A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  While American industrialists had reaped stupendous profits during the Second World War, patriotism had also been a motive for many. Andrew Higgins, the New Orleans boatbuilder, had, along with several pioneering Marine Corps officers, developed the ubiquitous amphibious assault craft of the Second World War, the LCVP (Landing Craft Vehicle and Personnel). It, and a larger version to ferry tanks, carried men and equipment ashore on innumerable contested beaches. Both boats were produced in the many thousands, yet Higgins declined to exercise his patent rights. He passed his designs freely to any other company that would agree to build them. By 1954, men such as Higgins were extinct. U.S. military industry, particularly the aircraft industry, had been coddled for so long that its leaders were like spoiled children. They had come to expect high profits as a virtual right. The firms were heavily subsidized. North American Aviation, for example, had by 1954 invested $33.8 million of its own funds in building its plants, while the Air Force and the Navy had furnished it with additional facilities worth roughly twice as much, $61.6 million, free of charge. In this atmosphere of government largesse, greed had become institutionalized. McNarney and Lanphier might fear advances in Soviet strategic weaponry as Schriever, Gardner, and von Neumann did, but if so, their fear was overmastered by their desire for lucre.

  Gardner had also become sufficiently exasperated to ask Schriever what he thought about cutting off negotiations with Convair and finding another firm to build the missile’s airframe and perform the final assembly. Bennie was opposed. They would lose a year’s time, he said. As it was, to hold to schedule they would have to release designs for the airframe and the other components in the spring of 1955. He told Gardner that they had no choice but to keep hammering at Convair. Fortunately for Schriever, McNarney and Lanphier apparently did not realize how tight Schriever’s deadlines were. Perhaps fearing an outcome such as the one Gardner had proposed, they caved in to the “country boy” and on January 6, 1955, agreed to a contract on his terms. Bennie made one concession. In addition to manufacture of the airframe, assembly, and participation in the testing, Convair would also provide the control mechanisms that steered the missile during liftoff and the first stage of flight. (The long-range guidance system to direct the warhead to its target remained a separate element to be awarded to a source with specialized expertise. Convair had come up with a radio-controlled system called Azusa, but like all radio schemes, it was vulnerable to interference. Von Neumann and the members of his committee favored an inertial guidance mechanism that would be integral to the missile and thus beyond the reach of the Soviet Union’s defenses.) Given the innovation of swiveling rocket engines that Bossart had introduced in his work on Atlas’s progenitor, the experimental MX-107B back in 1946–47, it was reasonable to assume the firm could perform this task adequately. Whatever the case, under the contract the specifications for everything would be those laid down by the Western Development Division and Ramo-Wooldridge. In turn, Schriever exacted a pledge from McNarney to create a distinct work force devoted only to Atlas at Convair’s San Diego plant. There was to be no dual tasking with Convair’s other enterprises, which could result in delays.

  The signing of the contract did not put an end to Schriever’s distrust of McNarney and Lanphier and their allies in the Aircraft Industries Association. He feared that they had not truly given up. Near the end of February, he wrote Power a secret fourteen-page memorandum recounting the flawed performance of the old-line aircraft companies in missilery and defending the unique organization that he and Simon Ramo had formed. Nor did the signing of the contract put an end to Schriever’s troubles with Convair’s performance. Ramo reported to him that Convair was not hiring the right kind of engineers in such specialties as metallurgy. More unpleasant exchanges followed with McNarney and Lanphier. It was not until May 1955, with Roger Lewis, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for matériel mediating, that Schriever and Ramo sat down with McNarney and Lanphier and settled on procedures that satisfied Bennie.

