CHAPTER 5
Rockets and Missiles
IT WAS NOT THE TINTINNABULATION of Poe’s silver bells, with their tinkle, tinkle, tinkle in the icy air of night. Rather, it was the clangor and the clamor of the brazen bells, the alarum bells, that heralded the 1950s for most thoughtful Americans.
The first Soviet A-bomb test (in August 1949), the communist takeover of China (in October 1949), and the outbreak of the Korean War (in June 1950) combined to focus American attention. Something was seriously wrong. The Cold War was no longer just a European concern, a geopolitical struggle an ocean away. A direct nuclear attack on the United States was now possible. The communist flood was enslaving, if not killing, millions of new subjects in Asia. American GIs and pilots were dying in an attempt to stem that tide. The lessons began to sink in; the U.S. itself was in mortal peril. Yet the most dangerous part of this threat was hidden from view. It lay in the minds of the two hundred German rocket scientists then working at the Eighty-eighth Scientific Research Institute, north of Moscow, in the Soviet Union.
During the fifties and sixties intelligent men and women on both sides of the Iron Curtain would give their all, sometimes their lives, in the battle for the high ground of space. They did so in the service of masters in whom they believed. On the Soviet side that meant the Politburo, a group of aging men whose monopoly on information allowed them to hide their corrupt, inefficient, and murderous ways. But then, that’s how those Soviet scientists saw us: capable, hardworking Americans in thrall to our capitalist-exploiter bosses. To the American people, the race for space was a matter of political, if not physical, life and death. As Wellington said after the battle of Waterloo: “It was a damn close-run thing.”
It all began in Peenemunde, a small German town on the Baltic Sea, directly north of Berlin and well inside what was to become—for forty-five years—the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany. There, the German rocket program of World War II got its start. In October 1942 the German scientists working at Peenemunde first fired an experimental V-2 guided ballistic rocket downrange, across the Baltic, for a distance of 120 miles. By September 1944 the Nazis were able to introduce that weapon into combat; 3,745 were fired at the West. One-third were targeted at London, the rest at the ports and cities of Belgium. The V-2s were neither accurate—the average miss distance was four miles—nor reliable. Only half of the rockets launched ever reached their targets. But with their use, the world entered the rocket age.
When the war ended, rocketry was not an alien concept to the Soviets. The first mathematical analysis of liquid propellant rockets and orbital mechanics had been done by Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, a Russian, in 1895. During World War II, Soviet spies watched German wartime rocket experiments. When the Red Army arrived in Peenemunde and its administrative headquarters at Bleicherode, a hundred miles south-west of Berlin, it knew what to look for. The scientific search party was led by a recently minted colonel, released from the Gulags of Kolyma and Magadan only a year before. Sergei Pavlovich Korolyev was a rocket and space fanatic. By correspondence from the Gulag (not all that unusual), he had convinced Stalin of the possibility of “rocket airplanes.” The boss turned him loose and, within a year, dispatched him to Germany.
A few months after the war’s end the Soviets began to “recruit” German custodians of that V-2 rocket technology. Initially they were housed at a new Soviet facility known as Nordhausen, located on the grounds of the Peenemunde center. Then, in early 1947, hordes of people, crates of papers, and boxcars of hardware, including fifty fully-assembled V-2s, headed east to the research center at Boltshevo, a suburb north of Moscow. It would become the future home of Soviet rocket science. 15
During this time, the United States had other priorities. Its armies reached neither Peenemunde nor Bleicherode, but Wernher von Braun, the German chief of rocket research, and some of his associates, did flee from there into U.S. arms. It was not until December 1945 that the U.S. government began the formal resettlement of those 130 German rocket scientists. They arrived in the United States as guests of an army and a government with little serious interest in rocket weapons.
A few years later the German guest scientists captive in Russia began to return home. Upon their release, they told Western intelligence services about the growth of serious rocket design bureaus in the Soviet Union. Those institutes were exploiting the German V-2 capability and were training young Russian scientists to pursue that technology. Once those design bureaus were fully Russified, the Germans were told they could leave. The fact that they were sent home instead of shot is one of the many enigmas of the Cold War.
