Читать книгу An Untaken Road - Steven A. Pomeroy - Страница 13
ОглавлениеThe Soviet Army today possesses such armaments and such firepower as no Army has ever had. I want to re-emphasize that we already have such an amount of nuclear weapons—atomic and hydrogen weapons and an appropriate number of rockets to deliver them to the territory of a potential aggressor—that if some madman were to provoke an attack on our country or on other socialist countries, we could literally wipe the country or countries attacking us off the face of the earth.
NIKITA S. KHRUSHCHEV, 19601
Nikita Khrushchev bluffed. In 1960, the Soviet Union had two ICBMs, and each of those carried one warhead. He did have sixty-three SLBM launchers and warheads, but the best of these missiles ranged no more than six hundred kilometers. His bomber force had 138 aircraft and 239 weapons, not insignificant numbers but small when compared to those of its American counterpart. The American air force’s Strategic Air Command possessed 1,735 long-range bombers, including 1,178 sleek but soon-to-be-retired B-47 Stratojets and 538 new B-52 Stratofortress heavy bombers, accompanied by nineteen supersonic B-58 Hustlers. Additional B-52s and B-58s were coming. To top off bomber fuel tanks for long flights to the Soviet Union and other targets, 689 KC-97 and 405 KC-135 aerial tankers stood ready. The bomber was the primary U.S. long-range nuclear attack weapon, but in a sign that times were changing, SAC also owned twelve Atlas ICBMs and by year’s end had five on alert and expected delivery of more, along with its Titan and upcoming Minuteman ICBMs. It anticipated a portion of its Minuteman force roaming the national rail network. At sea, the American navy did not yet have Polaris sea-launched ballistic missile submarines prowling, but they were heading to operational capability. The United States had been a nation slow to develop ballistic missiles, but American strategists now sought to deploy missiles in the air, on the land, and under the sea. Sun Tzu may have counseled the wisdom of deceiving one’s enemy, but Khrushchev’s lies played with fire.2
Khrushchev knew he was bluffing, but the Americans perceived Soviet power through the lenses of propaganda and technological achievements such as Sputnik. Technology and rhetoric led American leaders to believe the Soviet Union could threaten the United States with a nuclear attack. To a limited extent it could, but the American counterpunch would have devastated Mother Russia. As the Soviets sought their security ends via a strong strategic nuclear force, particularly ICBMs, the United States terminated its failed intercontinental cruise-missile programs and initiated a crash ballistic-missile program. Khrushchev’s bluster and Soviet technical achievements provided the American missile community an opportunity for which it was prepared.3
Remarkable—at the end of World War II, large parts of the Soviet Union had stood ruined, but the Soviets possessed powerful armed forces. For many years, the Soviets had faced Hitler’s worst, as well as the depredations of their own national leaders. At war’s end, the Red Army provided unsurpassed land power and hosted devastating ground support air forces, but Russia had much to rebuild. In contrast, the United States, virtually untouched by enemy arms, had begun the war as a global industrial and economic power. It ended as a victorious superpower.
American technological, industrial, and economic hubris swelled. It possessed uncontested naval superiority, a victorious army (if smaller than that of the Soviet Union), and the only long-range air force capable of delivering atomic bombs.4 Even as Soviet-American relations worsened and Soviet military power stood fast, the American populace’s passions demanded that its troops return and normalcy resume. Should Premier Joseph Stalin prove troublesome, the American military “technological sublime,” the feeling of awe and beauty the war machine generated, provided Americans the confidence they needed to believe their security to be a gift of their atomic superiority. President Harry S. Truman sought to contain the Soviet Union’s influence by limiting the availability of nuclear weapons and by leveraging a unilateral atomic advantage. Truman’s objective was to stop the transfer of atomic technology. Unfortunately for him, one may manage technological diffusion, including inhibiting it, but stopping it is another matter, and Stalin soon had his own bomb.5 Political scientist David Broscious has described Truman as a man who felt technology would secure America, but as historian Melvin Kranzberg once remarked, technology was “neither good nor bad; nor was it neutral.”6 Broscious’ Truman understood this, considering nuclear weapons “a gateway to Armageddon and a deterrent to aggression.”7
In light of two world wars’ devastation, revolutionary travails, and humiliation in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, the postwar Soviet Union demanded security. Its mighty army and ground-support air forces were large and possessed much combat experience. Their wartime modernization was uneven. The Red Air Force was the only major Allied air arm that failed to develop a jet fighter during the war, and it lacked strategic bombers. Contextual reasons help to explain this. The Soviet air service had no experience with strategic long-range bombing and had no cultural attachment to it. In support of a manpower-intensive military, Soviet aerospace industry concentrated on ground support aircraft. The postwar bomber force began with the Tu-4 Bull, a copy of the American B-29. No matter—Soviets exalted at the victorious end of the Great Patriotic War. Britain’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr, wrote, “Russia could be made safe at last. She could put her house in order, and more than this from behind her matchless 300 divisions, she could stretch out her hand and take most of what she needed and perhaps more. It was an exquisite moment, all the more so because the resounding success under their guidance justified at last their faith in the permanence of their system.”8
