A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  Major Prentice “Pete” Peabody used his imagination. A thoughtful man, Peabody had earned his B.S. in aeronautical engineering at Georgia Tech in 1936, when it was the only school in the South with a program in the subject. He instrumented prospective ablative warheads for Atlas (they looked like giant condoms, a long, tubular body extending back from a rounded nose), and put them on stands behind rocket engines Rocketdyne was testing. No one knew if the flame of a rocket generated the same heat a warhead would on reentry, but it was a reasonable comparison. In this fashion, Peabody worked out the amount and composition of coating required to keep the heat on the inside of the warhead within an acceptable limit for the hydrogen bomb. He had already tested the copper heat shield of the original Atlas RV in the same way. Ironically, years later Peabody was awarded a Legion of Merit for leading a team that redesigned the X-17 and gave it enough velocity to mimic the reentry of warheads for the Navy’s submarine-launched ballistic missiles, Polaris and then Poseidon.

  Launching of the D Series went much better during the second half of 1959 and that September the initial battery of three Atlas D missiles, manned by SAC crews, was declared operational at Vandenberg. Although the state of testing did not yet fully justify deployment, there was no choice but to go ahead.

  65.

  WHOSE MISSILE GAP?

  Aterrifying fairy tale called “the missile gap,” which had the Soviets surging ahead of the United States in ICBM capability, was roiling Washington. The controversy was another example of the chronic American habit during the Cold War, partly from genuine fear but usually inspired as well by political and institutional motives, of seriously overestimating Soviet military power and technological capabilities. Khrushchev, whose solution to the carefully disguised military inferiority of the Soviet Union vis-à-vis the United States was boasting and bluff, had helped to foster it. In August 1957, approximately two months before the shock of Sputnik, he announced that Russia had ICBMs able to reach “any part of the globe.” In November of the following year Moscow claimed to have begun “serial production” of ICBMs. That December of 1958, Khrushchev told Senator and future Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Democrat of Minnesota, who was on a visit to Russia, that the Soviets had a new rocket but no place to test it because it flew 9,000 miles. He asked Humphrey what his hometown was and then walked over to a map of the United States and drew a circle around Minneapolis. “That’s so I don’t forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly,” Khrushchev said. On another occasion, he bragged that in Russia “missiles were being turned out like sausages from a machine.”

  The Soviet leader had a receptive audience in the United States for these lies. Aroused by Sputnik, Democratic Party leaders accepted the purported missile gap as real and accused the administration of allowing the United States to lapse into a position of strategic inferiority. One of those crying out the loudest was the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, who was to make the missile gap one of the central issues in his victorious presidential campaign of 1960. Influential fearmongers like Paul Nitze and chronic alarmists in the press like the Alsop brothers, Joseph and Stewart, who shared a syndicated column, added to the presumed state of peril. Nor were the military services averse to exploiting the situation in order to force an increase in the Pentagon budget. The worst offender was the Air Force’s assistant chief of staff for intelligence, Major General James Walsh. In November 1959, he predicted that the Soviets would have 50 ICBMs by mid-1960 and “an operational ICBM force of about 250 (185 on launcher) by mid-1961, 500 (385 on launcher) by mid-1962, and 800 (640 on launcher) by mid-1963.” Eisenhower, who knew Khrushchev was lying from the U-2 photography and other intelligence, which, for security reasons, he refused to share with his opposition, attempted reassurance but was simply not believed. (To his credit, Schriever did not join in fostering the scare, although he naturally benefited from the loosening of the budget strings.)

  The truth was that by 1959 there was a missile gap. The gap was widening steadily in favor of the United States, not the Soviet Union. Soviet rocket engineers like Sergei Korolev had been ahead through the mid-1950s with soundly constructed medium-and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. After Bennie Schriever and the Schoolhouse Gang got going in the summer of 1954, however, the key in the ignition had been turned and the motor started to reverse positions in the race once it reached the level of an ICBM. With the assurance of a 1,500-pound hydrogen bomb for the warhead by the time the missile was ready, Schriever and company could commence by designing a practical ICBM. They were not forced, as Korolev had been because the Soviet Union was three years later than the United States in acquiring the hydrogen bomb, to begin by designing a behemoth rocket capable of carrying a 5.4-ton fission, or atomic, warhead, and thus to produce a totally impractical ICBM. By mid-1960, when the Air Force’s intelligence chief predicted that the Soviet Union would have fifty ICBMs, it had emplaced the only four of Korolev’s R-7 proto-ICBMs it was ever to deploy at Plesetsk, 600 miles north of Moscow. Khrushchev was to admit years later that the R-7 had “represented only a symbolic counterthreat to the United States.”

