An Untaken Road. Steven A. Pomeroy
operational complexity and provided the enemy an opportunity to spoof the signal and force the Matador off target. Matador and its ilk had aircraft-like sizes and characteristics, but they lacked the airplane’s tactical flexibility. Once airborne, it could not be re-tasked to strike another target.24
A decade earlier, the German military had experienced the same problems with mobile V-2 ballistic missiles. Soldiers had to secure the launch site, assemble the launch pad, erect and fuel the rocket, connect the command and control system, and conduct a full countdown, all the while hiding from enemy attack. One trailer-mounted missile required thirty support vehicles, including a transportation trailer, launch platform, propellant vehicles, and a command and control truck. Small by ICBM standards, a fueled V-2 with its warhead weighed 28,373 pounds, was forty-five feet long, and was twelve feet wide at its base. From arrival at an unprepared site, V-2 troops required four to six hours to launch it.25
Thus until 1954 the Air Force pursued intercontinental cruise missiles instead of ICBMs. The service nominally funded ballistic missile research, but its two long-range cruise missiles, Snark and Navaho, starved ballistic missiles. The budget displayed Air Force priorities. Between 1951 and 1954, Snark received $226 million and Navaho $248 million, whereas the Atlas ICBM received $26.2 million, of which $18.8 million was in fiscal year 1954 funds. Translated into 2013 dollars as a relative share of the gross domestic product, Snark received $9.7 billion, Navaho $10.7 billion, and Atlas $1.13 billion.26 A billion 2013 dollars for Atlas sounds impressive, but considering the ballistic missile’s technological reverse salients (historian Thomas P. Hughes’ term for problems retarding technical advances), it was woefully underfunded.27 Despite their winged heritage, Snark and Navaho’s $20 billion failed to deliver unmanned weapon systems capable of intercontinental cruising through defended airspace. Nonetheless, in an exercise of technological transfer, they contributed various components, including rocket engine and guidance technologies, to later missile programs. In 1958, a Navaho guidance set helped the submarine USS Nautilus cruise the Stars and Stripes under the North Pole.28 Despite this, Navaho and Snark often crashed into waters surrounding their test sites. Program managers suffered jests including “Snark-infested waters” and “never go, Navaho.”29 The systems largely failed, although Snark briefly deployed. The intercontinental cruise missile’s road was a dead end.
Re-opening an Untaken Road
From 1953 through 1954, the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration eyed reducing defense costs and reviewed defense research and development. Eisenhower based his national defense upon a strategy called the “New Look,” which relied on the American ability to deliver overwhelming nuclear destruction to deter aggressors from attacking. Credibility demanded that the United States possess an effective strike force that could survive a Soviet attack and deliver a debilitating counterstrike. To deter an attack, American strength had to convince any rational opponent that an attack was futile. Within the Air Force, the bomber still reigned, and cruise missiles ate enormous budgets, but ballistic missiles soon received attention, for three reasons. The first was the feasibility of lighter-weight nuclear weapons, which increased the number of bombs a bomber could carry and raised the possibility of using a rocket as a delivery vehicle. Then, key individuals emerged who were interested in new methods and tools of warfare (Hughes terms these “inventor-entrepreneurs”).30 Lastly, as chapter 3 will examine, the Americans knew the Soviets were developing long-range rockets. There converged perceived need, innate technical capability, will, and interest in new military technologies, both means and ways, to solve national strategic problems. Technological push and pull complemented.31
A complex sociotechnical system such as the ICBM—and in a broader sense, the nuclear deterrent force of the United States—required significant social and technological advances and the elimination of many reverse salients. In their first development phase (invention and development), ICBM innovators experimented with many operational concepts and navigation, guidance, control, and propulsion systems. A successful rocket involved a family of compatible engines, guidance subsystems, testing and launch site facilities, airframes, and a multitude of associated devices. Each area presented critical problems that slowed the overall program. As engineers solved these, analyst Robert Perry has contended, “the management of technology became the pacing element.”32 Historical appreciation of the magnitude of these reverse salients warrants deeper internal examination.
Although popular and military use of the word “missile” describes the rocket and warhead as one package, the missile was technically the projectile that struck the target. Like a human body’s systems and organs, each with specific contributions to the body’s life, an ICBM synthesized interacting subsystems. It combined many major elements, including the booster rocket, complete with all its subsystems. The delivery vehicle contained the airframe, engines, guidance and control systems, and power supplies necessary for flight. The weapon intended for delivery was a small spacecraft. The body that re-entered the atmosphere, called a “re-entry vehicle,” encased the fusion weapon assembly. The re-entry vehicle encountered brutal heating and aerodynamic stresses. In addition, the humans who operated, maintained, and secured the system were critical systems, as were the networks of training schools that prepared them. The launch bases constituted another system, as did the necessary command, control, and communications (C3) needed to coordinate operations. National leaders, including the president, and the systems that warned of enemy attacks joined the overall mega system of nuclear technological weapons systems. Along with these came the governmental, industrial, and academic infrastructure that energized the effort.
Weapon delivery relies on a ballistic trajectory from the carrier vehicle. Upon receipt of a launch order, the ICBM crew conducts the appropriate countdown procedure, which ends in an electrical command to launch the rocket. The propulsion system uses either liquid or solid fuels to propel the vehicle. All ICBMs use multiple stages (even if a “stage and a half”), although the number of engines per stage varies. Accuracy depends upon the guidance and control systems. The guidance system knows where the vehicle began flight and where the re-entry vehicle must go; it acts as the brain. The control system receives inputs from the guidance system and maintains stability of flight, reacts to disturbances, and adjusts course. At thrust cutoff or termination, powered flight ends, the guidance system discards the boost vehicle’s airframe, and the re-entry vehicle is released. Improved computers and electronics contributed greatly to these processes. The re-entry vehicle then follows an unguided ballistic path to its target. Typical ICBM flight profiles attain altitudes of hundreds of miles into outer space and have terminal velocities exceeding 15,000 miles per hour (mph). Given an American–Soviet confrontation, a land-based ICBM takes roughly thirty minutes from launch to nuclear detonation.33
Guidance and navigation are critical. The guidance set contains the gyroscopic assembly (mechanical or otherwise) that maintains the stable reference orientation the missile needs to navigate from launch site to re-entry-vehicle release point. An onboard computer provides the necessary computations. The guidance set transmits inputs to the rocket’s flight control system to control the engines and thrusters. Developing powerful onboard computers and fully internal guidance systems was a major challenge. Such a system, called “inertial guidance,” does not depend upon inputs from outside the missile. Some forms of inertial guidance systems took stellar position measurements to check their trajectory, but outside sources did not transmit data to them.34
Early on, existing computers and inertial guidance units could not ensure sufficient accuracy. The missiles needed outside inputs. In radio guidance, a network of ground stations measures the rocket’s flight path and determines the adjustments needed to keep the vehicle on course. The ground stations transmit corrections to the rocket, which then adjusts its performance. Combining radio and inertial guidance into a hybrid technology, radio-inertial guidance, minimized the weaknesses of the available inertial systems of the 1950s and early 1960s with proven radio guidance. Radio guidance sets were cheaper and easier to build than inertial units but were susceptible to jamming, the intentional garbling of the transmitted signal, and “spoofing” (the hostile transmission of inaccurate data). Once launched, an inertially guided rocket was a self-contained package dependent only upon itself. As Air Force general Bernard Schriever recalled, “Obviously the self-contained system