The Turkish Radar, as Brown’s and also Trevor Gardner’s creation was henceforth to be known within the Air Force, was on the air by June 1, 1955. Its football-field-sized antenna boomed a whopper of an electronic signal out over the southeastern end of the Black Sea, across the Caucasus Mountains of the Soviet Republic of Georgia, and into southern Russia toward Kapustin Yar approximately 800 miles away. The Soviets could not fail to detect it, nor fail to understand that electronic missile espionage was under way. Another radar specialist on Brown’s steering committee predicted that it would enjoy a life span of one week. The Soviets would then jam it. Brown noted they could easily have done so, either permanently with a ground jamming station or selectively when they were testing missiles by having an aircraft equipped with jamming gear circle over the Black Sea. They never did jam the Turkish Radar or interfere with it in any other way during the many years it was on the air. Brown was uncertain why. Lieutenant General Forrest McCartney, who left a country town in northeast Alabama for an Air Force life that saw some of its most memorable days working for Schriever, had what was perhaps the best explanation. There were, he said, certain “implied rules of engagement” that both sides adhered to throughout the Cold War, unspoken but carefully observed modes of conduct based upon common sense. Sending spy planes like the U-2 over the Soviet Union was unacceptable to the Russians, but electronic spying and later espionage from space were something else. They wanted to do their own. If they jammed an American radar in Turkey spying on their missile launchings, the Americans would jam the radars on the Soviet trawlers that lurked off Cape Canaveral, Florida, to monitor American missile firings.
About a week or two after the Turkish Radar went on the air, Brown got a telephone call from Lieutenant Colonel Manatt of the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson. When he devised the radar, Brown had also created a system whereby a camera constantly filmed the radar’s viewing scope, called an oscilloscope. The oscilloscope was connected to the receiver and showed what the radar was detecting. Because of the way the radar operated, the electromagnetic waves reflected off the flying missile and back to the receiver would appear on the oscilloscope not as an unbroken streak but as a series of images, contacts with the missile, separated by empty spaces between them. They would thus appear the same way on the film of the camera photographing the scope. Brown had calibrated the film so that one could calculate the speed of the missile by measuring the distances between the contacts. Manatt said the radar had achieved an intercept and he was sending a copy of the film to Brown by an armed Air Force courier. Would Brown please study the film and give him a reading?
Brown laid a straight edge ruler on the film and measured the distances between the contacts. The warhead of a ballistic missile that is launched into space at the optimal fifteen-degree angle and is traveling a mile a second is capable of going approximately 1,100 miles. That was the angle and speed at which the warhead of this Soviet missile was flying. Brown called Manatt back and told him what the film revealed: “You’ve got an eleven-hundred-mile missile.” There was hesitation at Manatt’s end of the line. “Are you sure?” Manatt asked. Brown replied that that was what the film said. Manatt thanked him and hung up. For some reason, the information percolated slowly up through the Air Force intelligence bureaucracy. Schriever, Gardner, and von Neumann do not seem to have received this first “hard evidence” of Soviet missile progress by the time they briefed Eisenhower on July 28, 1955. The news apparently reached them a bit later. The Soviets were clearly testing an intermediate-range ballistic missile, or IRBM. It was certain now that they were in a race.
BOOK VI
BUILDING THE
UNSTOPPABLE
49.
A COMPETITOR
Trouble, always trouble, came from a new quarter. In the fall of 1955, Eisenhower decided—formalizing his decision in another National Security Council Action Memorandum that December 1—to order the building of an intermediate-range ballistic missile with a reach of 1,725 miles. The creation of an IRBM, the president further ordered, was to have equal priority with that of the ICBM. The Killian Committee had first recommended an IRBM to the president in its February 1955 report, not with the same urgency as the committee’s advocacy of an ICBM, but with a similar strategic argument. The committee had reasoned that if the Soviets acquired an intermediate-range ballistic missile first, Moscow could wield nuclear blackmail over the West European nations within the missiles’ range and undermine the fledgling NATO alliance. The president’s concern grew with evidence, such as that provided by the Turkish Radar, that the Soviets were striving for such a weapon. He seems to have been influenced as well by another State Department study concluding that should the Soviet Union attain an ICBM before the United States did, repercussions among the Western allies could be mitigated if Washington had IRBMs based in England and Europe. Intermediate-range missiles poised there would have all of western Russia, including Moscow, within their range. The British government had already expressed interest in such a basing scheme and there was hope of persuading other West European nations to accept the missiles.
