A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  The next hurdle was how to achieve instant shutdown of the engine, that absolute necessity for accuracy in a ballistic missile. This was not difficult with liquid fuels because the flow could just be cut off. But once a block of solid fuel had been set alight and was driving a rocket at thousands of miles an hour, how was one to extinguish it in flight? Some of the Ramo-Wooldridge engineers thought the problem insoluble. Hall came up with an elegantly simple answer. He designed an engine casing with shutdown ports. When the missile’s control system flung these open with a signal, the pressure inside was reduced so swiftly that the propellant was snuffed out. Steering was to be achieved with equal simplicity, by swiveling the engine nozzles. Hall designated his creation, which had not yet been given its permanent name, Weapon System Q. He chose Q because he discovered that the majority of the remaining letters of the alphabet had already been co-opted by other departments, and projects of WDD and Q had an element of mystery and surprise for him. It called to his mind the Q-ships, merchantmen with disguised depth charge mounts and false sides that hid cannon, which the British navy had employed during the First and Second World Wars to lure and destroy German submarines. He believed that his new weapon and the plan he had conceived to employ it would also surprise.

  By January 1958, he was ready to unveil it. He telephoned Schriever’s deputy, Terry Terhune, and said that he needed several hours of Terhune’s time to brief him. Colonel Terhune told Hall to come to his office right away and instructed his secretary to cancel his appointments. Hall held forth for two to three hours. He had a blueprint of the proposed new rocket and went step by step through its advantages over its liquid-fueled predecessors, as well as his plan on how to deploy it. Terhune was so impressed that he led Hall over to Schriever’s office and said that he had to hear Hall immediately. Schriever in turn canceled his appointments and Terhune sat by while Hall launched into another two-to-three-hour briefing session. As soon as Hall was done, Bennie picked up the phone and called Lieutenant General Donald Putt, currently deputy chief of staff, development, at the Pentagon. He informed Putt that they wanted to come to Washington around the end of the month to brief him. He also asked Putt to set up briefings with the Air Force Council and with James Douglas, Jr., the new secretary of the Air Force, who had replaced Donald Quarles the previous May. In the meantime, Hall was to prepare charts and any other aids necessary for a full-scale presentation.

  As Schriever and Terhune both had their families living in Santa Monica, they rode to and from work together each morning and evening when Schriever was not in Washington or at Canaveral. Terhune welcomed the custom as an opportunity to alert the boss to forthcoming problems, have him read over a proposal on which Terhune wanted his opinion, or just review the events of the day. Because Schriever was away so much and trusted Terhune completely, he had become, in effect, supervisor of the California end of their endeavor. With the Pentagon briefings in prospect, they thought it was time to give Q a catchier name, one that might help to sell the missile. Hall and others had already proposed three alternatives: Sentry, Sentinel, or Minuteman. Schriever and Terhune decided that the last most aptly caught the essence of the new rocket and so Minuteman went to Washington.

  As matters turned out, the Pentagon briefings were postponed until the beginning of February. The first crucial briefing was on February 6, 1958, before the Air Force Council. Curtis LeMay was now vice chief and thus its chairman. They did not expect trouble from Thomas White, who had become chief of staff in July 1957 when Nathan Twining had moved up to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs, because White had been so supportive of the ICBM program from the outset. LeMay had remained unremittingly hostile to Atlas and Titan. “These things will never be operational, so you can depend on them, in my lifetime,” he had predicted to Jerome Wiesner, the Tea Pot Committee veteran. Nevertheless, Schriever had felt it his duty, as the ICBMs would ultimately be turned over to SAC, to keep LeMay informed. He had always been rewarded with scorn. The Cigar had sat silently through one briefing on Atlas. At the end he had asked, “What is the biggest warhead you can put on that missile?” One megaton, he was told. “When you can put something on that missile bigger than a fucking firecracker, come and see me,” LeMay replied.

