The Move Toward Missiles

In August 1945 it took little imagination to envision that the weapon of the future would be an advanced V-2, carrying an atomic bomb as the warhead and able to cross oceans. It took rather more imagination, along with technical knowledge, to see that this concept was so far beyond the state of the art as not to be worth pursu­ing. Thus, in December Vannevar Bush, wartime head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, gave his views in congressional testimony:

“There has been a great deal said about a 3,000 miles high-angle rocket.

In my opinion, such a thing is impossible for many years. The people have been writing these things that annoy me, have been talking about a 3,000 mile high-angle rocket shot from one continent to another, carrying an atomic bomb and so directed as to be a precise weapon which would land exactly on a certain target, such as a city. I say, technically, I don’t think anyone in the world knows how to do such a thing, and I feel confident that it will not be done for a very long period of time to come. I think we can leave that out of our thinking.”1

Propulsion and re-entry were major problems, but guidance was worse. For intercontinental range, the Air Force set the permitted miss distance at 5,000 feet and then at 1,500 feet. The latter equaled the error of experienced bombardiers who were using radar bombsights to strike at night from 25,000 feet. The view at the Pentagon was that an ICBM would have to do as well when flying all the way to Moscow. This accuracy corresponded to hitting a golf ball a mile and having it make a hole in one. Moreover, each ICBM was to do this entirely through auto­matic control.2

The Air Force therefore emphasized bombers during the early postwar years, paying little attention to missiles. Its main program, such as it was, called for a mis­sile that was neither ballistic nor intercontinental. It was a cruise missile, which was to solve its guidance problem by steering continually. The first thoughts dated to November 1945. At North American Aviation, chief engineer Raymond Rice and chief scientist William Bollay proposed to “essentially add wings to the V-2 and design a missile fundamentally the same as the A-9.”

Like the supersonic wind tunnel at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, here was another concept that was to carry a German project to completion. The initial design had a specified range of 500 miles,3 which soon increased. Like the A-9, this missile—designated MX-770—was to follow a boost-glide trajectory and then extend its range with a supersonic glide. But by 1948 the U. S. Air Force had won its independence from the Army and had received authority over missile programs with ranges of 1,000 miles and more. Shorter-range missiles remained the con­cern of the Army. Accordingly, late in February, Air Force officials instructed North American to stretch the range of the MX-770 to a thousand miles.

A boost-glide trajectory was not well suited for a doubled range. At Wright Field, the Air Force development center, Colonel M. S. Roth proposed to increase the range by adding ramjets.4 This drew on work at Wright, where the Power Plant

Laboratory had a Nonrotating Engine Branch that was funding development of both ramjets and rocket engines. Its director, Weldon Worth, dealt specifically with ramjets.5 A modification of the MX-770 design added two ramjet engines, mount­ing them singly at the tips of the vertical fins.6 The missile also received a new name: Navaho. This reflected a penchant at North American for names beginning with “NA.”7

Then, within a few months during 1949 and 1950, the prospect of world war emerged. In 1949 the Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb. At nearly the same time, China’s Mao Zedong defeated the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek and pro­claimed the People’s Republic of China. The Soviets had already shown aggressive­ness by subverting the democratic government of Czechoslovakia and by blockading Berlin. These new developments raised the prospect of a unified communist empire armed with the industry that had defeated the Nazis, wielding atomic weapons, and deploying the limitless manpower of China.

President Truman responded both publicly and with actions that were classi­fied. In January 1950 he announced a stepped-up nuclear program, directing “the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super bomb.” In April he gave his approval to a secret policy document, NSC-68. It stated that the United States would resist com­munist expansion anywhere in the world and would devote up to twenty percent of the gross national product to national defense.8 Then in June, in China’s back yard, North Korea invaded the South, and America again was at war.

These events had consequences for the missile program, as the design and mis­sion of Navaho changed dramatically during 1950. Bollay’s specialists, working with Air Force counterparts, showed that they could anticipate increases in its range to as much as 5,500 nautical miles. Conferences among Air Force officials, held at the Pentagon in August, set this intercontinental range as a long-term goal. A letter from Major General Donald Putt, Director of Research and Development within the Air Materiel Command, became the directive instructing North American to pursue this objective. An interim version, Navaho II, with range of 2,500 nautical miles, appeared technically feasible. The full-range Navaho III represented a long­term project that was slated to go forward as a parallel effort.

