A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  Approximately four months later, on February 10, 1954, the committee’s inquiry was complete and its final recommendations forwarded to Trevor Gardner with a covering letter from Simon Ramo. Gardner could not have asked for a better outcome if he had written the committee’s report himself. What he had essentially wanted was validation by these eminent scientists that an ICBM was technically feasible. He got this and he got a great deal more. The committee said that not only was the unstoppable weapon feasible, the first ready-to-fire ICBM could be produced by 1960–61 and enough missiles to constitute a deterrent threat to the Soviet Union could be fielded by 1962–63. However, this goal was contingent, the committee said, on the Air Force conducting a “radical reorganization” of the project. The measures it recommended for this reorganization were also just the sort that Gardner had in mind. The scientists came to the same conclusion he had that the nation’s Second World War-era aircraft industry was incapable of bringing to fruition a project as technologically challenging and complex as this one. They too sought the creation of an organization that would constitute the seed of an American aerospace industry.

  To begin with, the committee recommended that, except for some limited additional research, the Air Force halt all further work by Convair. “The most urgent and immediate need,” the committee said, was for the Air Force to set up a “new IBMS development group, which … should be given directive responsibility for the entire project.” (IBMS were the original initials for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile System, later changed to ICBM to avoid confusion with the initials for the International Business Machines Corporation, IBM.) This command group was also to exercise its “overriding control” with a unique independence and freedom from bureaucratic harassment and was to be composed of “an unusually competent group of scientists and engineers.” (Gardner thought he already knew how to find this scientific and engineering talent and so did Schriever. Shortly after the submission of the Tea Pot report, Schriever and Gardner put the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation on hold with another letter contract from Schriever’s Development Planning Office, this one for further missile research.) “Within a year” of study and experimentation, the committee predicted, a group of this quality would be “in a position to recommend in full detail a redirected, expanded, and accelerated program” that would meet its beginning of the 1960s deployment schedule for the missiles.

  The report also lent assurance to von Neumann’s pronouncement to Schriever and Gardner that a hydrogen warhead weighing less than a ton, yet with a megaton’s blast, could be readied by the end of the decade. “The warhead weight might be reduced as far as 1500 lbs,” the committee said, and its diameter scaled down as well. Given the advent of thermonuclear weaponry, the committee said that the impossible accuracy requirement of 1,500 feet, tied to a lower-yield fission warhead, should be extended to a CEP of “at least two, and probably three, nautical miles [2.3 to 3.4 statute miles].” (For some reason, von Neumann had been unable to persuade his colleagues on the Nuclear Weapons Panel of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, which he also headed, to predict a one-megaton bomb of less than a ton in an October report on the panel’s deliberations. The closest they got was a three-ton bomb yielding two megatons.)

  The Tea Pot Committee said that the final decision on the warhead should be left to the results of the Castle series of thermonuclear tests at Bikini Atoll that von Neumann had spoken of in his meeting the previous May with Schriever and Walkowicz. A 23,500-pound dry thermonuclear device, fueled with lithium deuteride and misnamed Shrimp, was set off on March 1, the first day of the tests. The physicists from the Los Alamos Laboratory discovered they had miscalculated somewhat the forces they were about to liberate. They had predicted that Shrimp would go off with a detonation of five megatons. Instead it ran amuck to fifteen megatons, one for every 1,566 pounds. The 1,500-pound, one-megaton missile warhead indispensable to the building of a practicable ICBM was now a certainty. Gardner, and Schriever always working closely with him through these developments, could count on substantially trimming the dimensions of the 110-foot-high monster ICBM most recently proposed by Convair and reducing its 440,000-pound weight by roughly half.

