A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  A Silver Star and a Croix de Guerre were not all he had brought home from the war. He had, in another instance of Jacobson persistence, won a brunette English beauty named Ethel Davies, called by her nickname, Peg. She was as strikingly lovely as Jacobson was strikingly homely. He had a beak of a nose, large ears that stuck out, and while still in his twenties, except for the hair on the side of his head, which he kept clipped short in military fashion, he was bald. He spotted her on a railway platform in Nottingham in the East Midlands, near the airfield where his squadron was stationed, and asked if he could sit beside her on the train. “Well, I suppose so,” she replied. “It’s a free country.” She was in uniform. Britain drafted its women for non-combat duty during the war, and to avoid ending up as a secretary, Peg Davies had joined the Royal Signals branch of the women’s army organization, the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She was working as a switchboard operator at a depot in the vicinity. Her stop was first and by the time she got off, Jacobson had maneuvered the conversation around to learning the name of the place and what she did there.

  When he called the switchboard soon afterward to ask for a date, she told the other operators not to put him through. She had been struck on the train by his baldness and found it hard to believe he was as young as he claimed to be. The bald Englishmen she knew were in their fifties. He kept calling and she kept refusing to take the calls. Then one evening, right after she had finished washing her hair, a guard at the depot gate sent word to her barracks that an American officer was there asking to see her. She dressed, wrapped her damp hair in a big white towel, and walked down to the gate. It was Jake. She decided that if he was this persistent, he was worth at least one date. He courted her on a motorcycle filched from a British airborne outfit during a pre-D-Day practice drop, with Lucky Strike cigarettes, Hershey bars, and hefty No. 10 cans of grape juice, and he took her to dinners at a restaurant in Nottingham that still served steaks, locally reputed to be horse meat. He also stayed on active duty an extra year so that he could fly back to England and marry her at a registry office in Shropshire in 1946.

  Foresight into the coming importance of guided missiles had led Jacobson to Schriever. He brought his English bride home to Birmingham and spent the next two years completing undergraduate studies for a bachelor’s in mathematics. Although he had left the service, he was still enrolled in the Reserve. While attending some mandatory Reserve schooling, he was informed by a general he knew that if he applied for a Regular commission, the newly independent U.S. Air Force would send him to MIT for two years of graduate study under Charles Stark Draper, the god of inertial guidance. He would receive the full pay and allowances of the lieutenant colonel’s rank he now held in the Reserve, along with tuition and any other expenses. He arrived at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, which Draper headed, on a Saturday morning and found the renowned professor in shirt sleeves sweeping the floor of the former shoe polish factory. Jacobson mistook him for a janitor until he asked directions to Dr. Draper’s office and the great man introduced himself. Because of sundry delays between Birmingham and Cambridge, Massachusetts, it was 1952 by the time Jacobson received his master’s degree in engineering from MIT. The question now was what to ask the Air Force to let him do with it. The Matador and Snark missiles were still in the development stage, but they caught his attention. Guided missiles, he decided, were in the Air Force to stay and he might one day want to command a missile unit. Nuclear weapons were also obviously here to stay and so he thought it would be a good idea to learn how to mate nuclear warheads to missiles.

  The same general who had urged him to go to MIT arranged his assignment to the guided missiles section of the Special Weapons Command at Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base. He spent the next two years there, weaponizing nuclear devices from Los Alamos, first for missiles and then for bombers and fighters as well. His superior was Colonel Charles Terhune, whom Schriever had recruited as his second man, WDD’s deputy commander for technical operations, while putting together his Schoolhouse Gang in Inglewood in the summer of 1954. A test pilot at Wright Field and fighter pilot in the Pacific during the Second World War, Terry Terhune had a deserved reputation within the Air Force as an engineer of consummate ability. Once at the School-house, Terhune began rounding up other officers with engineering prowess for Schriever. The Air Force personnel department had selected Jacobson for a term at the Naval War College after his assignment to Kirtland, a comfortable academic year in Newport, Rhode Island. Terhune warned him that, with Schriever’s authority to put a hand on whomever he wanted, Jacobson was coming to Schriever’s shop sooner or later, and, if he wanted a good position, he had better come sooner. He told Peg they would not be going to Newport and came sooner, near the end of 1954. Moose Mathison, who had become Jacobson’s deputy at Kirtland, followed in 1955. It was Jacobson who, with Schriever’s assent, had then sent him to Canaveral as WDD’s delegate to oversee construction of the launch complexes there. “Colonel, do you have any experience in test operations?” Schriever had asked Jacobson on his arrival at Inglewood. “No, sir,” Jacobson had replied. “Do you know anything about testing?” Schriever had probed. “No, sir,” Jacobson said. “Good. You’re my director of tests,” Schriever announced. Terhune had assured him Jacobson was a quick study. Bennie had therefore assumed he would learn. And he did.