  In the meantime, Schriever’s relations with Power had undergone a transformation since their unnerving conversation of the previous July. Despite his years of association with LeMay and the conventional attitudes of the senior Air Force bomber general that his career had ingrained in him, Power had a mind of his own. Months of listening to scientists as prestigious and as persuasive as von Neumann discuss the ICBM had given him an appreciation of its strategic importance. He was by now a convert and saw it as a necessity in the nuclear arms competition with the Soviet Union. Those same months of listening had also brought him around to an understanding of why the special management arrangement with Ramo-Wooldridge was needed. Tommy Power was a tough and decisive man and, as he valued those qualities in himself, so he also admired them in others. The persistent, unflinching manner in which Schriever had stood up to and eventually won out over McNarney and Lanphier made him realize how badly he had misjudged this younger officer in assessing him as a naive amateur.

  The first fitness report on Bennie that Power rendered at the end of April 1955 demonstrated the dramatic reversal of attitude. Schriever has “excellent staying qualities when the going gets rough,” Power began. “Professionally, he is characterized by his thoroughness. He has a brilliant mind and can be depended upon for outstanding work. He is highly respected by his associates, both senior and junior. His management ability has been demonstrated in the organization and operation of the highly classified special project for which he was hand-picked.” Power recommended Schriever for a second star, promotion to major general. In short, Power had perceived that Bernard Schriever was made of the stuff that bred success and his success would shine on Power, which is above all what Power wanted. From this point on Schriever no longer had to worry about the wary three-stars in Baltimore. Power was now behind him.

  41.

  AN ASSAULT FROM AN UNEXPECTED QUARTER

  Having bested McNarney and Lanphier, Bennie was astonished in mid-February to find himself suddenly involved in a totally unexpected fracas with Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott. He had been looking forward to Talbott’s scheduled visit to the Schoolhouse on February 16 as a “Happy to Have You” occasion, as he had written at the top of the outline for his briefing on the progress they were making. Instead, he subsequently recorded in his diary, “It was indeed a painful meeting.” Schriever and Ramo had, with the concurrence of Gardner and von Neumann and the other scientists on his committee, decided on a management strategy that was a dual approach. One side was called concurrency. On this side, work on every part of the missile—airframe, engines, long-range guidance, nose cone or reentry vehicle—was to go forward simultaneously. The objective was to gain time. They assumed that if each of these parts was adequately tested beforehand and Ramo and his colleagues did their job of systems engineering competently to make certain that everything would fit together, they would have a ready-to-fly ICBM much sooner than if they developed each part in sequence.

  The other aspect of the strategy was fail-safe redundancy. They were going to build not one, but two different ICBMs. And they were going to create a complete second set of the subsystems that went into an ICBM. If the Atlas or any of its components proved a failure, they would always have a fallback. Schriever already had his staff sizing up which other aircraft companies were the best candidates to design and manufacture the airframe for the second ICBM. He intended to launch a competition as soon as possible. And, on Hall’s advice, he had also just negotiated a contract for the rocket engines that were to power this alternate ICBM. The firm was Aerojet General, a full-grown descendent of a seedling company started in 1942 by von Kármán and a number of his students with Hap Arnold’s assistance to build small rockets that would give heavily laden aircraft an extra boost to take off. Aerojet had agreed to develop the new engines in collaboration with a less well-known firm called Reaction Motors, Inc., another pioneer in the rocket business.

  Bennie cheerfully recounted all of this good news to Talbott and got a
reaction he least expected. As with his unnerving session with Power the previous July, he was so upset by it that he again wrote a long memorandum, this time eight pages, for his diary. Talbott paid no attention to what had been accomplished. Instead, he was solely concerned with stopping any additional work on the project in California. To render military industries less vulnerable to attack, President Eisenhower wanted to start dispersing them inland, rather than leaving them concentrated, as they were, on both coasts. He was also particularly concerned about the extent to which California’s economy was based on military industry. The state’s dependence on the military made California, he felt, highly vulnerable to future cutbacks. Talbott had obviously left Washington freshly briefed on the president’s wishes. He should have explained to Eisenhower that the ICBM project was so dependent on scientific and industrial resources virtually exclusive to California at this point in American history that an exception would have to be made if the program was to move ahead at an acceptable pace. But he had not done so. Instead, he had flown out a somewhat frightened man, determined to enforce what he interpreted as the boss’s orders.