  If he reacted in the same fashion to Minuteman, they would have a fight on their hands, because, while White would, in the end, probably rule in their favor, he would be reluctant to just brush aside his subordinate’s opinion. Schriever introduced Hall in a couple of sentences and then turned the briefing platform over to him and sat down. Terhune remembered the self-confidence with which Hall spoke and the skill with which he employed his blueprints and charts to illustrate his points.

  Solid fueling had enabled Hall to shrink an ICBM. The Minuteman he described would be a small boy compared to an Atlas or a Titan. It would weigh, including its solid propellant, about 65,000 pounds at liftoff, compared to 243,000 pounds for Atlas, and would stand approximately fifty-five feet tall, in contrast to ninety feet for Titan. Yet he had sacrificed none of the reach and potency of the ICBM weapon. His rocket was a three-stage affair, each stage smaller and lighter than the last. Stage I, at 50,100 pounds, would provide liftoff and bring the rocket to initial velocity. As it shut down and fell away, the engine of Stage II would kick in and increase speed. Then as it too went silent and dropped off, the engine of Stage III, which weighed only 5,800 pounds, including the solid fuel, the missile’s guidance system, and the ablative-type reentry vehicle at the nose with a one-megaton hydrogen bomb inside, would ignite and propel the rocket to terminal velocity for release of the warhead. Nor would there be any scrimping in range. Minuteman would throw its warhead the same 6,330 miles as Atlas and Titan with a CEP, circular error probable, of little more than a mile.

  There was a proviso on warhead yield, Hall said. The nuclear weapons designers would have to size a one-megaton bomb down to 500 pounds. Given the rapidity with which the art of downsizing hydrogen weapons was progressing, Hall said, he did not doubt that this could be done by the time the first Minutemen began to flow to an operational squadron. Schriever and Terhune agreed. If the Air Force was willing to settle for a half-megaton warhead of 350 pounds, the Minuteman’s range could be extended to a record 7,480 miles. (The nuclear weaponsmiths were indeed displaying an astonishing aptitude for miniaturizing their hellish contrivances. When deployed, Atlas and Titan I would both carry thermonuclear warheads yielding four times the one megaton Schriever had counted sufficient at the outset back in 1953, with no appreciable gain in weight beyond the 1,500-pound limit. The first 150 Minutemen were to be fitted with a one-megaton warhead and those that followed with a higher-yield bomb of 1.2 megatons.)

  Hall’s scheme for deploying Minuteman was as radical as the weapon itself. His design, he explained, was intended to deter the Soviets from ever resorting to a surprise nuclear attack on the United States. His plan was to build 1,616 Minutemen (the total included spares) by the end of calendar year 1965 and to deploy them in “missile fields” of one hundred or so. The rockets would be dispersed three miles apart, every one in an underground silo sufficiently hardened with concrete and steel so that if the Soviets hit the field with a five-megaton warhead, only one rocket would be lost. The silo covers would then slide open and the remaining Minutemen would be launched right out of the silos in retaliation. Because of their solid fuel, the rockets could be stored in the silos indefinitely. They would be checked constantly to be certain that every one was in working order and that the inertial guidance systems, internal to the missiles and therefore unjammable, were always up and running. If a malfunction was found, the missile would be removed from its silo and replaced by a spare until it could be repaired. Everything would be automated. Unlike the liquid-fueled ICBMs, which had to be launched individually after fifteen minutes of fueling, two or more remote control centers, also dispersed for survival, could fire individual Minutemen or salvo fifty at once, each with the coordinates of a different Soviet city cranked into its in
ertial guidance. The Russians would, of course, learn of the missile fields and the virtually instantaneous launch capability of Minuteman and draw the appropriate conclusion.