  There were Soviet ICBMs comparable to the Atlas and its alternative, Titan, on the way in 1959, but they were still in the development stage. Korolev designed one called the R-9, first flight-tested in 1961. It did not find favor with the Soviet military and was never produced in substantial numbers. The missile that was to become the standard Soviet ICBM for much of the 1960s, the R-16, was created by Mikhail Yangel, Korolev’s principal rival as a rocket designer. Its initial flight test on October 24, 1960, turned into the worst disaster in the history of rocketry. Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, the commander of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, came to supervise the launch. He was a career artillery officer, an impatient, bullheaded man who actually knew little about rockets. When there was a last-minute glitch, he refused to allow the launch crew to drain the fuel from the rocket as a safety precaution while making necessary fixes. One of the fuel’s components was nitric acid, flammable and toxic, inflicting severe burns on contact with the skin. A technician accidentally ignited the engines and the rocket burst apart in a mammoth fireball, sloshing burning fuel all over the pad and the surrounding area.

  A camera set up to record the launch instead recorded a horror movie of human torches, including Nedelin, futilely attempting to escape. Secrecy was clamped over the catastrophe and the exact number of victims is unclear. The toll of those incinerated was apparently somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred. A Red Army newspaper reported in 1990, the year before the Soviet Union collapsed, that 156 perished. Nedelin’s death was publicly attributed to a plane crash and a coffin supposedly containing his remains was buried with honors in the Kremlin wall. William Taubman, the Amherst College scholar whose splendid biography of Khrushchev won him a Pulitzer Prize, says there was nothing left to put in a coffin. All that remained of Nedelin, he writes, was “a marshal’s shoulder strap and half-melted keys to his office safe.” The calamity did not stop test launches of the R-16 and the ICBM was deployed in 1962. The Soviets were, however, still having trouble with the weapon in October 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred and Khrushchev had a total of twenty operational ICBMs to the 160 Kennedy possessed. Preparations to fire the R-16 continued to require several hours rather than the thirty minutes Yangel had posited and that was eventually achieved. “Before we get it ready to launch,” Kirill Moskalenko, a ranking Red Army marshal and friend of Khrushchev from Second World War days, warned in the midst of the crisis, “there won’t even be a wet spot left of any of us.”

  66.

  A VICTORY DESPITE THE BUGS

  There was a hiatus of a year after that first symbolic deployment of Atlas D missiles at Vandenberg in September 1959, during which the test-launching continued at Cape Canaveral on the more advanced E and F Series models. They were equipped with an inertial guidance system, again designed by Charles Stark Draper of MIT, that was self-contained
and immune to interference. The long pause was not voluntary. The same haste in deployment that had caused such havoc with Thor was now wreaking its pain on the Atlas program. The SAC launch crews in training at Vandenberg were having a difficult time learning how to handle the Atlas’s complex LOX and RP-1 fueling system. One rocket blew up during fueling exercises there. No one was hurt, apparently because, in contrast to the R-16 incident in the Soviet Union, safety precautions were followed, but there was extensive damage to the pad and other launch facilities. Major Benjamin Bellis, the formidable young engineer who had worked a cure for Thor, was brought back to do the same for Atlas. “Mr. Configuration Control,” as the wags on Schriever’s staff referred to him, formed another committee, the Atlas Configuration Control Board, and once more, naturally, designated himself its chairman. He discovered maddening confusion between missile parts being turned out by Convair’s assembly line and those altered on site by the engineers to get the weapons to fly. There was no procedure to note down the changes in order to replicate them in missiles still being manufactured or completed and awaiting launch. When an Atlas functioned properly, “we didn’t have a record of how we made it successful,” Bellis recalled. “So we were having random success, the worst thing that can happen to you because you know you got it right but you can’t repeat it. It drives you wild.”