  Johnny von Neumann tipped the issue decisively in their favor by injecting a clincher argument into the committee’s report. It was once again based on the fear that drove American military technology, in this case fear that the United States was already caught in a race with the Soviet Union to determine which of the two great powers would be the first to build an ICBM. As Schriever recalled many years later, there was no firm evidence at the time that America confronted such a race; in fact, no hard intelligence at all on Soviet missile work. Nor would there be for another year and a half. Not until mid-1955 would Gardner succeed in setting up a long-range radar installation and electronic eavesdropping posts in Turkey to monitor missile firings at the Soviets’ then main testing range at Kapustin Yar in southern Russia, on the dusty, dismal Astrakhan steppe about seventy-five miles east of where Stalingrad (subsequently renamed Volgograd) lies in the bend of the Volga River.

  The Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (Wright Field had been amalgamated with neighboring Patterson Field into a single installation after the Air Force was proclaimed independent in 1947) believed the Soviets were making swift advances in a number of guided missile types, but there was no proof. In late 1951 and early 1952, the center also received reports that the Soviets had built a super-rocket engine producing 265,000 pounds of thrust, twice as powerful as any American counterpart, and precisely the sort of engine most useful for an ICBM. The engine reports proved to be false. Senior Air Force intelligence officers were, in any case, focused mainly on Russian progress in bombers. At the time, no one who mattered in the U.S. intelligence community was concerned about the possibility of a missile gap, which John Kennedy was to make one of the main slogans of his successful run for the presidency in 1960. The National Intelligence Estimate for 1953 put out by the CIA, an annual top secret report that collates and summarizes the collective judgment of all the nation’s intelligence agencies on subjects of importance, does not even mention Soviet missile activities.

  What intelligence did exist had mostly been gleaned from interviews with the German rocket specialists whom the Russians had released and allowed to go home, the last sizable group returning to Germany in November 1953. Once the Soviets had milked the Germans of their expertise, however, they had been careful to isolate them from more advanced missile designs and experimentation. As early as the fall of 1950, most had been excluded from secret work. The existence and location of Kapustin Yar had first been learned from a Red Army general and rocket expert named Gregory A. Tokady (also known as Tokaty-Tokaev), who had defected to the British in 1948. But an attempt to photograph it in late August 1953 by a British twin-jet Canberra bomber, with a large, oblique-looking camera fitted into its aft fuselage by RAF and U.S. Air Force photoreconnaissance technicians, had nearly ended in disaster. As the plane was approaching Kapustin Yar, it was intercepted and shot up by Russian fighters and was vibrating so badly from damage when it reached the test range that the photographs were useless. Fortunately for the crew, the Canberra was battle-worthy enough to hold itself together while they turned south along the Volga and across the Caspian Sea to land safely in Iran. The RAF did not try any more daytime spy flights deep into Russia.

  No one in the United States knew that on March 15, 1953, the better part of two months before Bennie Schriever ventured up to Princeton to see von Neumann, the first Soviet medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM), the R-5, had been test-fired from Kapustin Yar without a hitch and had flown its full 800-mile range. Subsequently named the SS-3 Shyster by NATO intelligence officers, the R-5 was designed to carry a nuclear warhead. Through espionage or through their own high competence, Soviet missileers had gained and were employing some of the same ideas, like separating warheads and swiveling engines to steer their rockets, that Charlie Bossart and h
is crew had brain-stormed in 1946 and 1947 for the MX-107B. The men who led these Russian missile advances, men like Sergei Korolev, the chief rocket designer, and Valentin Glushko, the principal rocket engine maker, were still anonymous figures hidden behind the high wall of a closed society. Their identities were regarded as high secrets, officially to protect them from assassination by American agents, but actually because of the Soviet state’s obsessive concern with security. Most important, nothing was known of the decision by the Politburo at the end of 1953 to base the Soviet Union’s nuclear strategy on long-range missiles, rather than on an imitation of SAC’s bombers, and to commence the building of an ICBM to carry the hydrogen bomb Moscow was to acquire in two years. The United States was indeed caught in a missile race, a strategic competition of profound importance of which it was quite unaware, and in which it was behind.

