CHAPTER 6
Sputnik and the Missile Gap
I DEPARTED EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE and joined the newly renamed Air Force Ballistic Missile Division (BMD) in June 1957. The atmosphere there was heavy, for the Scylla of the U-2 photos from Tyuratam stared at the Charybdis of the poor man’s budget across the narrows of history. For me, as a young officer, it was a heady time. The senior officers welcomed me with open arms. For the most part they were veterans of World War II; few were eminent scientists. They were cut from the same cloth as our leader, General Schriever. From the general on down, the officers in Los Angeles were honest, dedicated, and intelligent men, but their engineering skills were perfunctory. They welcomed me, a graduate from a strong engineering university, newly bedecked with academic honors. They had confidence in their Ramo-Wooldridge technical advisers, but there were some areas, such as the internals of nuclear weapons, where Ramo-Wooldridge was not allowed to tread. My new boss, Colonel Jack Dodge, had asked that I be assigned to his armament (reentry vehicle) division at BMD.
It was summer, the beginning of a new fiscal year. Los Angeles was awash with technical innovation and opportunity, but in Washington the poor man’s program was the order of the day. It had induced an unwarranted lethargy in the leadership of our nation’s ballistic missile program, but things did not stay that way for long. On August 21, after three unsuccessful tries (reported nowhere in the Western press), the Soviets launched the world’s first ICBM. It was an R-7 rocket 22 fired eastward from the newly discovered facility near Tyuratam across much of the Soviet land mass. The Soviet name for the launch complex, as noted earlier, was Baikonur Cosmodrome. The R-7 impacted on the Kamchatka peninsula, 3,500 miles downrange, near the Pacific coast. Most of this historic flight was tracked by our new radar at Diyarbakir, Turkey.
The differing Soviet and Western attitudes toward range safety are a stark reminder of the differences between our competing values and systems of government. The United States launches its long range missiles and spacecraft out over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Every Western nation has taken a similar precaution. Even the Nazis launched their first V-1s and V-2s eastward from Peenemunde over the Baltic Sea. In fact, the U.S. once flirted with the idea of an “operational base launch,” a test of a Minuteman missile to be fired from a true operational base in Wyoming. While the target would have been Kwajelein Island in the Pacific, the first-stage booster was expected to fall into the redwood forests of northern California. I was given the job of explaining this bizarre concept to the representative of the First Congressional District of California, home of those remote redwoods and the proposed impact point for those crashing first stages. The shrieking and carrying on was understandable. The congressman mobilized the entire California delegation. The Pentagon and White House were besieged with objections. The operational base launch was cancelled, never to be heard from again.
But that’s not the way it worked in the Soviet Union. The citizens there had no voice in their government. They had no channel for complaint. Their lives and personal safety were subservient to the interests of the state. The Soviet launch sites were built well inland, where the military wished to have them, sited away from the prying eyes of Western intelligence. (Or so the generals thought.) Test ranges crossed the Asian land mass. Jettisoned boosters and launch misfires were allowed to crash down on hapless peasants. Farms, villages, and livestock herds suffered “collateral damage” without objection.
Some traits of human nature are immutable, however. Kids will be kids, and young officers like to live on the edge. Some have a saying: “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.” My friends from the Soviet Strategic Rocket Force, now retired, tell of partying at night downrange from Kapustin Yar, watching the launch fireworks, but driving like mad to avoid the falling upper stages when their apparent impact point seemed too close for comfort. A large-caliber form of Russian roulette, I suppose.
Back in the U.S., we again tried to fly another Atlas during September 1957. In ghastly counterpoint to the Soviet R-7 success, an engine turbo pump failed again after only a few seconds of flight. Things were looking bleak, but we hadn’t seen anything yet. On Friday afternoon, October 4, 1957, the Soviets used their R-7 booster to launch an artificial satellite into earth orbit. The device, called Sputnik, circled the earth every ninety-six minutes. It emitted a regular “beep” and was visible in the night sky, a new, moving star.
America went into stunned analysis over the weekend. By Monday the United States was awash in fearful headlines; the Ballistic Missile Division was dealing with a dozen “what if” questions. The months that followed saw unparalleled changes in American society. The education system was revamped to promote science and engineering. Missile programs were granted immediate budget increases. Recriminations and concern were everywhere. And with this awakening the brightest minds of the American scientific community began to work their magic.