In early August 1945, a lone B-29 annihilated the Soviet sublime. Kerr continues, “At a blow the balance which had now seemed set and steady was rudely shaken. Russia was balked by the West when everything seemed to be within her grasp. The 300 divisions were shorn of much of their value” as the U.S. Army Air Forces evaporated the exquisite Soviet moment into humiliation. Russian military scholar Steven Zaloga has contended, “Prior to 1945 Stalin had a very limited appreciation of the revolutionary nature of the atomic bomb.” Hiroshima changed Premier Stalin’s mind, and he accelerated an existing fission-weapon project, telling his experts, “Comrades—a single demand of you. Get us atomic weapons in the shortest time possible.” No thinking Soviet could ignore his demand. In 1946, they gave Iron Joe a Christmas present when the first Soviet nuclear chain reaction occurred. A world political surprise followed on August 29, 1949, when the Soviets exploded what the Americans nicknamed “Joe I,” their first atomic fission device. While the United States sought to rely on its atomic might and reduce conventional defense expenditures accordingly, the Soviets eliminated the unilateral American advantage. As much as the Americans had destroyed the Soviet sublime, Stalin’s technologists rebalanced the strategic equation.9
Atomic weapons were useless without an accurate and reliable delivery system. Early bombs were large and heavy. The Americans favored bombers to deliver them, and they had already created massive bomber forces. They could incorporate the new weapon into their existing architectures of war. The Soviets did not ignore bombers, but they lacked strategic airpower. They needed another technology. In 1947, the first R-1, a Soviet copy of the German V-2 rocket, flew. It was unimpressive compared to later Soviet rockets, but it demonstrated commitment to ballistic missiles. This weapon could threaten Western Europe but provided zero advantage against the United States. On March 14, 1947, Gyorgi Malenkov, the Politburo’s representative for rocket development, stated he was “not happy with our V-2s. We cannot rely on such a primitive weapon; besides, should there be another war[;] . . . our strategic needs are predetermined by the fact that our potential enemy is to be found thousands of miles away.” Stalin doubtlessly motivated Malenkov. On March 15, 1947, the dictator directed his rocketeers to develop a long-range rocket as “an effective straightjacket for that noisy shopkeeper Harry Truman.” Even though the Soviets lacked a military cultural tradition of long-range strategic bombing, they knew artillery and perceived long-range rockets as useful military and political tools.10 During World War II, the Germans had dreamt of intercontinental missiles and atmospheric “skip” bombers with which to strike New York, but the Soviets did not just dream. They built such missiles.11
The American Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons, known as the “atomic bombs,” were fission bombs. “Fission” denotes weapons whose explosive yield depends upon the splitting of the nucleus of a plutonium or uranium atom into two or more parts. When atoms split, they release an enormous amount of energy useful for destroying a target. The energy yielded is “about ten million times as much, atom for atom” as is obtained from conventional energy sources, a stunning capability advance. In a conventional bomb, pounds of trinitrotoluene (TNT) measured explosive yield, but the fission bomb measured yield in kilotons, the explosive force of one thousand standard tons of TNT. Hiroshima’s “Little Boy” yielded from twelve to fifteen kilotons, and Nagasaki’s “Fat Man” yielded approximately twenty-two, plus or minus two.12
A fusion bomb uses a fission reaction to overcome the repulsive forces of atomic nuclei. “Hydrogen” or “thermonuclear bomb” are terms that describe a fusion bomb that merges hydrogen nuclei (the lightest element) to form heavier atoms. Unit for unit, fusion releases less energy than fission, but fusion yields energy “about three or four times as great per unit weight” than fission. At yields above fifty kilotons, fusion weapons are cheaper and weigh significantly less than fission weapons, and they produce megaton yields, the explosive force of one million standard tons of TNT. “Mike,” the first U.S. fusion bomb, detonated at Eniwetok Atoll on October 31, 1952. It yielded 10.4 megatons. Fusion weapons offered economy of force, because so much firepower resulted from one weapon. One bomb replaced thousands of airplanes and airmen; accurate delivery, however, remained a problem.13
Technical Means for the Future
In less than a decade, atomic technology moved through the first three phases of development. Thermonuclear technology accelerated faster. Deliveries of operational American fusion weapons followed in 1954. On August 12, 1953, the Soviet Union detonated its first fusion weapon and followed with its first operational weapons in late 1953.14 Since 1945, the bomber had been the primary American delivery method for atomic weapons, because the size and weight of early fission weapons precluded any other vehicle. The available midfifties rockets, whether Soviet or American, were too weak to serve as delivery vehicles, and American missile programs were fragmented and small in scale. This occurred despite the prescience of the Army Air Forces’ visionary commander, Gen. Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold, who by November 1944 knew his service needed planning for the future. Without aggressively pursuing new technologies, he feared, the Army Air Forces would “let the American people down” by slipping “back to our 1938 position.” He wanted to capitalize upon wartime scientific and technological developments, wherever sourced. Arnold appreciated the relationship of science to technological development. As he colorfully put it, “The longhaired professors . . . [need to] see all the gadgets and data and drawings so as to give us a Buck Rodgers program to cover the next twenty years. . . . Accordingly, we must make accessible to the . . . boys all information available from all sources from all nations.”15 Arnold wrote this diary entry, dated Friday, July 13, 1945, while in Paris en route to a stay at Berchtesgaden, the site of Hitler’s mountain retreat. Arnold knew how to accomplish technological transfer and diffusion. He assembled a crack team and charged it with gathering data on Axis aeronautical technology. Headed by Doctor Theodore von Karman, director of the California Institute of Technology’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory and the Army Air Forces Scientific Advisory Group, Arnold’s long-haired professors lustily swept through postwar Germany and compiled mounds of data. Nazi jets, wind tunnels, and cruise and ballistic missiles captured their attention.