At the same time, a British communications intelligence team, posing as archaeologists while traveling through Iran, monitored the early Soviet V-2 flights across the border. Then a high level Soviet defector brought out firsthand details of the Soviet program. There were indications of a huge Soviet rocket engine, a device producing over 250,000 pounds of thrust with another factor of two in the offing. That came as a surprise. American industry was thinking about a 220-ton, seven-engine U.S. monster rocket to be known as Atlas, but only 120,000 pounds of thrust was the design goal for each engine. What was going on over there?
A NEW LOOK
A new administration came to power in Washington in 1953, and President Eisenhower ordered a major review of all departments. Examination of the Defense Department was entrusted to a young man named Nelson Rockefeller. The Rockefeller committee found a need to strengthen military research and development. In its April report, the committee proposed eliminating the World War II era Munitions and R&D boards, replacing them with Assistant Secretaries of Defense authorized to make decisions and allocate money. Congress agreed. Fiscal restraint was the primary objective of that move, but the result was to entrust power to individuals who would push the technological envelope.
There had been no such dithering in Russia. By 1953 the launching of captured V-2 rockets and then their Soviet R-1 copies had been going on for five years. The U.S. intelligence agencies were beginning to take notice.
The Air Force was studying the implications of America’s first thermonuclear test, in late 1952. Professor John von Neumann, a leading light of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, assumed the chairmanship of a nuclear weapons panel for the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Meeting in Los Alamos during June 1953, the von Neumann panel concluded that a thermonuclear warhead would be possible for U.S. ballistic missiles. They thought a yield of at least half a megaton might be coaxed out of a 3,000-pound warhead. Three months later the Air Force Special Weapons Center, tracking the design work at Los Alamos, cut that weight estimate in half, to 1,500 pounds. 16
Then, on August 12, 1953, came the first Soviet H-bomb test. We know now that the RDS-6s weighed 10,000 pounds and gave a yield of 400 kilotons. In the mind of its designer, it confirmed the possibility of a megaton-size weapon. That yield would be large enough to compensate for the few-mile miss distance inherent in any first-generation Soviet rocket’s guidance system. 17
Back then, the U.S. knew only that the Soviets were very confident. On August 8, 1953, during a major public speech to the Supreme Soviet, Georgi Malenkov forecast an immediate end to the brief U.S. H-bomb monopoly. He may have been willing to go out on this limb because the Soviet security services had recently acquired intelligence on a similar U.S. approach to an operational H-bomb. Whatever it was that gave Malenkov the courage to forecast the historic Soviet shot, U.S. sensors picked it up right on schedule.
In November 1953, the designer of that Soviet device, Andrei Sakharov, was called to a meeting of the Soviet Politburo to discuss the RDS-6s. The Soviet leadership directed the development on an improved, hopefully one megaton, version of the RDS-6s, and the engineers at the Eighty-eighth Scientific Research Institute were ordered to design and build a rocket to deliver that 10,000-pound warhead to the American continent, 5,500 nautical miles away. Thus, 10,000 pounds became the standard Soviet payload, a decision that accounts for the size of all Soviet rockets even today.
It turns out that the RDS-6s was a dead-end design. Conceptually, it “fizzled out,” in Sakharov’s words, “replaced by something quite different.” A new and more compact weapon, the RDS-37, delivered 1.6 megatons on its first test in November 1955, but by then the Soviets were already committed to huge, five-ton payloads.
A young man, Trevor Gardner, was watching all this for Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense. Though only thirty-seven at the time, Gardner had a wealth of technical experience gained at Cal Tech, General Electric, Goodyear, and his own electronics company, Hycon. Secretary of the Air Force Harold Talbott recruited Gardner to serve as his special assistant for R&D. (The job matured into Assistant Secretary of the Air Force when authorized by Congress.) As a result of the Rockefeller report, Secretary of Defense Wilson asked Talbott to look into all the U.S. guided missile programs. In the summer of 1953, Talbott told Trevor Gardner to go do it.