Nowhere was this talent more productively focused than in the most secret Telemetry and Beacon Analysis Committee (TABAC) assembled in the immediate aftermath of Sputnik. This group of youngsters 23 was given the job of looking into the mysterious Soviet telemetry signals. When they started work, the NSA tapes seemed like those huge jigsaw puzzles often found at summer resorts. Everyone just sat down at a corner and started assembling pieces. The group soon came to understand the modulation scheme used to transmit those signals. Then they were able to assign meaning to each of the forty-eight channels (engine pressure, guidance signals, acceleration, engine cutoff, etc.). Lastly, they calibrated all this data, giving it some absolute numerical values, by reading the telemetry transmitters at liftoff. When their work was done, TABAC had thrown open a huge window into the inner workings of the Soviet military machine. For the next two decades the U.S. knew as much about every Soviet rocket launch as the Politburo did.
In the more visible world, operational R-5 rockets rolled through Red Square as part of the Soviet revolutionary celebrations of November 7, 1957. There could no longer be any doubt that the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a serious race. Two years later the R-5s would become the world’s first ballistic missiles operationally deployed with nuclear warheads. Khrushchev’s public posturing and threats made clear the consequences of losing that race. But shortly after that parade in Red Square, on December 17, 1957, the tide began to turn. The U.S. Atlas finally achieved a successful flight, impacting 600 miles downrange. No separation of booster from sustainer engines was attempted, but Atlas had flown.
MINUTEMAN
These struggles to produce the Atlas family of missiles were just a reaction to the Soviet challenge. In time an operational missile would be produced, but Atlas was not an initiative. That responsibility—the job of putting the United States into the role of missile leadership—fell to Colonel Ed Hall.
Hall was born to Barney and Rose Holtzberg in New York City on August 4, 1914. He attended the College of the City of New York, graduating in 1936 with a B.S. in engineering and, a year later, with a professional degree in chemical engineering. In 1936 he and his younger brother simplified their last name to Hall, as many of our ancestors had upon arrival in the New World. At that time, New York City, and especially CCNY, were hotbeds of Depression-spawned Marxist activism. Julius Rosenberg was a classmate of Ed Hall’s.
As the clouds of war blew across Europe in 1939, Hall enlisted in the Army Air Corps as a mechanic. Pearl Harbor instantly brought the gold bars of a second lieutenant in the Army Reserves and a transfer to Greenland. From there he went to England, where he met and married Edith Shawcross, to France as the allies swept across Europe, then back to England to serve in technical intelligence. For all of those years, as enlisted man and officer, Hall suffered the slings and arrows of incompetent leadership. At least, that’s how he sees it today. He feels he was made to work for a procession of unqualified nonengineers, people put in charge of complex technical projects that he had to execute. By the closing days of the war he was in charge of repairs to battle-damaged aircraft returning to England. His trademark was a swarm of mobile service teams, not a bureaucratic central depot. He was doing whatever it took to get those planes back into combat.
At war’s end, Hall was assigned to technical intelligence, overseen by “worthless stockbrokers,” as he puts it. He applied for a regular commission and was turned down. He then applied to Cal Tech, hoping to earn a Ph.D. in engineering, but other Air Force assignments cut that short. He was awarded an M.S. in 1948, returned to Europe for two years, then was assigned to the Air Force’s research and development center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Again he started work as somebody’s assistant, this time as the assistant chief of the rocket and ramjet engine group. He worked at Wright-Patterson for four years, until 1954, when he was tapped by General Schriever to join the latter’s new Western Development Division as chief of the propulsion division. For once, Ed Hall was unequivocally in charge of something, overseeing the development of the liquid-fueled engines for Atlas.
But he knew there was a better way. During his years at Wright-Patterson, and then during the year he oversaw the Atlas engine work, he had been thinking and learning about solid propellants. The Atlas engines were powered by difficult-to-handle liquid fuels and oxidizers. Those missiles had to be filled with such chemicals right before firing, a dangerous procedure that consumed much valuable time. He knew that a missile with solid propellants would change all that. Premixed pastes could be poured into a tube, allowed to harden, then lit off years later as part of the launch process. The ideas were simple, like Fourth of July fireworks, but the practical chemistry was daunting. Even so, Hall wanted to pursue solid propellants as part of any second-generation missile.