Von Karman’s team distilled this scientific and technological data into a series of reports. The first, Where We Stand, assessed American and British aerospace technology vis-à-vis the Axis. While technical components, particularly Germany’s supersonic wind tunnels, impressed the team, it was the associated mental architectures of managing technological development that impressed von Karman most.16 He wrote the German V-2 was “the most outstanding technical achievement” of wartime aeronautics. He identified management and organization as key reasons for this. The German system had provided “under a single leadership in one organization, experts in aerodynamics, structural design, electronics, servomechanisms, gyros and control devices, and propulsion; in fact, every group required for the development of a complete missile.” Arnold and von Karman appreciated the German innovation, and a decade later in 1954, this description fit the American ICBM effort.
While the mental achievement of organizing such work impressed him, von Karman felt that “the most important result of the German effort in this field [rocketry] was to show that winged missiles are superior in performance to finned missiles,” a conclusion consistent with wartime American efforts to develop glide and cruise missiles but ignore ballistic missiles. As political scientists Emily Goldman and Andrew Ross have noted, the amount of cultural compatibility between the transmitter and receiver of transferred technology determines how closely the receiver adopts the technology.17 The Americans and Germans differed politically, but they were science and engineering cousins. The Germans’ lessons nestled comfortably in the American bosom, particularly within an air force built upon long-range, winged strike platforms. They affected the trajectory of American missile research for years. Until the initiation of a crash program to build the Atlas ICBM, the United States dithered with ballistic missiles. Americans concentrated their missile research and development on cruise missiles, but once they accepted the necessity of a long-range ballistic missile, they developed management techniques consistent with von Karman’s observations.18
By the end of World War II, the United States had duplicated the German V-1 cruise missile, but von Karman cautioned Arnold, “The task is far beyond the scope of inventing gadgets and trying to make them work.” Von Karman thought it was insufficient to copy Nazi technology without serious contemplation of future wartime requirements. He understood the importance of a coherent mental architecture for military means, and he accelerated the development of new technical components. He saw an “urgent need of a systematic analysis of the various tasks which manned airplanes equipped with bombs, guns, and rockets perform, and which now may be performed by pilotless craft,” a description of technical means decades in the future. For future long-range strategic bombers, he envisaged “two types of pilotless aircraft, both with wings, one with a high trajectory reaching far into the outer atmosphere, and the other designed for level flight at high altitudes.” He envisaged the first weapon as a multiple-stage rocket that lifted an aircraft-like vehicle into space to conduct long-range bombing missions. He foresaw as the second weapon “a supersonic pilotless aircraft flying at altitudes of from 20,000 to say, 60,000 feet” but believed an achievable “intermediate step might be a pilotless aircraft traveling at high subsonic speeds . . . about 600 miles per hour at 40,000 feet.” Those parameters matched the capabilities of the first American intercontinental cruise missile.19
Funding and acquiring such weapons required public support. Arnold understood how to win the discourse from Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. In a February 1946 piece written for National Geographic Magazine, he explained his ideas to the American public. Stressing the importance of the long-range ground-to-ground ballistic missile, he was certain it would become “the strategic long-range bombardment airplane of the future.” Arnold’s thought was an Air Forces heresy. Although he never said the day of the manned bomber was over, he recognized the inherent offensive aspects of the ballistic missile. He commented the V-2 was “ideally suited to deliver atomic explosives because effective defense against it is extremely difficult. Now and for the moment, the only defense seen for the future is its destruction prior to launching.” He foresaw extending the range of missiles from the V-2’s 250 miles to over three thousand miles and assigning them a polar trajectory, because that was the shortest path to Soviet targets. Arnold believed the United States had to have such offensive weapons, and he stressed that protecting them against enemy attack required the Army Air Forces to “make them harder to detect and destroy.” He envisioned the nuclear-armed ICBM, although neither he nor von Karman specified whether mobility was a useful operational concept.20
A Road Abandoned