THE TEAPOT COMMITTEE
In 1953 the armed services were awash in missile programs. The Air Force, for instance, had air-to-air projects, a variety of surface-to-air antiaircraft missiles, and two air-breathing strategic missiles, Snark and Navaho, neither of which were on schedule or within budget. And there were paper studies of Atlas, a monster intercontinental ballistic missile. Snark and Navaho, having wings and looking like airplanes, enjoyed Air Force funding at a level seventeen times that of the original Atlas program.
Trevor Gardner served as chairman of a committee to sort through this duplication. In October, however, he reempaneled von Neumann to form a second committee to look specifically at the Air Force strategic missile programs. It would be known by its code name, the Teapot Committee, a group that made technological history. With their uncanny technical and managerial foresight, that committee showed America how to pull its chestnuts out of the fire, just in the nick of time.
The Teapot Committee was composed of the brightest and best from the academic and industrial world. 18 Si Ramo and Dean Wooldridge had just left Hughes Aircraft to form Ramo-Wooldridge, and Gardner immediately contracted with them to support and administer the committee’s work. Gardner and Ramo had known each other from their prewar days together at General Electric in Schenectady. By today’s standards, that procurement decision—to hire the two-day-old Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation—was pretty cozy and rather informal, but time was of the essence. Calling on friends who are known commodities may not be fair, but it’s the quickest and surest way to build a good organization fast. Knowledgeable scientists were hard to find then, and the Soviet momentum was scary. To serve as the Teapot Committee’s military representative, Gardner chose a young colonel, Bernard Schriever. At the time, Schriever had the bureaucratic-sounding title of Assistant to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Development Planning, but that moniker was misleading.
“Bennie” Schriever had earned an engineering degree from Texas A&M in 1931. He then joined the Air Corps and earned his wings, but in those Depression years military pay was a sometime thing. Upon occasion, Schriever flew as a commercial pilot, but in 1938 he was posted to Wright Field in Ohio as a test pilot. In 1942 he earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford, then went off to the war in the Pacific. He flew thirty-eight combat missions in B-17s. By war’s end, at age thirty-four, Schriever had risen to the rank of colonel while serving as Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics of the Fifth Air Force. Schriever understood technology; not only what was then current, but what the future might hold. After the war, he was given a series of Pentagon jobs that involved anticipating technical possibilities open to the Air Force. In 1953 he was selected for promotion to brigadier general and posted to the Teapot Committee.
During that same year, the American technological giant was coming to life. At Los Alamos, Carson Mark, head of that laboratory’s theoretical division, was converting the November 1952 thermonuclear experiment, code named “Mike,” into a real H-bomb design. His teams of design engineers were working with the new computers to better understand the energy flow and burn within a thermonuclear device. To make it go, they settled on the use of new materials not yet in production. Device designs were completed by mid-1953. Only the lack of necessary materials held up the tests of these new designs for half a year. Ben Diven was the designer of one new device to be tested as Bravo; Harold Agnew was the designer of another, to be known as Romeo. Both devices were scheduled for testing in 1954’s Operation Castle.
At the Ames Laboratory in California, Dr. Harvey Julian Allen was doing calculations on the physics of hypersonic vehicles reentering the atmosphere. Delivering a warhead by rocket to the far side of earth requires velocities over 20,000 miles per hour. The question was: upon reentry into the atmosphere, where was that energy to go? He showed that such energy is partitioned between skin friction heating of the reentering vehicle and shock wave heating of the atmosphere as the reentry vehicle speeds through. He also showed that with proper design, less than 1 percent of the vehicle’s kinetic energy would go into skin heating. The other 99 percent could be made to go into ionizing the atmospheric gasses around the vehicle, leaving behind the fiery tail usually associated with “shooting stars”—meteorties entering the atmosphere. He concluded that a reentry vehicle could be designed to deliver Agnew’s warhead or, in time, U.S. astronauts, safely back to earth.
In Cambridge, an MIT professor, C. Stark “Doc” Draper, devised a way to use the gyroscopes developed for gunsights in World War II to guide aircraft (and eventually missiles) over long distances. These new gadgets used what came to be known as “inertial guidance,” because they relied on their own internal measurement of acceleration to calculate net velocity in each of three orthogonal coordinate systems. Knowing where it started, and with an accurate clock keeping time, such a guidance system would know exactly where it was without any further outside-world data.