Upon his return from the UK, Hall asked Schriever for the authority to start work on a solid-propellant, multistage missile system. Schriever demurred, but he did allow Hall to conduct a study of what such a missile might look like. It was the job Hall most wanted, for in time he would define the next generation ICBM, the missile that would establish U.S. missile supremacy at an affordable cost. His study became known as the Advanced Missile System, a three-stage solid propellant rocket designed to carry a fractional megaton warhead to ranges of 8,500 miles with a quarter mile average miss distance. In addition to technology, he understood costs, and the role of those costs in actually deploying a meaningful weapon system. He envisioned a cheap missile: a bargain at a million dollars each, inexpensive to operate in unattended, underground silos. The U.S. could afford thousands; he envisioned an impossible-to-target force of 4,000 missiles deployed by 1965.
These studies proceeded quietly until the post-Sputnik events of October 1957. That month, Hall found himself in Washington, engaged in debate with the Navy about the merits of their proposed solid propellant IRBM. His comments focused on what could be done if the technology envelope were pushed. Hall’s boss, Colonel Charles Terhune, thought Air Force Vice-Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay ought to hear what Hall had to say. These two, accompanied by General Schriever, gave General LeMay a rundown. Never happy with the complexity of Atlas and Thor, LeMay reacted favorably. The quick-firing, underground-based Minuteman was his kind of bird.
Being a man of action, LeMay led the threesome down one Pentagon flight of stairs to the office of the Secretary of Defense. LeMay asked Hall to repeat his story to Neil McElroy, with regular reinforcement by LeMay. The Secretary of Defense was impressed, both with the technology outlined by Hall and by its endorsement from LeMay. On the spot, McElroy said $50 million would be made available to kick off this advanced missile system and that the Air Force should proceed to develop it without delay.
PROJECT Q
With $50 million in his pocket, directly granted by the Secretary of Defense, Ed Hall went home to start work on this system. He decided to call it Project Q. It was a strange name with an even stranger history.
During his first three years at the Western Development Division, Ed Hall had grown bitter about the role of Ramo-Wooldridge in the U.S. ballistic missile program. He saw that firm as yet another example of the blind leading the visionaries. He felt that the Air Force had the technical talent to design and develop new missiles, that it did not need to hire a bunch of high-priced outsiders to do systems engineering studies and provide technical direction. Hall himself certainly constituted Exhibit A. Some officers, such as himself, were fully qualified and on the cutting edge of missile technology. But on the larger scale, most observers then (and most historians now) agreed with the Teapot Committee’s recommendation: get ICBM development away from the Air Force bureaucracy. Ed Hall did not agree, and as his years at WDD unfolded, his feelings intensified. He felt the Ramo-Wooldridge engineers would view the modestly improved technology reflected in Titan I as the definitive next-generation ICBM. Hall knew better. His advanced missile system would make the difference.
To keep it out of Ramo-Wooldridge’s sight, he decided to give the advanced missile project an innocuous name. Only when the Ramo-Wooldridge engineers surfaced in their opposition would he blow them out of the water. He likened his plan—invisibility before deploying the overwhelming power of his arguments—to the Q-boats of World War I. Thus the name.
As a resident of Great Britain during World War II, Ed Hall had read about the British “Q-boats.” The problem in World War I had been German submarines surfacing to attack British coastal shipping with deck guns during the early phases of the war. One solution, first proposed by First Sea Lord Winston Churchill, was to outfit some tramp steamers with serious firepower, to be hidden inside crates on deck that could be quickly disassembled. These Q-boats lured the Germans to the surface at close range before dropping their disguises to open fire. The Q-boats were very effective.
During February 1958, the Q missile system was fully funded, granted program office status, and given a real name: Minuteman. On March 5 these historic events were written up in Time magazine. While Time credited Schriever with ballistic missile leadership, it gave the full credit for Minuteman to Hall, describing him as a “day-after-tomorrow kind of officer.”
At that time, I was a special assistant to the armaments chief, Colonel Dodge; he assigned me to the new Minuteman account. I became the technical project officer for its reentry vehicle. With the growing success of the Atlas and Thor flight test programs in 1958, with the approval of the next-generation Titan ICBM, and with the pending nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific that summer, the U.S. ballistic missile program was turning the corner. Atlas would maintain parity with the Soviets, Thor would preclude any missile gap, and Minuteman would put the United States into a position of leadership. The Soviets had made their point with Sputnik, and the U.S. was not home free, but the Soviets were now stuck trying to boost 10,000-pound warheads across intercontinental distances with dangerous liquid fuels. Their flight test program was not going well.