  To halt the chaos and stop the Convair and Ramo-Wooldridge engineers from tinkering, he had seals put on the doors of the missile compartments and on the electronic cabinets of the launch equipment. In a repeat of the decree he had issued for Thor, no one was allowed to make a single change until it had been cleared by the board and incorporated into the manufacturing system and the instruction manuals. Yet these complicated first-generation ICBMs had so many bugs in them that attempting to eliminate their flaws in a hurry was a truly challenging task. On September 2, 1960, at the end of the one-year pause, a second deployment, a squadron of six Atlas D models, was declared operational at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. Then there was another six-month pause while another round of fixes took place. At the beginning of March 1961 the deployments resumed with the installation of a second squadron, this time of nine D model Atlases, at Warren, and then at the end of the month a third squadron of nine at Offutt Air Force Base, SAC headquarters, in Nebraska. Troubles, however, were not at an end. That June a $20 million retrofit program was started to try to bring average reliability to between 50 and 75 percent. Schriever conceded to staff members of the Senate’s Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee the same month that several more years of testing would be required before the missiles achieved an 80 percent reliability rate. Nonetheless, after a third halt of nearly six months, the deployments resumed in the fall of 1961 when three nine-missile squadrons of the more advanced E models went operational at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington State, Forbes in Kansas, and again at Warren.

  Once more, there was a halt for the better part of a year while everything possible was done to ready six twelve-missile squadrons of the last and most sophisticated of the Atlas series, the F models, the first to be emplaced in the protective underground silos that would house ICBMs of the future. With Schriever’s organization, assisted by the Army Corps of Engineers, supervising construction of the silos and turning silos and missiles over to SAC to operate, the six deployments unfolded one after another through the fall of 1962—Schilling Air Force Base in Kansas, Lincoln in Nebraska, Altus in Oklahoma, Dyess in Texas, Walker in New Mexico, and Plattsburgh in northernmost New York State. Except for Plattsburgh, the sites were all in the middle and western half of the continent, chosen for a trajectory that would take the missiles over the northern Pacific, Canada, Alaska, and the Arctic. By December 20, 1962, when the twelve F model missiles became operational at Plattsburgh, the force was complete. A total of 132 Atlas ICBMs had been arrayed against the Soviet Union.

  While all of this was happening, Titan, which had begun its existence as a fallback to Atlas, had gone on to become a second ICBM. It went through the same roller-coaster testing pattern at Cape Canaveral in 1959 and 1960, successful flights ultimately eclipsing failures. Although still a first-generation liquid-fueled rocket like Atlas, Titan was taller, at ninety feet, and a more sophisticated ICBM with two stages. A pair of 150,000-pound-thrust booster engines, produced by Aerojet General, powered the rocket through the first stage of flight until, as their flames died and they fell away, an 80,000-pound sustainer engine ignited in the air and propelled the rocket to near-warhead-release speed, when four vernier engines took over for the final burst.

  The two-stage technique enabled Titan to lift a much heavier warhead and it was soon designated Titan I, as a second version, Titan II, was on the drawing boards. Titan II would unleash a warhead containing a hydrogen bomb of a terrifying nine megatons. On April 18, 1962, deployment began for six squadrons of nine Titan I missiles each at Air Force bases in California, Colorado, Idaho, South Dakota, and Washington State. The Titans were housed, as the Atlas Fs were, in underground concrete silos. By September 28, 1962, when the last of the six squadrons was declared operational, the Soviet Union was looking at another fifty-four American ICBMs.

  How many of these Titan and Atlas missiles would fly if doomsday arrived and the command to launch was given, no one really knew. But Nikita Khrushchev and the other leaders of the Soviet Union could not afford to bet on percentages of reliability. All they could do was to count missiles. It was nearly nine years since, in March 1953, the vision of an ICBM had lit Bennie Schriever’s mind while he listened to John von Neumann and Edward Teller brief the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board meeting at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. The goal of fielding the first generation of intercontinental rockets had just been achieved. As Schriever was to say years later to a reunion of those who had participated in the race against the Soviets: “We beat them to the draw.” And the consummation of the victory, the fielding of the ultimate in ICBMs to emerge from the insight of Schriever and the creative genius of Edward Hall, had begun. The new missile was called Minuteman.