Economic restraints and an anticipated development period of no less than ten years doomed any prospect of ballistic missiles in immediate military use. Meanwhile, in September 1947, the Army Air Forces became a separate service, the United States Air Force, which held continued faith in the bomber, a familiar and proven technology. Simply, the winged bomber possessed technological momentum no other military means could arrest. It had advanced to the final stage, phase four—stability. The money the Air Force spent on missiles went into winged cruise missiles such as von Karman detailed. Historian Edmund Beard contends that something beyond budget and technical limitations was at work. Believing the Air Force culturally preferred winged vehicles, he notes how during World War II the Army Air Forces emphasized strategic bombing. Its basic doctrine stressed the indivisibility of airpower to exploit massing many attacking aircraft and using their inherent maneuverability to destroy and demoralize the enemy. Bombing from winged aircraft was central to the Air Force’s bureaucratic existence. Missiles might augment the bomber, but they would not yet replace it.21
In his classic analysis of Air Force culture, The Icarus Syndrome, historian Carl Builder comments, “The Air Force’s love of technology is the result of the technological era that crested around 1950 and dominated the decades on each side of that peak.”22 Winged vehicles starred in this era, but, Builder contends, “Arnold’s love for technology and his devotion to the ends of air power theory” outweighed his love for the traditional manned aircraft.23 Arnold had pursued his vision of unmanned aircraft as missiles since his earliest officer days, and his realistic review of missile development illustrates the technical reasons why Arnold, von Karman, and the Air Force believed winged cruise missiles represented a better technical road than ICBMs. Unlike cruise missiles, rockets attained speeds far greater than aircraft, and they did not rely on aerodynamic lift. Ranges of thousands of miles demanded powerful engines to carry massive amounts of fuel and oxidizer. The day’s ballistic missile propelled and guided itself only during the first portions of powered flight; the era’s guidance, navigation, and control systems were too inaccurate, unreliable, and heavy. They were unsuited for the dynamics of long ballistic flights. Once the re-entry vehicle (a heat-resistant, aerodynamic casing that enclosed the explosive warhead) released, it travelled a free and uncontrolled trajectory. The laws of Kepler and Newton commanded it. Winged vehicles did not share these problems. Bombers and cruise missiles were similar, and until later in the 1950s the sizes and masses of the available atomic and nuclear weapons outstripped the ballistic missile’s ability to deliver them. Culturally comfortable, intercontinental and medium-range cruise missiles were sustaining innovations of the bomber. They fit the Air Force’s context.
The Air Force excelled at re-deploying aircraft across globe and battlefield. Inherently flexible once airborne, their launch bases were immobile and inflexible. Scattering forces required a network of bases. To disperse airplanes, pilots could take off and land at another base. Officers wanting to disperse ground-launched cruise missiles, however, had to move each missile’s launch base. They could not fly the cruise missiles to another base; the weapons only flew when launched against a target. Worse yet, the capability to transport a missile lessened operational responsiveness, meaning the time required to deploy, set up, and respond to a launch order. The Matador cruise missile sent to Europe in 1954 provides an example. Costing only a quarter of the price of a 1950s fighter aircraft (which it looked like), it was used by the Air Force in place of manned aircraft to attack heavily defended targets. Matador was a tactical weapon ranging seven hundred miles, much less than an ICBM. It was a transportable but unresponsive system, in that Matadors did not travel to their field launch sites in a ready-to-launch configuration. Crews towed them in four pieces to a field site; once there, ten people using a crane needed ninety minutes to assemble the fuselage, wings, warhead, and booster. Upon launch, the guidance system required updates from a ground-based radio transmitter, a factor that added operational complexity and provided the enemy an opportunity to spoof the signal and force the Matador off target. Matador and its ilk had aircraft-like sizes and characteristics, but they lacked the airplane’s tactical flexibility. Once airborne, it could not be re-tasked to strike another target.24
A decade earlier, the German military had experienced the same problems with mobile V-2 ballistic missiles. Soldiers had to secure the launch site, assemble the launch pad, erect and fuel the rocket, connect the command and control system, and conduct a full countdown, all the while hiding from enemy attack. One trailer-mounted missile required thirty support vehicles, including a transportation trailer, launch platform, propellant vehicles, and a command and control truck. Small by ICBM standards, a fueled V-2 with its warhead weighed 28,373 pounds, was forty-five feet long, and was twelve feet wide at its base. From arrival at an unprepared site, V-2 troops required four to six hours to launch it.25
