectral imaging surveillance technology in the prototype blimp, said. "They want the eye-in-the-sky, 24-hours a day. Every harbour in America will want three of these things to monitor arial threats and also the surface area. The blimps can be used for underwater surveillance, too."

Inside the prototype blimp’s cabin, known technically as a gondola, it is easy to see why the airship is an effective way of providing surveillance.

The take-off is noisy, with two engines acting as giant fans to provide forward thrust, while water ballast is released to make the craft lighter. But once in the air, you feel like you are sitting on a giant waterbed as the blimp rides the warm thermals from the Mexican desert. It can be a choppy ride, as the gondola occasionally lurches towards the earth. It is, however, relatively quiet and smooth, unlike hovering in a helicopter. The blimp is also able to remain directly above a given position, unlike an aircraft which has to circle at great cost.

Stephen Huett, the director of airship programmes for the Naval Air Systems Command, which sees the eagle-eye blimp as a way of remaining relevant in an age defined by terrorism and guerrilla warfare, said: "Once you’re up, you just sit up here, like you’re in a French café. If you watch anything for long enough up here, you get a sense of what’s normal — and what’s not normal."

At the rear end of the gondola sit two surveillance operators, one controlling a powerful zoom camera with a joystick, the other studying a computer screen. During our demonstration, we focused on a ship about two miles out to sea, which was invisible to the human eye from the gondola. We zoomed in so close that we could almost see the captain drinking his morning coffee on the bridge.

The spectral imaging computer screen is even more sophisticated. It breaks down real-time photographs of the environment into colour-based algorithms, using a spectrum of colours far more complex than could be analysed by the naked eye, which then highlights unusual changes.

Just beyond the airfield, the navy has set up a mock terrorist camp under a canopy of trees and the computer screen dutifully identified it with red marks. Last October, when the Pentagon used surveillance aircraft to hunt the Washington snipers, a similar system was deployed to look for a change in colours caused by sniper gunfire. Within seconds of spotting such a change, the blimp could relay exact Global Positioning System co-ordinates to police on the ground.

The blimps will not come cheap. Defence contractors estimate that a fully-equipped airship costs in the region of $12 million (£7.8 million), mean- ing that any city requiring 24-hour eagle-eye surveillance from a blimp would have to pay close to $40 million for three of them (two to take it in turns to fly, the other to stand in during maintenance work).

Yet plans for the humble blimp extend even further than that. The Pentagon has asked several defence contractors to develop a giant unmanned gasbag that would be able to hover for months at 70,000ft, carrying more than 4,000lb of an unspecified payload.

These super-blimps would be way out of range of any artillery fire, yet able to detect any incoming missiles from countries such as North Korea. They could even end up being a workable version of the Star Wars programme envisioned by President Reagan in the 1980s.

It is thought that the first prototype could be built within three years. A fully operational blimp defence system could be in place by 2010.

Not since the Second World War, when hundreds of tethered blimps floated above London to hamper German bombers and rockets, has the airship been taken so seriously. The days of the blimp being used simply as a giant floating billboard or to provide footage of sports games seem to be numbered.