There were just two oddities that bothered me then, and they still do. The first was Colonel Hall himself. He had a chip on his shoulder where he should have been wearing his colonel’s eagles with aplomb, and he was tape-recording the weekly Minuteman program meetings. He said it was to assure that no one would go back on his commitments to the program, but in 1958, tape recording was not a simple thing. It involved tape-to-tape reels. And any recording of those highly classified discussions was contrary to security policy. In discussions forty-five years later, General Schriever was outraged to hear of such activity.
The second puzzle was the set of political constraints that would follow the Hardtack nuclear test series, to be conducted in the Pacific during the summer of 1958. The leadership of the U.S. and the USSR had agreed to a moratorium on nuclear tests, to be effective on October 31, 1958. This “agreement” was not a treaty. Rather, it was a pair of unilateral declarations to the effect that henceforth nether side would conduct nuclear tests anywhere; underground, in the atmosphere, in space, or wherever. This scheme was referred to by some as a “gentlemen’s agreement,” illustrating by that name alone the folly of such an undertaking. A “gentlemen’s agreement” with a nuclear-armed dictatorship, totally lacking legitimacy, led by murderers, few of whom could be called gentlemen? Absurd. Yet the moratorium had the potential of stopping the Minuteman warhead development in its tracks.
Colonel Hall’s studies indicated the possibility of a much simpler, cheaper, smaller, and more reliable ICBM than Atlas, but it could only carry a warhead half the size of Atlas’s. What warhead would that be? How could it be developed without a nuclear test? Now that the Cold War is over, nuclear testing can be viewed in a different light, but testing moratoria and bans always have serious consequences. They incur costs still not well understood. The development and deployment of Minuteman saved U.S. taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. Would those savings have been possible if the Soviets had not unilaterally resumed nuclear testing in 1961? Such treaties are important, and they can be beneficial to mankind, but their terms and conditions need to reflect fiscal and technical reality.
THE NUCLEAR GENIE
This problem first came into focus for me in February 1958, when I flew to Albuquerque with Colonel Dodge for my first exposure to the world of nuclear weapons. Unlike engines, guidance, and reentry physics, warhead technology was off limits to contractors, including most Ramo-Wooldridge employees. It was an Air Force/AEC preserve. Albuquerque was the central node of the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment. It was the administrative headquarters for the Los Alamos design laboratory, and it was the home of Sandia, the organization responsible for the safety, arming, and firing components of nuclear weapons.
Our meetings were held at the Sandia Corporation offices. To gain admission, I had received not only a top secret clearance but an AEC “Q” as well. I was impressed by the security procedures, dazzled by the technical competence of the scientists and engineers from the weapons program, and overawed by the responsibilities heading my way. Sandia had a museum. Most hush-hush institutions in the United States and Russia have such secret rooms, filled with cutaway models of everything from their first experiments to the currently deployed hardware. My first visit there was mind-bending. At our business meetings, we discussed the technical details of integrating warheads into reentry vehicles, but I had glimpsed the nuclear genie. It would never let me go.
When we returned to Los Angeles, Colonel Dodge opened his personal safe to let me have a look at his weapons notebook. It was marked “Top Secret—Restricted Data.” I do not remember its formal name, but it was printed on pink paper, and it contained cross-sectional drawings, dimensions, and design details of every U.S. nuclear device tested. It was the Nieman-Marcus catalog of the military-industrial complex. The responsibility for leading the Air Force and Pentagon through the Minuteman warhead options was being placed squarely in my lap.
In March 1958 a formal “Phase I” warhead feasibility study meeting was held in our Los Angeles offices. Representatives from the two U.S. nuclear weapons labs, Los Alamos and Livermore, were there. It was on that occasion that I first met Jack Rosengren, a physicist not much older than I. He had proceeded through the conventional physics apprenticeship: a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, a stint teaching at MIT, and a brief tour through the aerospace industry. He was recruited to the Lawrence Livermore staff in 1957 by Harold Brown to design thermonuclear experiments, devices, and weapons. Rosengren was tall, thin, handsome, quiet, witty, and smart; all substance and no flash. Underlying that substance were core values of integrity and good judgment, nice to find in people dealing with nuclear weapons.