The thousand-mile Navaho of 1948 had taken approaches based on the V-2 to their limit. Navaho II, the initial focus of effort, took shape as a two-stage missile with a rocket-powered booster. The booster was to use two such engines, each with thrust of 120,000 pounds. A ramjet-powered second stage was to ride it during initial ascent, accelerating to the supersonic speed at which the ramjet engines could produce their rated thrust. This second stage was then to fly onward as a cruise mis­sile, at a planned flight speed of Mach 2.75.9

A rival to Navaho soon emerged. At Convair, structural analyst Karel Bossart held a strong interest in building an ICBM. As a prelude, he had built three rockets in the shape of a subscale V-2 and had demonstrated his ideas for lightweight struc­ture in flight test. The Rand Corporation, an influential Air Force think tank, had been keeping an eye on this work and on the burgeoning technology of missiles. In December 1950 it issued a report stating that long-range ballistic missiles now were in reach. A month later the Air Force responded by giving Bossart, and Convair, a new study contract. In August 1951 he christened this missile Atlas, after Convair’s parent company, the Atlas Corporation.

The initial concept was a behemoth. Carrying an 8,000-pound warhead, it was to weigh 670,000 pounds, stand 160 feet tall by 12 feet in diameter, and use seven of Bollay’s new 120,000-pound engines. It was thoroughly unwieldy and repre­sented a basis for further studies rather than a concept for a practical weapon. Still, it stood as a milestone. For the first time, the Air Force had a concept for an ICBM that it could pursue using engines that were already in development.10

For the ICBM to compete with Navaho, it had to shrink considerably. Within the Air Force’s Air Research and Development Command, Brigadier General John Sessums, a strong advocate of long-range missiles, proposed that this could be done by shrinking the warhead. The size and weight of Atlas were to scale in proportion with the weight of its atomic weapon, and Sessums asserted that new developments in warhead design indeed would give high yield while cutting the weight.

He carried his argument to the Air Staff, which amounted to the Air Forces board of directors. This brought further studies, which indeed led to a welcome reduction in the size of Atlas. The concept of 1953 called for a length of 110 feet and a loaded weight of 440,000 pounds, with the warhead tipping the scale at only 3,000 pounds. The number of engines went down from seven to five.11

There also was encouraging news in the area of guidance. Radio guidance was out of the question for an operational missile; it might be jammed or the ground-based guidance center might be destroyed in an attack. Instead, missile guidance was to be entirely self-contained. All concepts called for the use of sensitive accelerometers along with an onboard computer, to determine velocity and location. Navaho was to add star trackers, which were to null out errors by tracking stars even in daylight. In addition, Charles Stark Draper of MIT was pursuing inertial guidance, which was to use no external references of any sort. His 1949 system was not truly inertial, for it included a magnetic compass and a Sun-seeker. But when flight-tested aboard a B-29, over distances as great at 1,737 nautical miles, it showed a mean error of only 5 nautical miles.12

For Atlas, though, the permitted miss distance remained at 1,500 feet, with the range being 5500 nautical miles. The program plan of October 1953 called for a leisurely advance over the ensuing decade, with research and development being completed only “sometime after 1964,” and operational readiness being achieved in 1965- The program was to emphasize work on the major components: propulsion, guidance, nose cone, lightweight structure. In addition, it was to conduct extensive ground tests before proceeding toward flight.13

This concept continued to call for an atomic bomb as the warhead, but by then the hydrogen bomb was in the picture. The first test version, named Mike, deto­nated at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific on 1 November 1952. Its fireball spread so far and fast as to terrify distant observers, expanding until it was more than three miles across. “The thing was enormous,” one man said. “It looked as if it blotted out the whole horizon, and I was standing 30 miles away.” The weapons designer Theodore Taylor described it as “so huge, so brutal—as if things had gone too far. When the heat reached the observers, it stayed and stayed and stayed, not for seconds but for minutes.” Mike yielded 10.4 megatons, nearly a thousand times greater than the 13 kilotons of the Hiroshima bomb of 1945-

Mike weighed 82 tons.14 It was not a weapon; it was a physics experiment. Still, its success raised the prospect that warheads of the future might be smaller and yet might increase sharply in explosive power. Theodore von Karman, chairman of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, sought estimates from the Atomic Energy Commission of the size and weight of future bombs. The AEC refused to release this information. Lieutenant General James Doolittle, Special Assistant to the Air Force Chief of Staff, recommended creating a special panel on nuclear weapons within the SAB. This took form in March 1953, with the mathematician John von Neumann as its chairman. Its specialists included Hans Bethe, who later won the Nobel Prize, and Norris Bradbury who headed the nations nuclear laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

In June this group reported that a thermonuclear warhead with the 3,000-pound Atlas weight could have a yield of half a megaton. This was substantially higher than that of the pure-fission weapons considered previously. It gave renewed strength to the prospect of a less stringent aim requirement, for Atlas now might miss by far more than 1,500 feet and still destroy its target.

