Whatever I lost in popularity with the commander was a net gain among my peers, who now knew that I would not shrink from pointing out where things were going wrong. It is in crisis moments that the men get separated from the boys, and every leader had better have a good idea which is which and who is who in the heat of battle. For now, my ego knew no bounds—until my first fall, which was not long in coming.
During that first month in 1959 after my appointment, Raborn asked me to make a speech about Polaris out in Minnesota.
Shortly after I gave the speech and returned, I was skewered in a Washington Post editorial for claiming, according to the writer of the editorial, that Polaris was close to being ready when in fact it was still years away. According to the paper, for me to say otherwise was the height of irresponsibility.
I slunk into work expecting it to be my last day and of course the admiral wanted to see me immediately. Still slinking, I entered his office and he greeted me with one of his widest grins and a hand ready for a firm shake. “Welcome to the club,” he said.
He then explained that the editorial was almost certainly written-even before the speech was given. It was part of a campaign in support of the Air Force's program to develop the B-1 bomber. The theme was to impress Congress that America's missiles would not be ready for some time and that there was thus a “bomber gap.” Raborn showed me the articles that had already been written to that end by the Post, all timed for ongoing congressional hearings.
The Special Projects Office's existence depended upon public perception as well as Soviet perception that our system was solely a deterrent and it would have failed if any missile were ever launched in anger. We had vigorous resistance from those in our own society who wanted nuclear war. They regarded deterrence as costly and irrelevant and too complex to ever work.
But as I occupied my new post in the summer of 1959 our number one crisis concerned the full-scale Polaris test program. The first seven missile trials were launched from surface test pads at Cape Canaveral. All had failed and had been witnessed by the press. Each report coming into the SPO's communication center was received with downcast eyes except for those of Levering Smith. He even seemed cheery, and I asked him why he was not discouraged.
“Why do you think we are conducting a test program?” he said. “It is to find the problems now before they appear in the field.” That was objectively true but the naysayers of the sea-based deterrent seized on each failure as a demonstration that the program was in trouble and success was far away. One columnist, the widely read Drew Pearson, was particularly scathing.
The day finally came when an underwater test was scheduled from the submarine George Washington. I cannot, even today, view the film of that first launch in the summer of 1960 without skipping a heartbeat. The missile emerges from the water at an atrocious angle in pitch and roll. It appears doomed for failure, but miraculously rights itself and streaks off to its target downrange. Then with the courage born of experience in battle, Levering Smith orders a second missile fired. It inspires Admiral Raborn's message to the Chief of Naval Operations: “Out of the deep to target, perfect.”
But once again, the media machine was unimpressed. The next day's Drew Pearson column began with the statement that the Navy was finally able to launch a missile from a submarine. The rest of his column, which by Pearson's own subsequent admission had been written prior to the test, recited the failures and recorded his expectation of more to come. He was not completely wrong in this regard.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff were less pessimistic, however. Along with their staff, they were on board the submarine for the next test. Four missiles were fired. None left the water. All fell back and bounced off the hull with a resounding smack. It was most difficult for these military men, particularly those of the land and air services, to maintain their normal sangfroid in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a submarine being hit by missiles loaded with high-energy fuel. To describe it in the indelicate but graphic language of the service, only the laundryman would know the extent of their fear.
The only discomfort felt by the SPO's technology experts on board was embarrassment. Otherwise, they were quite comfortable knowing that the unignited solid propellant bouncing off the hull was as harmless as a rubber ball. Indeed, SPO senior personnel had office ashtrays made from the missile propellant—a lot safer than the cigarettes that were snuffed out in them.