  LeMay had written Twining back in November 1955 that he would consider the ICBM “the ultimate weapon” worthy of inclusion in SAC’s inventory when one could be created “with a capability of instantaneous launch and with acceptable reliability, accuracy, and yield.” The conditions were technological pie in the sky at that time, an attempted stalling tactic, because LeMay knew that the technology of nearly instantaneous launch was years away, if ever, and at this moment in 1958 he continued to regard the bomber as the best of weapons. But he also turned out now to be as good as his word on what he required in an ICBM. Terhune remembered that after a short discussion at the end of Hall’s briefing, LeMay swung around to the three-star deputy chiefs of staff sitting in the rows behind him and asked: “Do you agree it’s a go?” They all did. Hall got the impression that what appealed most to LeMay was the massiveness of the scheme. The thought of hundreds and hundreds of rockets roaring out of silos was LeMay’s vision of how to frighten the Russians and then to reduce the Soviet Union to cinders if it did come to nuclear war.

  The briefing for Air Force Secretary Douglas was also a go, and on the morning of February 8, 1958, they faced the last hurdle: a briefing for Wilson’s successor, Neil McElroy. LeMay came as well as Douglas and, to Hall’s surprise, LeMay weighed in with comments underscoring Hall’s briefing points. McElroy gave his assent. The meeting ended, Hall recalled, with the secretary turning to him and saying: “Now get out of here and go back to work.” After they had returned to California, Terhune found himself astonished at what they had accomplished. They had been in Washington only a few days and had won approval for what would probably be the biggest rocket program the Air Force would ever undertake. “That was a world’s record as far as I was concerned,” he reflected years later. Schriever had Hall draw up a detailed development program and by the end of February they had formal approval and start-up funds of $25.9 million. Hall forged ahead toward a final design. By the latter half of July 1958, he had reached the point where the contractors who would build the missile had been selected.

  68.

  “YOU COULDN’T KEEP HIM IN THAT JOB”

  Then, that August, Schriever broke Ed Hall’s heart by taking Minuteman away from him. The project was passing from the conception to the testing and production stage and it was impossible to leave him in charge. The task of managing a program on the huge scale looming ahead for Minuteman was beyond his gifts and prohibited by his personality. As he had with Thor, he would alienate too many people and make a hash of things. “We knew from our previous experience with him,” Terhune, who admired Hall’s fertile mind and aggressiveness, recalled, “that you couldn’t keep him in that job.” As Schriever put it in his comment as indorsing officer on Hall’s last efficiency report under his command: “Col. Hall’s inability to work harmoniously with persons with whom he disagrees seriously impairs his competence in the management area.” Even Sidney Greene, Hall’s friend now working for Jacobson, who had put his own future in peril back at the Wright-Patterson laboratories by shifting the $2 million to Hall for his pioneeering venture to devise the engine that would power Atlas and Thor, felt that Schriever had acted responsibly.

  Hall, now intensely embittered toward Bennie, clearly could not remain in Los Angeles. He received orders at the end of August transferring him to Paris to start a project for a new solid-fueled intermediate-range ballistic missile that would be jointly produced by the NATO countries. Despite intra-Allied bickering and rivalry, he succeeded in getting the program started. His efforts eventually saw fulfillment in a French IRBM called the Diamant, but Ed Hall could not see much of a future for himself in the U.S. Air Force. Although he had been promoted to full colonel in February 1957, he was obviously not going to receive a star nor was he likely to get another compelling assignment. Twenty years of service, the minimum for retirement, would come due for him in the fall of 1959. He returned to the United States to exchange his Air Force blue for a business suit that October 31, accepting a job offer as an engineer and assistant to the chief scientist of the United Aircraft Corporation in East Hartford, Connecticut. Schriever saw to it that his achievement was recognized. In January 1960, Hall flew out to Los Angeles for a ceremony to award him his second Legion of Merit. It capped the first he had received as a first lieutenant in England in 1943 for putting B-17s back into the air against Hitler’s Third Reich by inventing special tools to hasten repair of flak-damaged fuselages. Terhune pinned on the medal with an oak leaf cluster, the symbol of a second award. Hall would have spurned it from Schriever.