  67.

  MINUTEMAN: ED HALL’S TRIUMPH

  When Schriever had relieved Hall as program director for Thor in the summer of 1957 after that missile’s third failure and Hall’s alienation of his co-workers, he had shrewdly avoided firing Hall from his staff and thereby losing his unique talents. Hall, in anger at his dismissal, had requested a transfer out of WDD. Schriever had refused. Instead, he had set Hall to work creating a second-generation ICBM. As all earlier liquid-fueled rockets had been descendants, in one form or another, of the German V-2, so this new guided missile was to be the progenitor of all rockets to follow. Hall’s rocket was to be fueled by a solid substance rather than by RP-1 kerosene and the dangerous and highly volatile liquid oxygen that powered the first generation. If a solid-fueled ICBM could be devised, it would have a number of advantages over its liquid-fueled predecessors. It would be much smaller and far simpler in construction, thus making it more reliable and affordable for the United States to produce in many hundreds. It could be stored in full readiness for lengthy periods of time. And most important, it could be fired off on its journey through space in a minute or less.

  Ed Hall had long had a yen to build a solid-fuel ICBM. Apparently understanding that this missile was the work for which he would be remembered, once over his pique about Thor, he dedicated himself to his task with a ferocious zeal. He had formidable obstacles to overcome. To begin with, he had to devise a solid fuel that would develop enough thrust, called “specific impulse” in the rocket business, to propel a warhead 6,330 miles. Hall had already dabbled in solid-fuel rocket work. At the beginning of the 1950s, he and his associates at the Wright-Patterson laboratories had improved on the small solid-fuel rockets Theodore von Kármán and his colleagues at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech had invented during the Second World War to give aircraft a quick extra lift during takeoff. Hall’s group had created a solid fuel potent enough to assist in getting a
fully loaded B-47 aloft, but it did not approach what he needed now. He had also made considerable progress during a research study of solid-fuel engines Schriever had authorized at WDD in 1955 and 1956, but again a formula for the right fuel had eluded him.

  The Navy, anxious to get into the strategic rocket business, had by 1957 also abandoned the batty idea of launching a Jupiter missile from the deck of a ship, a spectacular way to burn and sink the vessel if the liquid-fueled rocket malfunctioned, and was working up a solid fuel, submarine-launched missile that became Polaris. While the Navy was willing to swap ideas, its research was of little assistance to Hall. Polaris was to be an IRBM with a 1,380-mile range. Hall was searching for a solid fuel with a lot more thrust than Polaris would require. He selected the three firms he considered most promising, Thiokol Chemical Corporation, Aerojet General, and Hercules Powder Company, and began experimenting. Hall and the team working under him finally hit on a formula that provided the necessary power. It was a lot more exotic than liquid oxygen and kerosene. They used a chemical called ammonium perchlorate to provide oxygen for the rocket’s flame, and as fuel aluminum additives and a combination with a long name, polybutadiene-acrylic acid. The whole propellant was compounded together and encased in a rubberlike wrapper that also burned.

  One of the persistent problems in creating solid-fuel rockets was getting the fuel to consume itself evenly from the center to the outside casing of the engine, but without burning a hole through the casing and thereby destroying the integrity of the engine and causing an explosion. Ideas, particularly technological breakthroughs, have a way of traveling. In this instance, the Rocket Propulsion Department of Britain’s Ministry of Technology had discovered a solution earlier in the 1950s while experimenting with a solid-fueled antiaircraft rocket. If a star-shaped cut was made all the way down through the middle of the solid fuel, or the same thing was achieved by casting the fuel in a mold with a star shape at its center, then enough burning surface was obtained so that the propellant burned evenly from the center outward, consuming itself in the process and leaving the engine casing intact. The British never went beyond the laboratory with the technique because the missile was canceled. Thiokol was then a small company in Huntsville, Alabama, near the Redstone Arsenal. When the Air Force asked Thiokol to build a solid-fuel rocket of modest size to provide a preliminary boost for a jet-powered cruise missile of 700-mile range called the Mace, Thiokol helped itself to the British idea. The star-shaped cut turned out to be equally applicable to Hall’s far more powerful solid-fuel engine.