The most critical problem facing Livermore’s A (thermonuclear) Division was the Polaris warhead program. Edward Teller promised the Navy a strategic warhead yield within a very portable weight package, and the Navy went out onto the Polaris limb in reliance on those promises, but their fulfillment within A Division might best be described as problematic. Interesting experiments during the summer of 1956 showed promise, but the nation’s primary deterrent was awaiting substantive results. In 1957, Rosengren was put in charge of the Polaris warhead design team. In the spring of 1958 a test was scheduled in the Pacific. It would show if Rosengren’s calm leadership had paid off.
At the same time, the definitive struggle broke out over Ramo-Wooldridge’s future role in Minuteman. They wanted to act as the prime or integrating contractor for the system; the Air Force, or at least Colonel Hall, was dead set against that. By summer, Boeing had been selected as the assembly and test contractor. The other guidance, reentry vehicle, and engine contractors also had been selected—and Hall was reassigned. In August 1958, Ed Hall was sent off to France to help the French with the development of their own IRBM, to be known as the Diamant missile. A year later, upon completion of the minimum twenty years needed for retirement, he called it quits. He retired to an engineer’s life in the corporate world and then to another twenty years of complete retirement.
What happened, and why? Today, forty-five years later, Schriever and Hall each have nothing but undisguised scorn for the other. The same is true of Ramo and Hall. In his memoirs, Hall makes the highly unlikely claim that he never even talked to Rube Mettler, R-W’s systems engineer for Thor and Minuteman. Mettler recalls Hall’s role as peripheral, at best, a creative mind that laid out ideas but was uninvolved in the hard work of implementation. Hall’s inability to get along with people is the generally cited reason for his departure from Los Angeles, but were there more reasons than that? What were the missing pieces that Schriever and Mettler never saw? I’ll touch upon this again shortly.
GETTING A DECISION AND LEAVING TOWN
The Hardtack nuclear test series during the summer of 1958 produced a cornucopia of good news. After preliminary tests in 1956, the selected approach to an Atlas and Thor warhead gave a yield in the megaton range. Los Alamos did its job. The Navy’s Polaris warhead, designed by Livermore’s Jack Rosengren, tested equally well. And then there was another quite small and unique Livermore device that gave twice the yield expected. So far so good, but the question now was, what warhead to use for Minuteman?
Such yield factors of two, along with parallel improvements in accuracy, could have a significant impact on SAC’s ability to attack and destroy Soviet hardened targets: command posts, communications nodes, submarine pens, and weapon storage bunkers. How were we to make that decision in the absence of nuclear testing? Should the Air Force planners opt for surety? Should they select a weapon that had been tested in 1958 and call it quits? If so, the Polaris warhead was the leading candidate. Or should they reach for another factor of two, opting for a scale-up of the 1958 experiment? Such a design should be straightforward, but nuclear devices are full of surprises, and our country would be betting its life on their reliability.
By the end of 1958 this undecided Minuteman warhead question was controlling the entire program. Without a decision on warhead size, weight, and configuration, the rest of the missile design remained in flux. My job was to reach my own conclusions, make some recommendations, then get a decision from the Secretary of Defense if necessary.
At the end of January 1959, I first visited the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. The quiet, self-assured competence of the people there was impressive. In March, Jack Rosengren, now the designer for the Minuteman warhead, visited me in Los Angeles. He reflected a growing confidence in the scale-up of the 1958 experiments, a confidence that came, in part, from a new relationship with the British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. As part of the testing moratorium, the U.S. and UK governments had agreed that it would be a good idea for both countries to review each other’s weapons designs.
In August, I was sent to Washington to brief representatives of the Secretary of Defense on the Minuteman warhead options: an expensive, high-yield, but untested warhead; another design tested at half that yield; or a lightweight device with a tested yield down by another factor of two, but enabling the global reach first envisioned by Colonel Hall. It was decision time.
The conversations were as arduous as the entire year’s studies. The stakes were immense. On the first of September, however, the answer was forthcoming: go for the higher yield, build in every possible margin of safety regardless of cost, and check the design with Los Alamos and the Brits. As a result, Minuteman missile design could proceed. The trilogy of Atlas (for immediate defense), Thor (as a “missile gap” hedge), and Minuteman (the long-term deterrent) could go forward.