When the press witnessed another four failures the previous two successes were witnessed and the crisis moved to the front burner. The “crazy” test facility that I had built at the model basin now proved its worth. It showed that a diaphragm at the top of the launch tube, which served to keep the missile dry prior to launch, would not always rupture symmetrically. As the missile would rise a bubble of compressed air was formed in the space above the missile in its tube. The diaphragm was designed to rupture when pierced by the nose of the missile. An asymmetrical rupture, however, would cause the compressed air bubble to push the missile to one side of the tube or the other. As a result, the missile would tilt unacceptably, thus aborting the flight.
The diaphragms were then fitted with an X-shaped explosive ribbon-and the explosive ribbon was activated on launch to rupture the diaphragm symmetrically. The problem finally solved, it was decided to test the solution out of the media's sight. As fate would have it, those unpublicized tests batted 1,000, going six for six in perfect launches.
Alas, fearful of another public relations disaster, we had failed to do range tracking of the firings, so we lacked vital data on trajectory time and impact. Fortunately the sounds of launch and splashdown had been recorded. A ship capable of very precise positioning was therefore deployed in the vicinity of the launch sound. Acoustic charges were dropped and the location of the original launch was determined by the differences in arrival time of the sound at the listening stations. The same was done for the splashdowns. Working out a way to make up for missing tracking data by using sound to make a very accurate estimation of missile flight time and impact point accuracy, we had developed a technique that I would later employ successfully in the searches for the positions of lost submarines—both Soviet and American.
In spite of the development problems and the skeptics, the system-was officially operational on November 15, 1960, when the USS George Washington departed on the first FBM operational patrol, with sixteen Polaris A-1 missiles aboard. The George Washington and her sister ship, the USS Patrick Henry, had been ordered back in 1957 when the Polaris program had been cut from nine to four years. But here we were, mission accomplished only three years and two months later. It was not a moment too soon.
This triumph was followed by events that fully established Polaris FBM as the world's most credible deterrent system. Because of the deleterious environmental effects of radioactive fallout from nuclear testing, the nuclear powers agreed to a treaty banning tests in the atmosphere. The treaty would be signed in the summer of 1963, but a year earlier, in the last atmospheric tests to be conducted by any of the world's nuclear powers, the only missile ever launched with a live nuclear warhead was fired from the USS Ethan Allen, submerged in the Pacific Ocean and under the command of Captain (later Admiral) Paul Lacy.
The May 6, 1962, test was monitored from the surface ship Compass-Island, on which the Polaris system's navigational equipment had been developed. Admiral Levering Smith was in command of the operation. He had the difficult task of determining whether the missile was off course and should be destroyed in flight. On the day of the test, all preparations had been going smoothly and the missile rose out of the sea and took flight successfully, but soon appeared to veer off track. The range safety officer called for termination, but the admiral stayed his hand. The missile then seemed to veer off again, then back on course and then to veer in the opposite direction. Smith let out an unrestrained “Aha!”
The irregular motion of the missile was in phase with the roll of the ship. It was the failure to adequately compensate for this roll that had created the appearance that the missile was wandering. It was not. From out of the deep to target, perfect. The bomb exploded over the South Pacific, more than a thousand miles downrange, “right in the pickle barrel” in the phrase of the day. The last and perhaps most portentous mushroom cloud showed the world, not a moment too soon, that Polaris was not a poker player's bluff.
Some months later, in October of 1962, the strategy of deterrence was tested unambiguously. Soviet ships loaded with nuclear-tipped missiles were proceeding to deployment in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy, having declared a quarantine on the delivery of these weapons, raised the threat of retaliation through the airborne alert of the Strategic Air Command and the full deployment of all operational Polaris FBM missile submarines. There were more than eight submarines each with sixteen missiles at the ready—one hundred twenty-eight in all—aimed at the Soviet Union. The world stood still in a week of excruciating tension as America prepared for nuclear war. Finally, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, faced with the ultimate dilemma, retreated. In the wake of the crisis, Khrushchev went before the Supreme Soviet and said, “Whose side has triumphed? Who has won? It can be said that reason has won.”
Deterrence had won, too, won big, but not all cold warriors rejoiced.