  He told an amazed Schriever, and Gardner and Ramo, who were also present at the meeting, that he wanted no additional work assigned in California, or at least none that would enable a California firm to enlarge its organizational or industrial base. He ordered Schriever to cancel the contracts with Lockheed and Aerojet General. When Bennie replied that carrying out those orders would severely impair the project, Talbott lost his temper and threatened to fire him on the spot and reduce him in rank. “Before this meeting is over, General, there’s going to be one more colonel in the Air Force,” he shouted at Schriever with a menacing look on his face. He yelled that he expected his orders to be obeyed. Other people might lose their jobs for failure to carry out the president’s wishes on this issue, but he was not going to be one of them, Talbott said. Bennie could also lose his temper on occasion, but never when he was under assault. He grew cold and deliberate then. He replied quietly, yet pronouncing each word with unaccustomed precision, that he could not accept the order “because I have a prior and overriding order. On being handed this assignment, I was directed to run this program so as to attain an operational ICBM capability in the shortest possible time.” Talbott also regained control of himself and began speaking calmly, but he did not back down.

  Ramo and Gardner came to Schriever’s defense. So did Roger Lewis, Talbott’s assistant secretary for matériel, who had also apparently flown to Los Angeles for the gathering. They pointed out to Talbott that if the president wanted industry dispersed, production facilities could be found inland once research and development of the prototypes was completed. The R&D, however, had to be done in California. Otherwise, they would lose a year. Lewis said he had read the agreement with Aerojet and that creation of new rocket engines for the alternate ICBM with this firm in California was the way to go. The solution of development in California and production elsewhere did not satisfy Talbott. He lost his temper again at a remark by Gardner and then said that the Aerojet General contract should have gone to General Electric. With its headquarters in upstate New York, GE was presumably far enough away from the coast to satisfy Talbott’s understanding of the dispersal criterion. The company had never previously manufactured rocket engines. In a reflex search for new business, however, it had competed for the alternate engine contract and lost because of its lack of qualifications. To his listeners, Talbott’s championing of GE now smacked more of politics and favoritism than obedience to the president’s dispersal policy. Gardner snapped a Gardner retort at his chief and patron. Bennie recorded it in his diary. “This would have been a big mistake because GE was a shitty outfit.” Ramo was glum and grim. Bennie also recorded his warning. “If no R&D is done in Calif., you might as well scrub the [whole] program.” Talbott waffled somewhat, but he left still refusing to rescind his instructions and aimed a parting shot at Schriever. The secretary told him that whatever contractor he chose for the airframe of the second ICBM, it would have to be a company “east of the Rockies.”

  Horatio Viscount Nelson, the British naval genius who brought his country a century of command of the seas and thus the freedom to build its extraordinary empire by destroying the combined French and Spanish fleets in the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, was once ordered by a superior to break off an action in which he believed he would prevail. In an account of the incident that may be apocryphal but which is entirely within character, Nelson put his telescope to an eye blinded in an earlier fight. He pointed it at the signal flags waving from his superior’s flagship and declared, “I really do not see the signal.” Bennie Schriever had not come this far in the United States Air Force to fail to learn the lesson that when a foolish order is issued, a wise officer ignores it. “The only way in which a development can be accomplished in the shortest period of time is when all other considerations are subordinate to time,” he observed in his diary. He canceled neither contract, instead forwarding both for approval. He ordered his deputy, Colonel Charles “Terry” Terhune, a redheaded Dutchman and one of the most accomplished engineers in the Air Force, who had been present at the meeting, not to tell anyone what had occurred. He also instructed Terhune to get the search for a second airframe contractor moving. He was careful with Power. The next morning, before leaving for Patrick Air Force Base in Florida to start planning for the launch pads and other missile test facilities they would have to construct on nearby Cape Canaveral, he telephoned Power in Baltimore, filled him in on the tumult of the previous day, and told Power what he intended to do. Power did not object.