During the early 1950s Doc Draper built several such experimental systems, and during the last week of January 1953 he installed one, his new SPIRE (space inertial reference equipment) in the bomb bay of a B-29. On February 8 he rode with the system as it flew that plane from Bedford, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles. The control of the aircraft was completely automatic; the crew’s only jobs were to keep the engines running and to adjust altitude. (Mountains posed hazards that SPIRE could not see.) The nonstop flight took 12.5 hours. Upon arrival in Los Angeles, the SPIRE system missed the L.A. airport by only nine miles. Draper was flying to Los Angeles to attend a top secret symposium at RAND on self-contained navigation systems. The results of his test flight stole the show. His follow-on work with SPIRE Junior opened the eyes of the Teapot Committee. It was clear that intercontinental missiles could be self-contained weapons, arriving at their targets with reasonable accuracy without any outside radio or stellar input of any sort.
In February 1954 the Teapot Committee rendered its report. It was a bombshell to those cleared to read it. In part that was because the credentials of the chairman and his committee were unassailable, and in part because they forecast a serious Soviet missile threat to the United States. The Teapot Committee report did not call for an immediate flood of new money. Instead it said a practical American intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) would be feasible within six to eight years, but only if a radical reorganization of the ICBM program was accomplished. Rather than pouring money into the existing Atlas program— a 220-ton missile with seven engines, needed to deliver an 8,000-pound warhead to the other side of the world—the committee recommended taking a year to do a weapons system study, to define a more realistic Atlas along the following lines:
Warhead: Plan on a 1,500 (not 8,000) pound warhead with a yield in the megaton range. This would drastically reduce the size of the missile. Details were to be reviewed in light of the upcoming Castle nuclear test series then getting under way in the Pacific.
Reentry vehicle: Do away with the requirement for high-speed (Mach 6) approach to the target. Reentry heating considerations would not allow that. Mach 1 would be good enough.
Guidance: Strive for the use of self-contained inertial guidance, and be content with a two to three mile average miss distance, 19 not the 1,500 feet called for in the then-current Atlas specifications. With a megaton warhead, that would be close enough.
Engines: Use the technology under development for Atlas as well as the other strategic missiles (Navaho), and expand the construction of test stands to support that work.
Basing: Get realistic about the need for reduced vulnerability to nuclear attack, a higher rate of fire, and a faster response time. These requirements would make the missile design more difficult, but they were necessary if U.S. missiles were to strike the nuclear facilities of any attacker on a timely basis.
These technical guidelines were impressive, but they paled in comparison to the proposed revolutionary management scheme. The Teapot Committee felt that the usual armed services procurement regulations, the unending layers of review authority, could not deal with this crisis. They concluded that the Atlas program “must be relieved of excessive detailed regulation by existing government agencies.” While subsequent committees would spell out the details, the Teapot Committee wanted a direct line of authority from the Pentagon to the new Atlas development agency. That would be the Western Development Division (WDD), to be organized in Los Angeles, where the technical talent lay, the products of Howard Hughes’s unintentional incubator. Brigadier General Bernard Schriever would be the WDD’s commander.
The Teapot Committee also had little faith in the Air Force/civil servant development laboratories. Those institutions had been in charge of Atlas since the end of World War II, and not much had happened. The committee wanted “the overall technical direction [of the Atlas program] to be in the hands of an unusually competent group of scientists and engineers . . .”
The Air Force’s first choice to do this work was the Bell Telephone Laboratories, which at the time was the nation’s preeminent commercial electronics organization; the transistor was invented there. Bell Labs declined the honor, as did Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Air Force then turned to the fledgling Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, technical advisers to the Teapot Committee, directing and authorizing them to build an organization from scratch, to hire the brightest and best scientists, engineers, and managers at whatever cost and with the greatest urgency.