If the IRBM project, like the ICBM, had its genesis in fear of Soviet advances in missilery, the impetus to build the weapon, as in the case of the ICBM, also arose from the profound rancor between the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army. The Army’s chief of staff, General Maxwell Davenport Taylor, who had won his reputation for courage in battle by leaping from a C-47 to lead the 101st Airborne Division into Normandy on D-Day (he was given an assist by a boot in the buttocks from the jumpmaster when he hesitated at the door), was embittered by Eisenhower’s policy of Massive Retaliation. It held down military spending by starving the Army of funds in order to foster SAC and the Air Force in general. (Just a year after his retirement in 1959, Taylor was to publish a widely read book, The Uncertain Trumpet, which denounced Eisenhower’s neglect of conventional forces as dangerously shortsighted.) Although long-range strategic bombardment was supposed to be the province of the Air Force, Taylor refused to accept any limit on the range of guided missiles the Army might build. When, in the summer of 1956, he defiantly told Senator Symington, then chairman of the Subcommittee on the Air Force of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, that “the role of the Army is … the destruction of hostile ground forces and the 1,500-mile [1,725-statute-mile] missile will do just that,” the Army was already well along in the acquisition of just such a missile. Army officers contended that all missiles, no matter what their range, were simply “guided artillery.” Studies for an Army intermediate-range ballistic missile had started at the Redstone Arsenal in 1954 under Wernher von Braun and his German rocket technicians. It was to be called Jupiter and to be a leap forward from the 200-mile-range Redstone missile, which von Braun had already devised using Hall’s 75,000-pound-thrust engine as a power plant.
By May of 1955, the Air Staff was sufficiently nervous over what the Army was doing at Redstone to urge Power to solicit industry proposals for an Air Force IRBM. Power passed along the Air Staff memorandum to Schriever, instructing him to explore but not to commit himself. There was no need for Power’s injunction of caution. Schriever, with Gardner’s backing, had already been engaged for months in attempting to ward off the building of an IRBM. He was convinced it would interfere with the progress of the intercontinental ballistic missile, the one that really mattered, by draining off time and engineering and scientific expertise, along with component parts common to both. For example, he already needed for Atlas all of Hall’s 135,000-pound-thrust engines, being upgraded to 150,000 pounds thrust, that he could obtain from North American’s Rocketdyne. If he was now tasked with an IRBM, he would have to part with engines for it. He argued that it was best to go forward at maximum speed with the ICBM until they had learned enough to spin an IRBM off from the bigger rocket.
As the fall of 1955 approached, he could hold out no longer. In October, with Eisenhower’s mind virtually made up, Secretary Wilson asked the Joint Ch
iefs of Staff to meet and decide which service should build the intermediate missile. The JCS deliberations foundered on the shoals of interservice rivalry. Their report, referred to in military bureaucratese as a “split paper,” recommended that Wilson approve the development of two IRBMs. One, which bore alternative code names, XSM (Experimental Strategic Missile)-75 and WS (Weapon System)-315A, was to be the province of the Air Force, while the other, XSM-68, was to be a joint Army-Navy project. The IRBM was not so vital to the nation’s security that it required such duplication, but surprisingly, Wilson, undoubtedly with Eisenhower’s approval, accepted this squandering of money and effort. The president’s reasoning is unknown. He may have believed he would get an IRBM faster this way or he may have thought he could not slight the Army further without provoking a rebellion by Taylor and other senior Army generals.