  The first thing Jacobson did after taking over Thor was to send an officer he trusted to the Douglas plant at Santa Monica to find out why the company was not performing as it had promised and the original contract required. The Thors had been arriving at Canaveral with many parts missing. The unlaunchable missiles sat in one of the assembly buildings at the Cape until the parts arrived from California after long delays, and were installed. Even if Thor 101 had not blasted the pad so badly that repairs had taken two months, lack of parts would have delayed the launch of Thor 102, the missile the range safety officer mistakenly blew up, for an equivalent period of time. Jake’s investigator found, as Jacobson recalled years later, that the manufacturing procedures at the Douglas plant were “in sad shape” and the engineers there “didn’t seem to give a damn.” Jacobson briefed Schriever on what he had learned and said he intended to wake up the slackers. “Boss, I’m going to close down Douglas Aircraft Company until they straighten out,” he said. “I’m going to get their attention.” Get it, he did. He telephoned one of the senior executives that he was cutting off all payments until Douglas began producing on time and up to quality standards. Three days later the Douglas executives were in his office with a plan of reform. Hall took umbrage at Jacobson’s brusque methods and, his pride hurt because he was still officially the program director, went over to Santa Monica and told the engineers to ignore Jacobson. They immediately telephoned Jacobson and asked him what they should do. He said to put Hall on the phone, but Hall refused to talk to him. Jacobson called the Air Force security people and had them escort Hall out of the plant. The issue took months to square away and, while Jacobson relented after a time and allowed funds to flow again, the threat that he would once more stop the money was enough to keep Douglas on good behavior.

  Jacobson’s next move was to appoint Moose Mathison his deputy. Whenever he could not be at Canaveral to oversee work on a Thor and preparations for a launch, Mathison was to act as his delegate and to speak with equivalent authority. The same would hold true in the blockhouse during a launch. If he happened to be absent for any reason, Mathison was the man. Like Schriever, Jacobson understood how thoroughly dependent the Air Force was on Mettler and Thiel and their associates. He was determined, again among his first tasks, to impress on the staff of approximately eight officers he had inherited from Hall that in the future he wanted teamwork with the Ramo-Wooldridge men, not internecine warfare. Hall’s staff were not an untalented bunch. One staffer was Sidney Greene, who, while a major at the Air Development Center at Wright Field back in 1952, had risked his career to divert $2 million to Hall for the prototype of the Rocketdyne engine that was p
owering Thor and would also power Atlas. But Jacobson discovered that instead of welding his staff into a team, Hall had each man doing his own thing with little interaction beween them. He decided that inviting them all to dinner at his house with their wives would be a good way to break down barriers and asked Peg to telephone the women and set it up.

  In these years in the military, when the wife of your husband’s boss called to invite the two of you to dinner, you said, yes, thank you. Peg was baffled and angered by the negative responses she got. She rang Jake back. “I’m not dealing with that bunch,” she said. Jake convened a staff meeting. “Mrs. Jacobson and I are going to have a little affair Friday night, and we would like each of you to come with your spouse. We think you will enjoy it,” he said. “It is not a command performance, but I will take the name, rank, and serial number of any son of a bitch who doesn’t show up.” Attendance was 100 percent and Jake began to transform his staff. He sat them down with Mettler and Thiel and their people and, making no attempt to hide the peril that Thor was in, said the project was doomed unless both sides learned to cooperate. Mettler in turn promised all the support he could muster from the Ramo-Wooldridge group. “Jake, you tell us what you want done and we’ll do it,” he said. They went over all their launch procedures and tightened up. There were to be no more foolish gambles with time and alertness. Instruments were checked and double-checked. There were to be no more backward-flying DOVAP radars.