Now I could think about new challenges and perhaps some peace and quiet. My first child, a daughter, had just been born; it was time for a more stable life. My exposure to the Livermore Lab in general and Jack Rosengren in particular made that organization my preferred future home. An informal September discussion with the leader of Livermore’s A Division led to a job offer two days later. I accepted, with the move set for late November.
QUESTIONS FOR THE END OF AN ERA
1. Was there really a missile gap?
Yes, in our favor. When John Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President, on January 20, 1961, the Soviet Union had only three huge R-7A ICBMs on alert. They were the only Soviet ICBMs capable of striking the United States. To be fair, there were forty-eight R-5M (SS-3) IRBMs deployed in Eastern Europe (menacing the NATO capitals), and in the Far East (targeting Japan and South Korea). Another thirty R-12 (SS-4) IRBMs were deployed in the peripheral Soviet republics. But there were no Soviet submarine-launched missiles at sea or even close to it.
On the U.S. side, one Atlas was on alert at Vandenberg Air Force Base since January 15, 1958. On the day Kennedy was sworn in, a squadron of six Atlas missiles also was on alert at Francis E. Warren AFB in Wyoming. Offsetting the Soviet IRBMs in Eastern Europe, the U.S. had four squadrons of fifteen Thor IRBMs each for a total of sixty missiles on alert in the UK. They were able to cover most Soviet targets west of the Urals. The nuclear-powered submarine George Washingtonwas on patrol in the Norwegian Sea, with sixteen Polaris missiles aboard capable of reaching the Soviet capital. Minuteman was in train, to be flown successfully on its first firing on February 1, 1961, a week after the Kennedy inauguration. One thousand Minutemen, deployed over the next six years, would stand alert in the central U.S. for the duration of the Cold War. Candidate Kennedy’s warning of a coming missile gap was nothing but campaign oratory. Once safely in office, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara looked at the facts and admitted as much. 24
Nikita Khrushchev knew he enjoyed no such advantage. During his confrontations with the U.S. in 1960, he boasted that he was going to crank out R-7s “like sausages,” but his son, Sergei, then working at a rocket design bureau, knew better. Sergei is now a U.S. citizen, serving on the faculty of Brown University. He is reported to have revealed a 1960 dinner conversation with his father on this subject.
SON: “How can you say we are producing rockets like
sausages, Father? We don’t have any rockets.”
FATHER: “That’s all right. We don’t have any sausages either.”
2. What happened to the Soviet space program?
The Soviet system could not afford spy satellites and trips to the moon at the same time. Just as the U.S. Star Wars initiative threatened to overwhelm the economy of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the U.S. Apollo program rolled over Soviet space exploration efforts in the 1960s. Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit of the earth in 1961 was the apogee of Soviet self-esteem. By 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was forced from Soviet power, with the encouragement of the Red Army. Among other things, the Soviet generals wanted spy satellites; Khrushchev and his rocket guru, Sergei Korolev, insisted on space spectaculars. The Soviet economy and infrastructure could not support both. Brezhnev took over and handed the military-industrial complex the blank check it wanted.
Sergei Korolyov, the prophet and mastermind of the Soviet space program, died in January 1966, and with him died Soviet leadership in space. Their moon program involved a super-huge N-1 rocket with thirty engines; it regularly blew up on the launch pad. In the late 1960s, Soviet dreams of a trip to the moon were quietly abandoned in favor of a massive ICBM buildup. By 1970 the Soviet Union had achieved supremacy in some measures of strategic nuclear firepower. Their deployment of massive SS-9 and their replacements, the SS-18 behemoths, endangered the U.S. for the decade to come, but the era of Soviet space leadership was over. Today the Russian rocketeers focus on the heavy lifting. Energia provides the boosters for many international space consortia, but the sophisticated electronics, the controls and on-orbit systems, are left to others in the West.
3. Did the U.S. ever consider the use of nuclear weapons during the Eisenhoweryears?
Yes, at the beginning and at the end. In 1953, upon assuming office, Eisenhower apparently threatened the use of nuclear weapons in and around Korea if a truce was not forthcoming from the Chinese.