Thus until 1954 the Air Force pursued intercontinental cruise missiles instead of ICBMs. The service nominally funded ballistic missile research, but its two long-range cruise missiles, Snark and Navaho, starved ballistic missiles. The budget displayed Air Force priorities. Between 1951 and 1954, Snark received $226 million and Navaho $248 million, whereas the Atlas ICBM received $26.2 million, of which $18.8 million was in fiscal year 1954 funds. Translated into 2013 dollars as a relative share of the gross domestic product, Snark received $9.7 billion, Navaho $10.7 billion, and Atlas $1.13 billion.26 A billion 2013 dollars for Atlas sounds impressive, but considering the ballistic missile’s technological reverse salients (historian Thomas P. Hughes’ term for problems retarding technical advances), it was woefully underfunded.27 Despite their winged heritage, Snark and Navaho’s $20 billion failed to deliver unmanned weapon systems capable of intercontinental cruising through defended airspace. Nonetheless, in an exercise of technological transfer, they contributed various components, including rocket engine and guidance technologies, to later missile programs. In 1958, a Navaho guidance set helped the submarine USS Nautilus cruise the Stars and Stripes under the North Pole.28 Despite this, Navaho and Snark often crashed into waters surrounding their test sites. Program managers suffered jests including “Snark-infested waters” and “never go, Navaho.”29 The systems largely failed, although Snark briefly deployed. The intercontinental cruise missile’s road was a dead end.
Re-opening an Untaken Road
From 1953 through 1954, the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration eyed reducing defense costs and reviewed defense research and development. Eisenhower based his national defense upon a strategy called the “New Look,” which relied on the American ability to deliver overwhelming nuclear destruction to deter aggressors from attacking. Credibility demanded that the United States possess an effective strike force that could survive a Soviet attack and deliver a debilitating counterstrike. To deter an attack, American strength had to convince any rational opponent that an attack was futile. Within the Air Force, the bomber still reigned, and cruise missiles ate enormous budgets, but ballistic missiles soon received attention, for three reasons. The first was the feasibility of lighter-weight nuclear weapons, which increased the number of bombs a bomber could carry and raised the possibility of using a rocket as a delivery vehicle. Then, key individuals emerged who were interested in new methods and tools of warfare (Hughes terms these “inventor-entrepreneurs”).30 Lastly, as chapter 3 will examine, the Americans knew the Soviets were developing long-range rockets. There converged perceived need, innate technical capability, will, and interest in new military technologies, both means and ways, to solve national strategic problems. Technological push and pull complemented.31
A complex sociotechnical system such as the ICBM—and in a broader sense, the nuclear deterrent force of the United States—required significant social and technological advances and the elimination of many reverse salients. In their first development phase (invention and development), ICBM innovators experimented with many operational concepts and navigation, guidance, control, and propulsion systems. A successful rocket involved a family of compatible engines, guidance subsystems, testing and launch site facilities, airframes, and a multitude of associated devices. Each area presented critical problems that slowed the overall program. As engineers solved these, analyst Robert Perry has contended, “the management of technology became the pacing element.”32 Historical appreciation of the magnitude of these reverse salients warrants deeper internal examination.
Although popular and military use of the word “missile” describes the rocket and warhead as one package, the missile was technically the projectile that struck the target. Like a human body’s systems and organs, each with specific contributions to the body’s life, an ICBM synthesized interacting subsystems. It combined many major elements, including the booster rocket, complete with all its subsystems. The delivery vehicle contained the airframe, engines, guidance and control systems, and power supplies necessary for flight. The weapon intended for delivery was a small spacecraft. The body that re-entered the atmosphere, called a “re-entry vehicle,” encased the fusion weapon assembly. The re-entry vehicle encountered brutal heating and aerodynamic stresses. In addition, the humans who operated, maintained, and secured the system were critical systems, as were the networks of training schools that prepared them. The launch bases constituted another system, as did the necessary command, control, and communications (C3) needed to coordinate operations. National leaders, including the president, and the systems that warned of enemy attacks joined the overall mega system of nuclear technological weapons systems. Along with these came the governmental, industrial, and academic infrastructure that energized the effort.