In March 1954 the Castle nuclear test series started in the Pacific. Bravo was fired on March 1. It provided an enormous exclamation point to the Teapot Committee’s report. The first U.S. thermonuclear test, in November 1952, had been an experiment two stories tall and weighing 82 tons. It produced a yield of ten megatons, but was hardly portable. On March 1, things changed.
The Bravo device weighed only twelve tons. It was expected to yield six megatons, but the designers had neglected to consider the proclivity of a certain isotope to breed more neutrons. When the shot went off, Bravo gave a yield of fifteen megatons, a thousand Hiroshimas and more than twice what was expected. Fallout from its unexpectedly large yield also became a bad omen for the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon. Bravo was a wake-up call to the other superpowers as well.
The United States was not yet sharing nuclear design data with the British, but our allies were keenly interested in what we were doing. The Brits had joined the nuclear club two years before but were still struggling with the thermonuclear puzzle. In subsequent conversations with British nuclear historians, I learned of two British aircraft lost in the process of collecting fallout debris from the Castle shots.
The Soviets were equally interested, but their scientists did not know how to ask the right questions. Memoranda from Yuli Khariton, chief scientist of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, tasked Soviet intelligence collectors at the time in the wrong direction. It was only after Bravo that the Soviet designers realized the possibilities. A portable, multimegaton thermonuclear device could be built. They went back to their drawing boards and intelligence files. Within a few months they came up with the right answer: radiation implosion. 20
Also in March 1954, a second thermonuclear shot gave eleven megatons, again several times the expected yield. Within three months these devices were weaponized and the U.S. had a portable H-bomb, ready for deployment aboard the B-36 bomber. In July of that year Schriever formally received his orders to take charge of the new ICBM program. Ramo-Wooldridge already was hired to start work on systems engineering studies. But within nine months of the Teapot Committee’s report, contracts were being let for a very different ICBM.
ATLAS, TITAN, AND THOR
The new Atlas was to weigh only 120 tons, compared to the 220 tons originally planned, since it needed to carry only a 1,500-pound warhead. Tests in 1956 and 1958 would show how much yield would emerge from that weight, but there was confidence that the Atomic Energy Commission labs could reach at least a megaton. A conservative engine and staging plan was adopted. Two booster engines, delivering 135,000 pounds thrust each, would be jettisoned after two minutes of flight, while a third sustainer engine, delivering 60,000 pounds of thrust, would continue to burn until shut down by the guidance system. Thus, there would be no need to light a second-stage engine in space, which no one knew how to do. Atlas became known as a one-and-a-half-stage missile. The first round of Atlas missiles were to be radio controlled, and a miss distance of two nautical miles was deemed acceptable. The reentry vehicle would be a blunt heat sink design. The resulting weapon system was to be operational in 1959.
These decisions were made in an atmosphere of crisis because Moscow’s Eighty-eighth Scientific Research Center was on a roll. On May 16, 1954, just as the U.S. system studies were getting under way, the Soviet Union fired an R-5 21 rocket 630 miles downrange from Kapustin Yar. The race was on in earnest; the United States was in second place. Allowing the Soviets to have a monopoly on operational ballistic missiles would have a disastrous effect on the “correlation of forces” all around the world. It would negate the U.S. Strategic Air Command’s deterrent, and thus could embolden the Red Army, or its proxies, to move as it wished. It was thought that a forced reunification of Germany on Soviet terms could be next.
To hedge its bets, the Western Development Division was authorized to proceed with a second generation ICBM, the Titan missile. This weapon system would be a true two-stage design, using more sophisticated liquid fuels. It would use inertial (self-contained) guidance and would work toward the use of higher speed, ablative reentry vehicles. Titan was to become operational in 1962, based in more secure, faster launching silos.
In mid-1955, the new U.S. FPS-17 intelligence radar, located at Diyarbakir, Turkey, came on line. It could not see the Soviet rocket launches from Kapustin Yar or anyplace else, but it could see the top of the rockets’ flight path—the apogee. This confirmed each flight, and thus the seriousness of the Soviet rocket program. It also allowed the calculation of launch and impact points, which in turn could cue various other reconnaissance assets. The overflying RB-47s and U-2s (described in Chapter 3) could be told where to look for launch facilities. To guard against any “missile gap,” the WDD also was authorized to start work on a single-stage Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile based on Atlas and Titan technology and components. The IRBM Thor would be based around the periphery of the Soviet Union, just as the early B-47 bombers had been assigned before the advent of the longer range B-52s.