  Nearly three and a half months went by before they could get another Thor ready to launch, but this time, on August 30, 1957, Thor 104 flew downrange for ninety-six seconds before it blew apart. Jacobson’s shaking up of Douglas now began to pay off in dramatically shorter launch intervals. Thor 105 was readied a lot faster and did a lot better on September 20. It lofted up and away, the engine shutting down instantly as it was programmed to do at 137 seconds and releasing the empty warhead, which flew on for 1,495 miles before impacting into the Caribbean. Twenty-one days later they crossed the finish line. On October 11, 1957, Thor 106 lifted off in a ballistic missile’s storm of fire and thunder and tossed its warhead off down the full required 1,725-mile course along the islands of the West Indies chain to splash into the Caribbean off Venezuela.

  56.

  THOR VS. JUPITER

  The success Jacobson wrought came none too soon. That August, Eisenhower, as part of a renewed campaign to constrict the military budget, had instructed Wilson to end the absurd expense of two IRBM programs. Wilson had established a committee consisting of Schriever and Medaris, with Wilson’s special assistant for guided missiles, William Holaday, as chairman, to decide whether the nation’s IRBM was to be Thor or Jupiter.

  Eisenhower and Wilson were not naive men and it is difficult to believe they thought that either Schriever or Medaris would consent to the cancellation of his own missile. The committee appears to have been structured as it was so that Holaday could permit each of the contestants to argue his case, examine the test results at Canaveral, and then render judgment for one side or the other. Disagree the two contestants did. On September 25, 1957, Medaris sent Holaday a lengthy, point-by-point memorandum, thickened with nine attachments, which extolled Jupiter as the superior missile, its worth demonstrated by its testing record and guaranteed by superior rocket makers under Wernher von Braun. His recommendation was:

  The JUPITER be continued as the IRBM and,

  The THOR project be cancelled as expeditiously as possible.

  Schriever countered in his brief that Thor was the better choice for the country because it could be fielded faster than Jupiter. The prototype Jupiters were being built individually at the Redstone Arsenal. The final design of the missile would subsequently have to be farmed out to industry for production. (Medaris intended to use the Chrysler Corporation, which was manufacturing Redstone.) In contrast, because the test model Thors were being created by Douglas on production tooling, the Air Force had the ability to move right into full production and then deployment as soon as the problems common to any new missile were solved. Furthermore, Schriever argued, the Army was building only a missile, not an IRBM weapon system that could be fielded. The Jupiter project lacked provisions for ground support equipment, such as tanks for the LOX and RP-1, shelters to protect the missile from the weather, and other equipment necessary for deployment. By the time the Army got around to furnishing this equipment, more delay would ensue.

  Holaday, who submitted his report on October 8, 1957, after Jacobson had begun to rescue the test launches with Thor 105’s 1,495-mile flight on September 20, decided not to place himself in the middle of a nasty interservice row. He beat a bureaucrat’s retreat. He said that unless Thor showed marked improvement, “the spectacular success which has been achieved by the Jupiter test flights” might eventually force its choice. But he recommended that in the meantime the Defense Department “continue both programs until we have a better basis for resolving the various problem areas.”

  In his report he did, however, state “a firm requirement” that whichever missile might eventually be chosen must have the capacity for upgrading “to a 2,000 nautical mile [2,301 statute mile] range from the present design” of 1,500 nautical. Medaris claimed that while Jupiter could easily achieve 2,020 nautical miles (2,324 statute), Thor would never be able to fly more than 1,660 nautical (1,909 statute) because of its heavier reentry vehicle. Thor’s reentry vehicle, designated the Mark 2, weighed 3,500 pounds and was the same RV designed for Atlas. In the hustle to put Thor together, it had been adopted without any remodeling to size it down for the smaller rocket. It was a heat shield, or “heat sink,” type. Its nose consisted of a massive, conical shield of solid, machined copper, five eighths to three quarters of an inch thick and six feet in diameter. Behind the shield was a stainless steel compartment in which the one-megaton hydrogen bomb was to ride. The shield alone weighed more than a thousand pounds. As this blunt nose RV descended back into the atmosphere, the shield absorbed the extreme heat generated by the friction of the air and protected the bomb behind it. Because of its shape and the size of the shield, it was also aimed to enter the atmosphere at a shallow angle, thereby slowing itself down as it descended and reducing heat that way as well.