Weapon delivery relies on a ballistic trajectory from the carrier vehicle. Upon receipt of a launch order, the ICBM crew conducts the appropriate countdown procedure, which ends in an electrical command to launch the rocket. The propulsion system uses either liquid or solid fuels to propel the vehicle. All ICBMs use multiple stages (even if a “stage and a half”), although the number of engines per stage varies. Accuracy depends upon the guidance and control systems. The guidance system knows where the vehicle began flight and where the re-entry vehicle must go; it acts as the brain. The control system receives inputs from the guidance system and maintains stability of flight, reacts to disturbances, and adjusts course. At thrust cutoff or termination, powered flight ends, the guidance system discards the boost vehicle’s airframe, and the re-entry vehicle is released. Improved computers and electronics contributed greatly to these processes. The re-entry vehicle then follows an unguided ballistic path to its target. Typical ICBM flight profiles attain altitudes of hundreds of miles into outer space and have terminal velocities exceeding 15,000 miles per hour (mph). Given an American–Soviet confrontation, a land-based ICBM takes roughly thirty minutes from launch to nuclear detonation.33
Guidance and navigation are critical. The guidance set contains the gyroscopic assembly (mechanical or otherwise) that maintains the stable reference orientation the missile needs to navigate from launch site to re-entry-vehicle release point. An onboard computer provides the necessary computations. The guidance set transmits inputs to the rocket’s flight control system to control the engines and thrusters. Developing powerful onboard computers and fully internal guidance systems was a major challenge. Such a system, called “inertial guidance,” does not depend upon inputs from outside the missile. Some forms of inertial guidance systems took stellar position measurements to check their trajectory, but outside sources did not transmit data to them.34
Early on, existing computers and inertial guidance units could not ensure sufficient accuracy. The missiles needed outside inputs. In radio guidance, a network of ground stations measures the rocket’s flight path and determines the adjustments needed to keep the vehicle on course. The ground stations transmit corrections to the rocket, which then adjusts its performance. Combining radio and inertial guidance into a hybrid technology, radio-inertial guidance, minimized the weaknesses of the available inertial systems of the 1950s and early 1960s with proven radio guidance. Radio guidance sets were cheaper and easier to build than inertial units but were susceptible to jamming, the intentional garbling of the transmitted signal, and “spoofing” (the hostile transmission of inaccurate data). Once launched, an inertially guided rocket was a self-contained package dependent only upon itself. As Air Force general Bernard Schriever recalled, “Obviously the self-contained system was a hell of a lot better from a military standpoint[;] . . . the radio . . . system required a very substantial ground installation which was highly vulnerable and we wanted to get rid of that as soon as we could.”35
The distance between a missile warhead and its target at impact measures the accuracy of the ICBM’s guidance. “Circular error probable” (CEP) is the unit of measurement. CEP is “the radius of the circle around the target within which fifty-percent of the warheads will fall in repeated firings.” The definition is somewhat disputed, and in another view CEP is “the distance from a target in which there is a fifty-percent chance of a warhead directed at that target exploding.” This accuracy does not ensure target destruction. That depends upon the ability, or hardness, of a target to resist a nuclear detonation and its associated effects, as well as the effectiveness of any in-place defenses, weather, and geography. Any unit of distance measurement applies to CEP, but the nautical mile measured early ICBM CEPs (a nautical mile equates to 6,076 feet). As accuracy improved, feet measured CEP. A smaller CEP indicates better accuracy than a large CEP. By the 1980s, ICBM CEPs measured in the low hundreds of feet.36
Propulsion challenged engineers. A rocket’s forward energy depends upon combusting oxidizer and fuel to generate an opposing reaction. The earliest method of energizing large missiles involved liquid fuels and oxidizers. The American ICBMs of the Atlas and Titan I types, as well as the Soviet R-7 that orbited Sputnik, used liquid oxygen for the oxidizer and a form of kerosene the Americans called Rocket Propellant 1 (RP-1) as fuel.37 Although RP-1 alone posed no difficult problems, the safe handling, operation, and integration of the two liquids into an operational weapon system was dangerous. Also difficult was developing technology that could feed oxidizer and fuel at high enough volumes, pressures, and speeds to support the combustion needed for thrust. Liquid oxygen could not indefinitely remain on board a rocket, because it boiled away and required continual refills. Such a system was unwieldy if one wanted to remain indefinitely in a launch configuration.