  Bennie put one of his stalwarts from the Schoolhouse Gang, Colonel Otto Glasser, an engineer and nuclear weapons specialist who had been the original program director for Atlas, in charge of Minuteman until the right officer could be found to guide it to fulfillment. (Glasser was yet another of Schriever’s crew to go on to win the three stars of a lieutenant general before his career was over.) Terhune and Jacobson encountered the man they needed during a trip to England in 1959 to assess the deployment of Thor. He was a straight-as-a-pencil young colonel named Samuel Phillips, director of matériel for SAC’s 7th Air Division in Britain, temporarily assigned to help ready Thor installations for turn over to the RAF. He had participated in writing the Thor basing agreement with the British and was to receive a Legion of Merit for his contribution. They were so impressed with him that they looked up his background on return to Los Angeles. Phillips had graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1942 with a degree in electrical engineering and a Regular Army commission he had gained in a special ROTC competition. After flight training, he had done two tours as a fighter pilot in Europe, and twice been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery, along with eight Air Medals and a Croix de Guerre from de Gaulle’s Free French. After the war, he had gone back to school for a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, focusing on electronics, and then joined the laboratories at Wright-Patterson for a gamut of assignments, including project officer on the B-52. He arrived in Los Angeles in August 1959 as the new program director for Minuteman and proved to be a superlative manager of large-scale enterprises. He also had plenty of help. Schriever had Ramo assign Mettler to head the Ramo-Wooldridge team that worked with him.

  By January 1961, when the time was approaching for the initial test firing at Canaveral, Phillips made up his mind to do something unprecedented for an opening launch. They would test the entire rocket—all three stages, the inertial guidance, a dummy warhead inside the ablative reentry vehicle—everything that would be on a deployed Minuteman except a real hydrogen bomb. General White had asked Schriever to trim a year off the deployment time and to field the first Minutemen in the fall of 1962, rather than in 1963 as earlier anticipated. There was no time to meet that deadline and follow the normal procedure of successive flight tests for individual components of the rocket. And so Phillips, who had confidence in the missile, decided on a gamble. He would risk what is called in the rocket trade an “all up” launch, never before attempted on a first try. Schriever agreed to the gamble, because there was no choice if they were to meet White’s wishes, but not without considerable trepidation. If the missile failed, it was going to be a well-publicized fiasco. With Air Force permission about 150 reporters and television cameramen assembled at Canaveral on the morning of Wednesday, February 1, 1961, a fine clear day in Florida, to cover the event.

  Ed Hall’s rocket proved itself worthy of Phillips’s confidence. At 11:00 A.M. the first Minuteman to fly lifted from its pad and rose, accelerating ever faster. At 65,000 feet the streak of flame and a long column of white smoke from the first-stage booster engine could still be seen, the missile now hurtling along at thousands of miles an hour. The countdown announcer in the blockhouse was calling off the telemetry readings the instruments in the missile were transmitting bac
k:

  “First stage burnout.

  “Second stage ignition.

  “Second stage burnout.

  “Third stage ignition.”

  The range safety officer in the separate Central Control bunker announced over the circuit that his instruments showed the guidance system had released the warhead on a bull’s-eye course for the center of the ring of hydrophones off Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. At that moment, a phone in the blockhouse rang. It was Schriever, who had been listening to all of this over a special communications hookup, calling from Washington to congratulate Phillips. The next day in East Hartford, Ed Hall received a telegram from Major John Hinds, a public affairs officer with the Ballistic Missile Division who had taken a particular interest in Minuteman from the time Hall’s work had become general knowledge within the command. “Congratulations on fathering the most significant single missile and space event of the decade,” the telegram said. “I thought of you as your brain child roared to life at Cape Canaveral.” Phillips’s reward was the star of a brigadier, the youngest general in the armed forces at forty years of age. He was subsequently loaned to NASA to run the Apollo program, which put astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969, and then took on a series of senior Air Force commands, including the Space and Missile Systems Organization in Los Angeles, a later successor to Schriever’s original WDD, which were to bring him the four stars of a full general.