On November 8, 1955, Wilson instructed both services to proceed. His memorandum specified that the IRBM was to be given “a priority equal to the ICBM but with no interference to the valid requirements of the ICBM program.” Eisenhower’s subsequent NSC directive of December 1 abandoned this mealymouthed equivocation and assigned a straightforward “joint” highest national priority, although it was just as unclear what this might mean in practice. Gardner was in a rage over the loss of the unique status for the ICBM, won with so many months of painstaking intrigue and labor, and tried several bureaucratic maneuvers to restore it, none of which succeeded. He blamed Engine Charlie rather than the president. Later denouncing the wastefulness of the parallel development of two IRBMs, Gardner mockingly said that Wilson regarded “competition in missiles … as desirable and necessary as it was in the automotive industry.”
By the time Eisenhower signed the NSC memorandum on December 1, Schriever was nearly ready to begin the building of an IRBM. In August, as the pressure rose, he had instructed Ramo to have his people take a serious look at the contractor proposals Power had previously directed Bennie to solicit and to do some studies of their own. He had Hall assign a Navy missile specialist, Commander Robert Truax, to work with Ramo’s people. They had heard of Truax and managed to have him seconded to the WDD staff. Power approved the design at the beginning of November and bids were solicited from contractors. Two days before Christmas, the airframe and missile assembly contract was awarded to the Douglas Aircraft Company of Santa Monica. A second race, a race against the Army, was on. Code designations for new aircraft or weapons last only as long as it takes someone to come up with a satisfactory name, and so it was with the Air Force’s XSM-75 or WS-315A. The missile was soon dubbed Thor, for the Norse god of thunder. Schriever appointed Hall program director for the IRBM, although Hall retained his duties as propulsion officer for the ICBM project. Ramo in turn put his crew under the man he felt best qualified to manage Ramo-Wooldridge’s engineering and technical direction side of the project, Ruben Mettler, his recently recruited star.
50.
THE TEAM OF METTLER AND THIEL
“Rube” Mettler was to cap his career by taking a seat with the cardinals of the American aerospace industry as chairman and chief executive officer of TRW, Inc., the ultimate successor firm of Ramo-Wooldridge. At the beginning of 1956, however, he was just approaching his thirty-second birthday, an electrical and aeronautical engineer with a reputation for brilliance among the cognoscenti like Ramo, but yet to take on, let along succeed at, a project on the scale of what he was now being given. A split-rail figure of a man who seemed taller than the six feet he stood because he was so slim and erect, Mettler was a California boy and an example of what California was achieving with its institutions of higher technological learning. Born in the small town of Shafter near Bakersfield, he had grown up on a farm in the valley of the San Joaquin River just in from the mountains of the Coast Ranges in the southern part of the state. In the fall of 1941, he had enrolled in Stanford University, initially as a humanities and history student, but had then taken courses in calculus and chemistry after his academic adviser told him that a literate man also had to know some science and mathematics. The advice turned out to be fortuitous. When he joined the Navy at seventeen shortly after Pearl Harbor, a personnel officer took a look at his grades in calculus and chemistry and decided Mettler was a candidate for a special program to produce officer technicians. He was sent to Caltech, gained a B.S. in electrical engineering in eighteen months, and, after midshipman and radar schools, was dispatched to the Pacific to serve as a roving radar repair officer. He lived like an itinerant electrician, transferring from one ship to another as radar malfunctions were reported. The experience taught him that what appeared to be a complex technological problem often had a simple cause. One destroyer captain was so exasperated at the refusal of his electronic wonder to cooperate that he warned Mettler he was going to be confined to the ship until he fixed it. Mettler checked out the apparatus and found everything in perfect order, but the radar simply would not come on line. In desperation, he climbed the mast to examine the antenna, then came back down and asked for some razor blades. They were provided. When Mettler descended the mast a second time, the radar worked fine. Some sailor, wielding that implement in such constant use in the Navy to fight off corrosion from saltwater—a paintbrush—had slapped thick lead paint across the radar’s window, effectively shutting it down.