Then, at the end, in April 1959, as Khrushchev was provoking a new Berlin crisis, Secretary of State Dulles created a secret NATO team and war plan known as Live Oak.Its purpose was to maintain Western access to Berlin, this time on the ground. His staff had concluded that a 1948-style airlift would not work again. One Live Oak option was to force access to Berlin via the East German highways, to be accomplished by an armored division using tactical nuclear weapons if need be.
Fortunately, the East German spymaster, Marcus Wolfe, got wind of these plans during the summer of 1959. An agent inside British military headquarters tipped him off; he passed the news to Khrushchev. Wolfe now says, “ Live Oak chilled me to the core.”
As a result, the Soviet 72nd Engineers Brigade, custodians of the Soviet R-5M missiles in East Germany, were pulled back into Soviet territory. Khrushchev cooled his Berlin rhetoric, resorting instead to construction of the wall two years later.
4. Who was Ed Hall?
Only when the CIA released the Venona tapes in 1996 did new light shine on the mysterious conduct of Colonel Ed Hall. During World War II the Soviets regularly transmitted coded messages back to Moscow from New York and Washington. The U.S. Army collected, but at the time could not decode, those messages. When the product finally did become readable, in 1949, it tipped off the FBI as to the wartime espionage activities of the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs, and their associates. It was these transcripts that led to the arrest and conviction of the atomic spies. Still other agents were faceless ghosts, however. The identity of “Perseus,” “Mlad,” and others remained hidden within the Venona transcripts. They lay in the vaults of the U.S. intelligence agencies until the Cold War was over. Then, in 1996, the Venona transcripts were published by the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence.
With that publication, two persistent journalists, Joe Albright and Marcia Kunstel, took an interest in identifying some of those shadowy figures. With a great deal of legwork, they identified Mlad. They even found him, elderly but alive, in Cambridge, England. They held lengthy interviews with Mlad, now beyond the reach of prosecution since statutes of limitation and the death of most witnesses allowed Mlad a peaceful retirement to the faculty at Cambridge. He taught physics in obscurity until these reporters knocked on his door one evening in 1996.
Fifty years before, however, Mlad was one of the youngest scientists recruited by J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was only eighteen years old when he arrived at Los Alamos in January 1944, but he had already finished the course work for a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard. Mlad was put to work measuring the nuclear properties of enriched uranium. As it became clear that plutonium would not work in a gun-type (Little Boy) bomb, the Los Alamos scientists hit upon the idea of spherical implosion. Mlad developed the instrumentation to confirm that such spherical implosions would work. By the end of 1944, Mlad was the resident genius on such implosion experiments.
He also decided against allowing America to enjoy a nuclear weapons monopoly once the war ended. In October 1944, Mlad arranged for a two-week vacation. He returned to New York, nominally to see his parents, but his key visit was to Amtorg, the Soviet trade agency there. He met with their resident intelligence agent, Sergei Kurnakov, in the latter’s apartment. Mlad volunteered his services to the anti-imperialist cause. Given his familiarity with the Los Alamos implosion experiments, Mlad’s contribution to the Soviet nuclear weapons program was monumental. With his guidance, the Soviet scientists were saved from many technical dead ends. His couriers for the delivery of information were Morris and Lona Cohen. Their photos today adorn the walls of the KGB museum in Moscow.
Once confronted by Albright and Kunstel, Mlad admitted his espionage efforts. He was proud that he enabled the Soviets to compete in the world of A-bombs. By so doing, he felt that he headed off a postwar American nuclear monopoly that in his eyes could only have led to the global spread of American imperialism. He accepted no Soviet money for his efforts. Albright and Kunstel published their conclusions in 1997 in a book entitled Bombshell. In it they reveal Mlad’s real name: Ted Hall. He was Colonel Ed Hall’s younger and most devoted brother.
Ted attended Harvard at his older brother’s insistence. During his interviews with Albright and Kunstel, Ted made clear the source of his early communist orientation. As Albright and Kunstel put it: “The writings of [various radicals] left an imprint on Ted’s developing political mind before he was even a teenager. So did the Communist Manifesto, which [older brother] Ed brought home from CCNY.”
It is all very strange, but it’s easy to imagine how a skilled Soviet intelligence officer, posing as a sympathetic friend, could have talked shop with Colonel Hall. Accolades denied him by the U.S. Air Force might have been delivered by these new best friends in exchange for insight into the Minuteman program. Who was Ed Hall? What made him tick? Perhaps we shall never know.