The introduction of storable oxidizers and liquids, which can remain on board the rocket for indefinite periods, overcame this limitation. The American Titan II, introduced to the operational inventory in 1963, used hydrazine, specifically Aerozine-50 (A-50, a mixture of hydrazine and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, or UDMH) as the fuel and nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4) as the oxidizer. The two materials, known as “hypergolics,” caused a thrust-generating explosion when combined, but if kept apart until launch they were suitable for long-term storage on a rocket. Handlers learned special handling and safety precautions. Small mistakes caused accidents. On September 19, 1980, a Titan II developed a leak and blew up in its underground launch facility near Little Rock, Arkansas. One service member died, twenty-one others were injured, and the explosion blew the nine-megaton warhead more than two hundred yards into a field. Ultimately, the Air Force ceased further development of liquid-fueled ICBMs in favor of solid fuels, although because of its target-killing power, the liquid-fueled Titan II remained in the ICBM inventory until 1987.38
The military used solid-fuel rockets during World War II, notably to aid the takeoff of heavily loaded aircraft. Solid fuel’s advantage was that the rocket came to the launch site loaded with fuel and oxidizer. The manufacturer mixed, poured, and cast these as one mixture within the missile motor or stage casing. Missile operation, handling, and maintenance were simplified in comparison to working with liquids. The design improved reaction time, because there was no need to wait for fuel and oxidizer loading. The solid-fuel missile was easier to transport. It was smaller, lighter, and required fewer people to operate and maintain. Because the propulsion system did not have complex tanks, valves, pumps, and piping, it had greater reliability. Solids eliminated the problems associated with toxic substances such as N2O4 or A-50 (unless these hypergolics were used in a small maneuvering platform, or bus, placed on top of the missile). There was another problem, however. Solid fuel has a built-in oxidizer. Once ignited, there is no way to stop combustion, even if placed under water. Nevertheless, as ICBMs developed, the Navy and the Air Force adapted solid-fuel technology for operational use.39
An Innovative Mental Architecture
Small fusion weapons and reliable long-range rockets, for which improvements in guidance and propulsion were critical, catalyzed the ICBM’s technical development. In June 1953, Secretary of Defense Charlie Wilson responded to President Eisenhower’s desire to reduce spending via the New Look. At the time, the cruise missiles showed poor results, despite generous funding. Wilson directed Secretary of the Air Force Harold E. Talbott to form a committee to compare and analyze all guided missiles. Talbott looked for a leader to do this job, and he chose wisely. He anointed Trevor Gardner, his assistant for research and development. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, a giant of American aerospace, described Gardner as a “sparkplug,” a man of action uninterested in roles-and-missions controversies. Gardner focused on missile performance and program improvement by pursuing promising technologies, standardization of production, and elimination of waste. He cared little for making friends, a trait that led some to describe him as “sharp, abrupt, irascible, cold, unpleasant, and a bastard.” Not a cruise-missile advocate, he favored ballistic missiles, and he reformed the American ICBM effort into an effective crash program. Historian Beard adds that Gardner, a thirty-seven-year-old civilian, was not only “suddenly giving orders to . . . general officers . . . on how to run the Air Force, but [his orders] were also contrary to the way the Air Force had been operating.” Gardner won few friends, but he did the job. Top-down direction provided a new sense of urgency to develop ICBMs.40
When Lewis Mumford wrote that the military possessed “third-rate minds” (see chapter 1), he could not have foreseen the ICBM program. The crème de la crème of academe, industry, and government participated. Concurrent with Secretary Wilson’s committee, the Air Force formed a nuclear weapons panel to assist its Scientific Advisory Board to learn how to adapt fusion weapons to missiles. Jimmy Doolittle convinced the omnipresent and omniscient Princeton mathematician John von Neumann to lead it. By June 1953, von Neumann’s panel was discussing new weapons “expected to weigh approximately 3,000 pounds, measure 45 inches in diameter, and yield 0.5 MT [megatons].”41 Rapid development followed, and by September the Air Force Special Weapons Center believed it could produce a warhead weighing as little as 1,500 pounds. A Research and Development Corporation (RAND, the Air Force’s “think tank”) memorandum dated February 8, 1954, supported this conclusion, stating, “It should be possible to produce in much smaller weights than was considered possible in the past. It is expected that we will get these weapons to weigh 3,000 lbs and probably even somewhat less.”42 These developments occurred within ten years, a dizzying pace of change. Such weight reductions meant payload-carrying rockets could be smaller than had been thought.
Important as this was, a long-range rocket to deliver the payload had yet to fly. In 1954, ten years after Hap Arnold first asked von Karman to study Axis technology, Gardner convinced von Neumann to chair another remarkable working group, the Teapot Committee. This assembled the ICBM’s major players, among them Air Force brigadier general–select Bernard A. Schriever, a disciple of Hap Arnold and a man sharing Gardner’s vision. No single innovator creates a technological innovation, but as a touchstone of space and missile technologies, Bernard Schriever did as much as anyone to create American space and missile power. His name should be as well known to Americans as is that of Wernher von Braun. One cannot reasonably compare such titans—the exercise is pointless. Today, Schriever’s infrastructure, weapons, and rockets still serve. His ICBMs and intermediate-range ballistic missiles formed the basis of American space launch for decades, orbiting the Mercury and Gemini astronauts and sending forth solar system probes. His Minuteman is today’s only American ICBM, and its first model deployed when Kennedy was president. Von Braun’s rockets are museum pieces. Schriever and his team’s contributions were that significant.43
Schriever’s scientific bent nudged him toward a broader, interconnected regime of program management. During World War II, Hap Arnold had him liaise between the Army Air Forces and the scientific community. Schriever relished his role. He nurtured this relationship throughout his career to develop methods of applying science to technological development. Long a believer in the value of scientific research, he did not believe the Air Force possessed the expertise to build ICBMs. Summarizing his admiration for the scientific community, he commented that he became a “disciple of the scientists who were working with us in the Pentagon. . . . I felt very strongly that the scientists had a broader view and had more capabilities. We needed engineers . . . but engineers were trained more in a, let’s say a narrow track having to do [more] with materials than with vision.”44 Schriever’s words describe how the Air Force perceived the relationship between science and technology and indicate that he well understood technology’s physical and mental aspects.