  The contracts went through and the ICBM project was eventually granted a complete exemption from the dispersal policy. Ironically, Harold Talbott, who had predicted that someone was going to lose his job but that it was not going to be he, was forced to resign that August because of a conflict of interest imbroglio. He had been using Air Force stationery and his phone and office to further the fortunes of a former business partner. Some of the companies he had contacted on behalf of his friend were Air Force contractors whom he had to have known would feel themselves under obligation to him. He had also retained his partnership in a New York investment group and had accepted more than $132,000 from them, he claimed for services not performed while he was secretary of the Air Force.

  42.

  A SENSE OF ADVENTURE

  Despite these traumas, Schriever and Ramo and their associates at the Schoolhouse in Inglewood were by no means discouraged. On the contrary, they were filled with the stir of adventure. They were giving birth to a “New Era,” two words that appear repeatedly in Bennie’s diary entries at this time. The ballistic missiles they were fashioning would lift the Air Force out of the atmosphere and carry it off into the world of outer space. In these chilling years of the early Cold War, fear of the Soviet Union was a constant and powerful stimulant. The probability that they were in a race with unnamed and unknown but nonetheless all too real rivals hard at work to destroy the United States from within the dark, closed society behind the Iron Curtain was pervasive, and Schriever never let anyone forget this. “If we don’t push into it [this New Era], we have failed our country and seriously endangered our security,” he told the Schoolhouse gang in a pep talk.

  Yet anxiety for the security of their nation and a race against opponents who would endanger it were only half of what drove them. These men were engineers. They built things. Theirs was a different ethos from that of operators like Power and LeMay, who got their adrenaline rush from the lure of aerial combat. The engineers’ fulfillment came from creating the new, from bringing into being that which no one else had yet achieved. And in building their lethal rockets, they were simultaneously opening the realm of space that had so far been beyond the reach of man. Their rockets would be more than weapons. They would also become launch vehicles to penetrate this unexplored vastness. If they could acquire the means to send a hydrogen bomb into space and bring it back down again, t
hey could do so with other things and, although they were military men to whom human exploration of space was not a priority, they could do so too with man. The technology that applied to sending the bomb up and bringing it back down again intact applied to virtually everything else. The first American astronauts to venture into space were, in fact, to ride up on military missiles and to return in capsules that were modified versions of the initial hydrogen bomb warhead.

  Bennie imparted some of the exhilaration of this adventure in a secret briefing he gave to the staff of the Air Force’s think tank, the RAND Corporation, in nearby Santa Monica on January 31, 1955. He spoke of a warhead flashing through space at the previously unimaginable speed of 20,000 feet per second, of the “invulnerability” of this nuclear spear point to Soviet defenses. And yet, he said, the real objective of the adventure was to contribute to the preservation of peace. The ICBM was not being built to be used as a weapon. Rather, as an instrument of war the ICBM would have the “highest probability of Not being used.” The thought was an idea he had absorbed from Gardner and was to reiterate over and over in the years to come. Once the missile existed the Soviets were “unlikely to miscalculate our capability to retaliate” and would be afraid to attack. The ICBM would thus achieve its highest purpose. It would have “deterred Total War.” Schriever was articulating a concept that would subsequently become known as Mutual Assured Destruction. And once they had attained the means to penetrate what he called the “New Environment—outer space,” they could move on to the next contribution to “preserve the peace.” They would power their rockets to even higher speeds than 20,000 feet per second in order to fling into orbit around the earth the spy satellites Arnold and von Kármán had envisioned. The “constant surveillance,” the regular flow of information on “enemy intentions” provided by these spy satellites, would deny the Soviets the possibility of a surprise attack, of a nuclear Pearl Harbor, the dread of which haunted many, including Eisenhower.