  Jupiter’s reentry vehicle, which weighed 3,000 pounds, was the one technological advance the Army missile had over Thor. It was an ablative type, the first of its kind to be mounted on an American ballistic missile and a tribute to the knowledge gleaned from experience by von Braun’s team. The word, originally a grammatical term for nouns or pronouns indicating separation, later also denoted the removal of tissue by a surgeon, the melting of ice or snow, typically from a glacier, or the erosion of rock by wind action. In this age of guided missiles coming into being, “ablative” referred to a reentry vehicle coated with a compound of plastic and other heat-absorbing elements. As the RV plunged back into the atmosphere and friction built up from the density of the air, the coating was enveloped by the red-hot abrasion and progressively burned away, thereby diverting the heat that would otherwise destroy the reentry vehicle and the hydrogen bomb inside it. Usually conical-shaped, or rounded like the nose of a torpedo (Jupiter’s was conical, if much smaller in diameter than Thor’s), an ablative RV had distinct advantages. It descended at a steep angle and retained its speed, making it more accurate because it was less subject to deflection from its course by the winds of the upper atmosphere. For this reason, an ablative RV was later adapted for Atlas. In the case of Thor and Jupiter, any minor difference in accuracy was largely academic, as both were first-generation area-destroying weapons referred to as “city busters” in the language of nuclear weaponry.

  Thor was stuck with its 3,500-pound reentry vehicle, Medaris contended. There was no practical way to shave off the 500 pounds necessary for the missile to reach the required 2,000 nautical mile range. “This would mean a complete nose cone redesign with attendant high cost and extensive re-test programs,” he wrote. What he did not calculate was that an IRBM, flying a far s
horter distance than an ICBM, also flew at considerably less than an ICBM’s speed, about 10,000 miles per hour. The higher the speed, the greater the heat generated on reentry. Thus the warhead on Thor did not need anything approaching the heat protection afforded by the copper heat shield designed for the Atlas, which was six feet in diameter.

  Jacobson, because of his knowledge of guided missiles, understood this. When Schriever, who was in Washington at the time, passed the word to Jake that he had to fly Thor 2,000 nautical miles, Jacobson responded, “Hell, that’s easy.” He instructed Mettler to trim hundreds of pounds (later he could not recall the precise figure) off both the heat shield and the bomb compartment behind it. When the engine of Thor 107 was ignited on October 24, 1957, the rocket flew flawlessly on past the 1,725-mile mark and over the Windward Islands, the last of the West Indies, to plunge into the Atlantic Ocean 3,043 miles from its launching pad on Cape Canaveral. The issue was never raised again. For some reason, Neil McElroy, the Procter & Gamble executive who succeeded Wilson as secretary of defense that October, never enforced Holaday’s requirement to extend the reach to 2,000 nautical miles. The 1,500-nautical mile range was retained. Jake flew the subsequent Thors with the original Atlas heat sink reentry vehicle. There was no necessity to fashion a lighter one. Holaday’s recommendation to wait and see turned into permanent hesitation. The Army and Air Force went on duplicating money and effort as each continued to build its own IRBM. Major General John Medaris had lost his power play. Bennie Schriever’s ICBM program was safe.

  57.

  SPUTNIK

  Permitting the Air Force and the Army the extravagance of duplicating IRBMs became the least of Eisenhower’s concerns after Sputnik, the Soviet surprise of October 4, 1957. Near the end of August, the Russians announced that they had flight-tested an ICBM. Sergei Korolev’s monster R-7 rocket, the Semyorka, had flown a 4,000-mile course from its launching pad at the new Soviet test center at Baikonur, also known as Tyuratam, in Kazakhstan in Central Asia all the way across Siberia to the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Bering Sea. The test was not perfect. The reentry vehicle disintegrated about six miles above the earth. No matter: the length of the flight was what counted. The Semyorka (designated the SS-6 Sapwood by NATO intelligence officers) was in reality the precursor of a Soviet ICBM. Designed to carry a super-size 5.4-ton fission, or atomic, pay-load because the Soviet Union did not explode its first full-fledged hydrogen bomb until November 1955, let alone begin the process of downsizing one for an ICBM warhead, the rocket was so huge it weighed twenty-three metric tons with its tanks empty, meaning that it could be moved only by rail. The steps necessary to prepare it for flight and fuel it with LOX and kerosene took twenty hours, versus the fifteen minutes for which the Atlas was being designed. The Soviets were to deploy only four Semyorkas at another new launch center readied in 1959, Plesetsk, south of Arkhangelsk (Archangel) in the far north of western Russia. Khrushchev’s son Sergei remembered that his father also recoiled at the cost, about half a billion rubles per R-7 site. “What will we do, we’ll be without pants,” Khrushchev complained to Korolev.