Von Neumann’s February 1954 report recommended a crash program to produce and deploy an ICBM force, a program that resulted in a complete restructuring of the moribund Atlas missile program and sounded the death tocsin for the intercontinental cruise missile. The personnel and organizations involved, including the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, revamped the ICBM effort. They accelerated the Atlas missile program, and their use of smaller payloads and smaller rockets affected later missile programs, including the Minuteman. Three years before Sputnik flew and the public worried about an apparent Soviet lead in long-range rocketry, planners and designers prepared to ensure American dominance. The idea that Sputnik ignited the American grab for space is a myth. It was the American desire for nuclear security that ignited the American military move into space, and the civilian programs followed. After all, as a result of the ICBM’s 1954 breakthrough, the first American satellite project was not Vanguard or Explorer. It was WS-117L, a spy satellite, given the “go-ahead” in 1955.45
The Teapot Committee soon had General Schriever running the Air Force’s newly created Western Development Division, an organization dedicated to the ICBM program. The Air Force had managed its cruise missile programs in the same ways as aircraft procurement. It treated them as individual programs instead of a family of systems. On August 2, 1954, Schriever assumed command with unique authority and control over ICBM weapon-system acquisition and procurement. His broad, integrated, systems outlook predicated his management style. He imposed horizontal and vertical integration. His authority ranged over system engineering responsibilities to operations, maintenance, logistics, and civil engineering. Everything related to ICBMs, from launch pads to communications equipment to the rockets, present and future, belonged to Schriever. As Thomas Hughes has suggested in Rescuing Prometheus, Schriever’s bureaucratic innovation was so simple at heart that it was difficult for people to accept. He centralized his control of the money and the people, and he accepted redundancy and the concomitant expenses. His mental architecture for doing business was a disruptive innovation.46
Consistent with Arnold’s and von Karman’s achievements, Schriever led and directed technological change. Historian Jacob Neufeld assesses this task as combining “operational requirements with technologies and strategies to establish objectives for future systems.” Schriever used Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation as his scientific and engineering advisory body to create specifications, oversee development, and coordinate between the Air Force and numerous subcontractors building the ICBM’s various pieces. This provided industrial unity the intercontinental cruise missile program lacked. The Air Force had ultimate authority and oversight, and Schriever gambled that the vision of the scientists, if properly guided, would deliver a viable missile in the shortest amount of time. Like Gen. Leslie Groves (who led the atomic bomb Manhattan Project), he let his scientific and engineering brain trust solve the thorny problems. This technique, what one might call trust, was critical to the concurrent development of multiple ICBM systems. This approach was revolutionary, and Schriever described the fight to install it as “a hell of a struggle [that left] . . . lots of blood on the floor.”47 Schriever’s program management innovation was more mental than physical, but it is at the heart of a story of profound military technological innovations.
Historian David Spires has maintained that the “application of concurrency reflected an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary approach to weapon system acquisition.” Schriever sought to “bring all elements of our program along so that they all would be ready, at each successive stage, to be dovetailed into each other.”48 Innovation scholar Adam Grissom remarks, “Innovation changes the manner in which military formations function in the field. Measures that are administrative or bureaucratic in nature, such as acquisition reform, are not . . . innovation unless a clear link can be drawn to operational praxis.”49 The ICBM proponents achieved this. The midfifties efforts of Doolittle, Gardner, Schriever, and von Neumann, among others, prepared the Air Force bureaucracy for the development, acquisition, and procurement of technologies capable of reshaping strategic contexts. The centralization mirrored the managerial organization of the German V-2 program so admired by Theodore von Karman and Hap Arnold. Throughout the development of ICBM technology, bureaucratic problems arose, particularly in deconflicting lines of authority, accountability, and responsibility between major Air Force organizations. Schriever in practice never actually quite had complete control of everything, but he had enough. As historian Spires relates, “By 1957, two years into the program, Atlas embraced 17 major contractors and 200 subcontractors across thirty-two states employing 70,000 workers,” and Atlas was only one of Schriever’s programs.50 From his perch at Western Development Division, Bernard Schriever shaped the operational praxis of the ICBM within the American strategic nuclear triad.