Arriving at San Francisco in 1946 and expecting to be discharged, he was instead turned back to the Pacific on a mission that profoundly affected his outlook during the coming Cold War. Assigned to the naval task force supporting the first of the postwar nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll in the central Pacific, Mettler joined the team of officers who set up instruments to measure the effects. The horrendous sights of two atomic explosions, one a subsurface detonation that hurled a geyser of seawater into the air from which a mushroom cloud then emerged and the second a searing surface burst from a tower, led Mettler to vow that he would do all he could in future years to prevent weapons like this from being used against the United States. He returned to Caltech and in 1949 earned a Ph.D. there in electrical and aeronautical engineering. Ramo and Wooldridge, then transforming Hughes Aircraft into a high-technology powerhouse, were lecturing in courses at Caltech on the side as a way of spotting and hiring the best graduates. They signed up Mettler right away and put him to work on the airborne radar and fire-control computer for the Falcon air-to-air missile. When they left in September 1953 to form their own company, Mettler declined their invitation to join them. He was leader of the team that was mating the Falcon system to the F-102, the latest of the supersonic interceptors that were coming on line to protect the United States against Soviet nuclear bombers, and he wanted to finish the job.
Ramo lost out on recruiting Mettler again in early 1954 when Mettler too left Hughes. Donald Quarles, who had not yet succeeded Harold Talbott as secretary of the Air Force and was still assistant secretary of defense for research and development, pulled rank and brought Mettler to Washington as a special consultant. He was soon on a plane bound for SAC headquarters at Omaha with instructions from Quarles to find out why the new electronic navigation and bomb release system for the B-47 and B-58 bombers was failing so often, causing the bombers to miss their targets in practice exercises. LeMay had seen such techno wonder boys before and they had brought him scant benefit. He assumed Mettler was another of these useless geeks. LeMay paraded Mettler in front of his staff and asked him to explain precisely what he was going to do to help. Mettler didn’t yet know what the problem was, never mind whether he could remedy it. He attempted to get off the hook by awkwardly explaining that he was headed for a SAC base in Texas where he would examine maintenance records, fly missions, and so forth. The Cigar proceeded to make fun of him. “He just shredded me to pieces,” Mettler recalled. “He said this is the kind of nonsense we have to put up with. It was just awful.”
Mettler left for Texas, studied records, and went out on several flights on B-47s and B-58s. He found nothing. Then on one flight, as if he were back on that destroyer i
n the Pacific, he suddenly noticed that the main electronic unit for the bomb-navigation system was housed in a closed metal cupboard. He put a hand on top of it. Intense heat burned his fingers. These were the days when electronic devices like this bomb-navigation system were still employing vacuum tubes, sealed glass tubes containing a near vacuum. The vacuum allowed free passage of electrical current to connect circuits. The tubes functioned reasonably well, but they were fragile compared to the tougher transistors to come and were especially prone to failure if subjected to excessive heat. When a vacuum tube failed, a circuit closed, and the electronic device malfunctioned. The Boeing engineers who had designed the B-47 and the General Dynamics designers of the B-58 obviously had no experience with electronics, nor were they systems engineers in Ramo’s conception of designing an integrated whole. The electronics had merely been crammed into the planes as an afterthought, without any regard to what was needed to keep the system functioning. And all that was required in this case was some cooling air. Mettler had ducts cut in the metal cupboard and fans installed. Vacuum tube lifetime increased significantly and so did the performance of the bomb-navigation systems. LeMay ordered the fix copied in all SAC bombers. To his credit, he also apologized for his cruel behavior, awarding Mettler the Defense Department’s Distinguished Public Service Medal in a ceremony back at SAC headquarters in Omaha. And this time, Ramo succeeded in recruiting Mettler for the missile program. In March 1955, as soon as Quarles was willing to part with him, he shifted back to California to confront the first great challenge of his career in Thor.