Three months later the Air Force Special Weapons Center issued its own esti­mate, anticipating that a hydrogen bomb of half-megaton yield could weigh as little as 1,500 pounds. This immediately opened the prospect of a further reduction in the size of Atlas, which might fall in weight from 440,000 pounds to as little as 240,000. Such a missile also would need fewer engines.15

Also during September, Bruno Augenstein of the Rand Corporation launched a study that sought ways to accelerate the development of an ICBM. In Washing­ton, Trevor Gardner was Special Assistant for Research and Development, report­ing to the Air Force Secretary. In October he set up his own review committee. He recruited von Neumann to serve anew as its chairman and then added a dazzling array of talent from Caltech, Bell Labs, MIT, and Hughes Aircraft. In Gardner’s words, “The aim was to create a document so hot and of such eminence that no one could pooh-pooh it.”16

He called his group the Teapot Committee. He wanted particularly to see it call for less stringent aim, for he believed that a 1,500-foot miss distance was prepos­

terous. The Teapot Committee drew on findings by Augenstein’s group at Rand, which endorsed a 1,500-pound warhead and a three-mile miss distance. The formal Teapot report, issued in February 1954, declared “the military requirement” on miss distance “should be relaxed from the present 1,500 feet to at least two, and prob­ably three, nautical miles.” Moreover, “the warhead weight might be reduced as far as 1,500 pounds, the precise figure to be determined after the Castle tests and by missile systems optimization.”17

The latter recommendation invoked Operation Castle, a series of H-bomb tests that began a few weeks later. The Mike shot of 1952 had used liquid deuterium, a form of liquid hydrogen. It existed at temperatures close to absolute zero and demanded much care in handling. But the Castle series was to test devices that used lithium deuteride, a dry powder that resembled salt. The Mike approach had been chosen because it simplified the weapons physics, but a dry bomb using lithium promised to be far more practical.

The first such bomb was detonated on 1 March as Castle Bravo. It produced 15 megatons, as its fireball expanded to almost four miles in diameter. Other Castle H-bombs performed similarly, as Castle Romeo went to 11 megatons and Castle Yankee, a variant of Romeo, reached 13.5 megatons. “I was on a ship that was 30 miles away,” the physicist Marshall Rosenbluth recalls about Bravo, “and we had this horrible white stuff raining out on us.” It was radioactive fallout that had condensed from vaporized coral. “It was pretty frightening. There was a huge fireball with these turbulent rolls going in and out. The thing was glowing. It looked to me like a diseased brain.” Clearly, though, bombs of the lithium type could be as powerful as anyone wished—and these test bombs were readily weaponizable.18

The Castle results, strongly complementing the Rand and Teapot reports, cleared the way for action. Within the Pentagon, Gardner took the lead in pushing for Atlas. On 11 March he met with Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott and with the Chief of Staff, General Nathan Twining. He proposed a sped-up program that would nearly double the Fiscal Year (FY) 1955 Atlas budget and would have the first missiles ready to launch as early as 1958. General Thomas White, the Vice Chief of Staff, weighed in with his own endorsement later that week, and Talbott responded by directing Twining to accelerate Atlas immediately.

White carried the ball to the Air Staff, which held responsibility for recommend­ing approval of new programs. He told its members that “ballistic missiles were here to stay, and the Air Staff had better realize this fact and get on with it.” Then on 14 May, having secured concurrence from the Secretary of Defense, White gave Atlas the highest Air Force development priority and directed its acceleration “to the maximum extent that technology would allow.” Gardner declared that Whites order meant “the maximum effort possible with no limitation as to funding.”19

This was a remarkable turnaround for a program that at the moment lacked even a proper design. Many weapon concepts have gone as far as the prototype stage without winning approval, but Atlas gained its priority at a time when the accepted configuration still was the 440,000-pound, five-engine concept of 1953- Air Force officials still had to establish a formal liaison with the AEC to win access to information on projected warhead designs. Within the AEC, lightweight bombs still were well in the future. A specialized device, tested in the recent series as Castle Nectar, delivered 1.69 megatons but weighed 6,520 pounds. This was four times the warhead weight proposed for Atlas.

But in October the AEC agreed that it could develop warheads weighing 1,500 to 1,700 pounds, with a yield of one megaton. This opened the door to a new Atlas design having only three engines. It measured 75 feet long and 10 feet in diameter, with a weight of240,000 pounds—and its miss distance could be as great as five miles. This took note of the increased yield of the warhead and further eased the problem of guidance. The new configuration won Air Force approval in December.20