  The Russophobia ingrained in von Neumann by his Hungarian youth led him to perceive the danger, as did the incisive logic of his mind. The committee had been briefed on currently available intelligence on Soviet missile activities. Because the information was so sparse and inconclusive, there was a dispute within the committee about what to believe. In his initial draft of the committee’s report, Ramo wrote that “the Russians are probably significantly ahead of us in long-range ballistic missiles.” After about half the committee members objected, he came up with fuzzy compromise language to try to bridge the gap. Von Neumann would not hold for this fence straddling. In a statement he insisted on appending to the report, he argued, in effect, that however imprecise the evidence, responsible men should err on the side of caution and conclude that a race was on and that the Russians were leading.

  He began by focusing on another reason Ramo had raised for building an ICBM with “unusual urgency.” This, von Neumann noted, was “a rapid strengthening of the Soviet defenses against our SAC manned bombers.” He was referring to an integrated air defense system of radars, jet interceptors equipped with air-to-air missiles like Ramo and Wooldridge’s Falcon, and batteries of surface-to-air missiles. The Soviets were indeed busy putting together such an air defense system, as Schriever had already discovered, though he had been rebuffed by Curtis LeMay when he had sought to persuade LeMay to have SAC’s bombers adopt evasive tactics in a low-level approach rather than the high-level one LeMay favored. This reason alone was sufficient for proceeding with an ICBM project, von Neumann said in a prophetic comment, because one could expect the Soviet air defense system to be in place “during the second half of this decade.” And so it was when the Russians demonstrated what formidable air defenses they had deployed by shooting down the U-2 in 1960 at a moment the Soviet leadership must have savored, news of it arriving while Nikita Khrushchev and the rest of the Soviet chieftains were assembling atop Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square to review the annual May Day Parade of armed might. As for information on Soviet progress toward an ICBM, von Neumann conceded it was true that “available intelligence data are insufficient to make possible a precise estimate.” Nevertheless, he argued, “evidence exists of an appreciation of this field” by the Soviets and there was “activity in some important phases of guided missiles” connected with development of an ICBM. “Thus,” he concluded ominously, “while the evidence may not justify a positive conclusion that the Russians are ahead of us, a grave concern in this regard is in order.” When a scientist of von Neumann’s reputation spoke this solemnly, who could fail to pay attention?

  35.

  GETTING STARTED

  Having obtained a scientific validation “which those narrow-gauged bastards in the Pentagon couldn’t back away from,” as Gardner triumphantly told his assistant, Vince Ford, he now set about convincing the authorities in the Air Force and the Department of Defense to launch a crash program to create an ICBM. On February 16, 1954, six days after Simon Ramo had sent him the final draft of the report, the “wild Welshman,” as Ford affectionately referred to his boss, forwarded a copy to Donald Quarles, an engineer and physicist whom Secretary of Defense Wilson had chosen as his assistant secretary for research and development. In his covering memorandum, Gardner told Quarles that the Air Force could build and be ready to launch the first ICBMs within just about four years, by mid-1958. Although the Tea Pot report had specified 1960–61 as the earliest possible goal for operational missiles, Gardner said it was his belief, confirmed by talks with von Neumann, Kistiakowsky, and Jerome Wiesner of MIT, that “a ‘Ph.D. type’ operational capability” was attainable by mid-1958. What he meant by this self-coined term was the ability to deploy and threaten the Soviets with the initial few missiles off the production line, using civilian test-launch crews from the rockets’ manufacturers to form the firing crews. (There would not be enough missiles available this early to train regular Air Force launch crews.) Gardner brought von Neumann, Kistiakowsky, and Wiesner down to the Pentagon to make the rounds of senior officials and talk up the report. He spoke of the scientists as his “influence matrix.” He already had his own superior, Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott, on board.