On December 27, 1955, the Air Force contracted for the development of Thor. The target operational date was to be 1958. Colonel Edward N. Hall, previously in charge of WDD’s propulsion division, was put in charge. He had just received the Robert A. Goddard award for his contributions to liquid rocket technology in the United States. A young engineer, Rube Mettler, formerly with Hughes but more recently a Pentagon consultant, became Ramo-Wooldridge’s systems engineer.
Thor first tried to fly just one year later, in January 1957. It rose less than a foot off its launch ring, then suffered engine failure, settling back to earth in a newsworthy ball of fire. With the fuel system redesigned, the second launch seemed to be going well until the range safety officer blew it up for the wrong reason. He thought the missile was headed for Tampa, not the open ocean. Thor finally made it downrange eight months later, but even then it was a bird without a nest.
At the beginning of the Eisenhower years the UK had wanted an IRBM stationed on its soil, and the U.S. assumed that other NATO allies would welcome the overseas basing of Thor as well. But they did not. The stumbling blocks were nuclear secrets and control of the “button.” Negotiations with the UK dragged on longer than the experimental flight test program. By the summer of 1957, Colonel Hall was sent to the UK to expedite Thor’s deployment in the face of some very ambiguous U.S.-UK agreements.
Aside from the policy questions surrounding nuclear control, there was the problem of money. American fiscal ingenuity played a role in finding an answer then, just as it did three decades later with Iran-Contra. In 1957, England’s apple crop had failed. Tobacco, usually imported from Turkey, was also in short supply. American farmers were happy to take up the slack. The transatlantic spread in apple and tobacco prices as determined by supply (in the United States) and demand (in the UK) provided an opportunity for arbitrage. Imaginative U.S. fiscal officers in London skimmed the apple and tobacco import market to finance the deployment of Thor in the UK.
Money was a problem everywhere. The Washington political community was beginning to tire of all missile program costs. In addition to the Air Force program, the Army/German team at Redstone was working on another IRBM, known as Jupiter. The Navy received authority to develop still a third IRBM, to be known as Polaris. This latter effort would feature a solid fuel missile carried aboard and fired from a submerged nuclear-powered submarine. Such a ship could remain hidden at sea for months at a time. The Air Force program alone was about to exceed $1 billion per year in the fiscal year beginning in July 1957, over $6 billion, in 2000 dollars. Cutbacks began. Control of Congress had shifted to Eisenhower’s political opponents, budget constraint was in the air, and the bureaucrats’ unending complaint about the “uncontrolled” management of WDD were all taking their toll. By the beginning of the new fiscal year, on July 1, 1957, a “poor man’s program” was put in place by the new Deputy Secretary of Defense, Donald Quarles. To live within these constraints, missile operational target dates were slipped by a year.
At that time, Thor had no home, and its flight tests had produced spotty results. Even worse, Atlas had not flown at all. The first Atlas test flight, on June 11, 1957, resulted in an engine failure ten seconds after liftoff. The exploding missile was on newsreels everywhere. Pictures of General Schriever and then Ramo and Wooldridge were on the covers of the April 13 and 29 issues of Time magazine. In Washington that usually means a major political purge is under way.
While the Air Force program managers were growing frustrated and discouraged, their leaders were just plain worried. NSA was continuing to intercept communications from rocket test ranges in the Soviet Union, but now those signals seemed to be coming from facilities far beyond those connected with the Kapustin Yar range. They were also collecting telemetry from rockets launched from Kapustin Yar, but that data was unintelligible. Then, in August 1957, a shocking piece of new evidence, the final piece of the puzzle, came into view. A U-2 overflew, and an alert photo interpreter identified a huge new Soviet launch facility near the village of Tyuratam in remote Kazakhstan. The Soviets were up to something big.