  Talbott instructed him to draw up a detailed plan. The memorandum spelling out the scheme was ready as early as March 11. Stamped top secret, it was addressed to Talbott and to General Nathan Twining, who had taken over as Air Force chief of staff after Hoyt Vandenberg was felled by cancer the previous June. Schriever and Vince Ford pitched in with substantial contributions to help Gardner compose the memorandum, but he was its principal author and the credit must go to him. The document was a masterly example, concise and flexible, of preliminary planning for an enterprise of surpassing scope. After a brief paragraph referencing the Tea Pot report as the practical basis for his plan, Gardner specified two primary objectives. The first was to attain his “Ph.D. type” capability, which he now defined as having “two launching sites and four operational missiles” by June 1958. The second was a full-bore deterrent to a Soviet nuclear attack—the creation of “20 launching sites with a stockpile of 100 missiles” by June 1960. To achieve these goals, Gardner proposed forming what amounted to a separate organization within the Air Research and Development Command. It would be headed by a major general who was ostensibly a vice commander of the ARDC, but whose “sole responsibility” would be leadership of the ICBM program.

  The purpose of placing the new organization within the ARDC was to enable it to draw on the larger resources of its parent. The major general was to be “backed up by a brigadier general of unusual competence to work directly with the contractors in supply of top level support and technical supervision.” Gardner named the two generals he had in mind. The first was Major General James McCormack, an Air Force intellectual with a specialty in nuclear weaponry who was already vice commander of the ARDC. The brigadier “of unusual competence” who was to back him up was Brigadier General Bernard Schriever. Both “should be prepared to remain with the program until it is satisfactorily completed.” Attached to their organization would be a “systems management scientific group of the highest competence” to provide the know-how necessary to overcome technological obstacles like reentry. His preference, he said, was “the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation.” He estimated the total cost over the next five fiscal years at $1.545 billion, an enticingly reasonable figure that would prove to be a gross underestimate.

  Wasting no time, Gardner took the paper in hand and strode off to a meeting with Secretary Talbott and General Twining the same day the memorandum was completed to brief them on his plan. Both reacted favorably, but Twining could not render a firm decision until, in courtesy to his staff, he had received a recommendation from the Air Force Council. The council was the highest advisory body to the chief of staff. It was chaired by the vice chief, currently Lieutenant General Thomas White. The other members of the council comprised the next tier down, the deputy chiefs who headed the various staff sections at Air Force headquarters. After briefing Talbott and Twining on March 11, Gardner briefed the Air Force Council too, returning for a second session on the 15th. “W
e’ve just introduced the Air Council to the nuclear missile age,” he announced to Vince Ford.

  Another threat nearly as dire as the Russians in Air Force eyes was also now prompting construction of the ICBM—the Army. Interservice rivalry was particularly acute during the late 1940s and the 1950s. Among other disputes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had never been able to agree on which service was entitled to build what missiles. Furthermore, the Army had “the Germans,” as Wernher von Braun, Nazi Germany’s chief scientist on the V-2, and his team of rocketeers were referred to wryly within the Pentagon. They were currently working at the Army Ordnance Department’s Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. Twining and White were being warned by the handful of officers who sided with Gardner and Schriever that if the Air Force did not build the ICBM, the Army, claiming superior expertise in von Braun’s group, would snatch the mission from it. With this threat in mind, the council accepted Gardner’s plan and on March 23 recommended directing the Air Research and Development Command to obtain an operational ICBM as early as possible, “limited only by technical progress.” Twining quickly signed off on the recommendation.

  In the meantime, the ever impatient Gardner had moved to preempt the decision making. He persuaded Talbott to order Twining on March 19 to speed up immediately the process of putting his plan into effect. Talbott also appointed Gardner his “direct representative in all aspects of the program.” But Gardner’s blowtorch methods had their limits. He could not build the missile by himself. He had to get the Air Force to do that for him and so he chafed and fretted while the struggle resolved itself within the service bureaucracy. LeMay was vociferously opposed because the ICBM would divert funds from aircraft production, and his allies among the bomber generals on the Air Staff were with him. He predicted that the Atlas would turn out to be an extravagant boondoggle. It would never perform as anticipated.