A Fiery Peace In A Cold War Part 7

In describing the organization of the project and what was occurring out in California, Bennie cleverly attributed everything that was being done to the Tea Pot Committee and its recommendations. Furthermore, to capitalize on the credibility of von Neumann and the other distinguished scientists, like Kistiakowsky, who had served on it, he always referred to the group as the Von Neumann Committee. The ploy also enabled him to get around at least partially Dillon Anderson's stricture on not attempting to "sell" or "pressure" Eisenhower. When he described the "radical reorganization" that entailed integrating the Ramo-Wooldridge group into his WDD command and the requirement, once the program got moving, as it now was, for "increased financial support and high project priority," he invariably cited the Von Neumann Committee and its report. He spoke of an imperative need for "the operation of the new group [to] be relieved of excessive, detailed regulation by existing government agencies," meaning streamlined management, as another conclusion drawn from the Von Neumann Committee's findings. Schriever occasionally broke the seriousness of his talk with light detail. "Our first field office, Mr. President," he said, smiling and turning toward Eisenhower, and Vice President Nixon and Secretary of State Dulles, who were sitting on each side of the president, "was an abandoned parochial grammar school in Inglewood, California." Eisenhower nodded once more and gave Bennie a light smile in return.

But the breaks for humor were few as Bennie drove home repeatedly the utter seriousness of the challenge. "Today we are not at war," he said, "at least not in the conventional sense, and yet the importance and urgency of this project requires the same dedication and competence and all-out effort one would expect to find in wartime." He forged on, explaining the abstruse, to laymen, management technique of concurrency he and Ramo had adopted "in the interest of compressing time-our most critical commodity." It was "simply ... the development, testing, and perfecting of all major components simultaneously ... at the right time all [of] this will come together, flow inward, converging finally at a central point in San Diego where it will be a.s.sembled to produce the final product-the ICBM."

He told the president of the plan to develop a second ICBM (it was to be called t.i.tan) as a hedge in case the Atlas did not fulfill expectations. A fresh chart placed on the easel laid out for Eisenhower the proposed test launch schedule at the Air Force's Eastern Test Range at Cape Canaveral. He replaced it with yet another chart estimating how much this investment in rocketry was going to cost the United States, from $150 million in the current fiscal year to $538 million in Fiscal Year 1958. (As might have been expected, given the pressure Schriever and Gardner must have felt not to frighten the economy-minded Eisenhower, all of the future estimates turned out to be far below actual costs.) As Schriever concluded his presentation, Eisenhower was no longer sitting back relaxed in his commodious armchair. He had shifted forward and was sitting up straight, intent on what Bennie was saying. Boatman rolled the film and the briefing climaxed in the roar and flame of the engine firings.

"Thank you, General Schriever," Eisenhower said warmly when the film had ended. He turned in his chair to von Neumann and Gardner, who were seated along the far wall. "And my thanks also to you, Dr. von Neumann, and Mr. Gardner. This has been most impressive, most impressive!" he said. "There is no question this weapon will have a profound impact on all aspects of human life, not only in the United States but in every corner of the globe-military, sociological, political." He turned all the way back, searching down the rows of chairs behind him. "Where's Radford-is he here today?" Eisenhower asked, seeking his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president spotted the admiral almost as soon as he inquired. "Radford, let's war game this-these long-range missiles-what they will do to the force structure. Do it right away. Let me know what answers you come up with." He leaned over to say something to Vice President Nixon, then rose from his chair, smiled, and said, "Thank you once again, General Schriever, Dr. von Neumann, Mr. Gardner." He gave another of his quick nods to recognize everyone else in the rows of seats who rose simultaneously in respect, then walked out of the Broadcast Room alone.

The half-hour ration of the president's time had stretched on into an hour and thirty-five minutes. Gardner, von Neumann, and Schriever "had done the job," Ford thought. "We had introduced the President and the National Security Council to the nuclear missile age." Virtually everyone stopped on the way out to thank Schriever, von Neumann, and Gardner, who had gathered in front of the podium. Twining was among them. He told Bennie how well he had done. Ford had spotted the older general sitting amongst other members of the Joint Chiefs with a satisfied "That's my boy" smile on his face as Eisenhower had complimented Schriever. Nixon and CIA chief Allen Dulles lingered. "Why haven't we started this sooner? What's been the holdup?" the vice president said, tapping the palm of his left hand with the stiffened fingers of his right in a gesture of emphasis that was peculiar to Nixon. Schriever took on the answer and explained once more why, until the thermonuclear breakthrough and the imminence of a relatively light hydrogen bomb warhead, nothing practical had been possible. In Nixon and his concern they clearly had won an advocate at the top of the administration. Allen Dulles then asked what Ford called "cops and robbers" questions. Despite Gardner's opening statement to the gathering that the Russians were "going full out," Ford noted that none of the three men could provide detailed factual answers to Dulles's questions "mostly because of what our intelligence people didn't didn't know about Soviet missile progress" (emphasis in the original text of Ford's memoir). know about Soviet missile progress" (emphasis in the original text of Ford's memoir).

Eisenhower may have been personally won over, but the bureaucratic struggle wasn't at an end. At 3:00 that afternoon Gardner, von Neumann, and Schriever repeated their briefing to the NSC Planning Board. It would be up to the Planning Board to submit an NSC action directive for the president to sign, and in the wording of the directive would lie the key to what action ensued. Schriever recorded the reaction of the board members in his diary. He noted that William Yandell Elliott, the Harvard professor who represented the Office of Defense Mobilization on the board and who had been so helpful in getting the ICBM on the NSC agenda in the first place, was still "a friend in court." And because of Wilson's opposition, the Pentagon representative, Brigadier General Charles Bonesteel, the defense secretary's military aide, was still "reasonably negative." Again by custom the Pentagon, as the department concerned, had the privilege of drafting the directive. Its draft was an exercise in sophistry. The proposed directive for the president to sign proclaimed the ICBM "a program of the highest priority," and then fizzled into language that would entail nothing more than what was already being done. But as the maneuvering walked its slow pace on through August, others with clout in the administration saw the gambit and moved to negate it. The most important was Richard Nixon, who, with Eisenhower away on a trout-fishing vacation in Colorado, chaired a September 8 meeting of the full NSC that would decide the issue. He invited von Neumann to the meeting to lend a hand and Johnny waded in with more unnerving talk of nuclear blackmail and only fifteen minutes' warning of incoming Soviet missiles.

NSC Action No. 1433, the presidential directive that emerged and that Eisenhower signed on September 13, 1955, in offices he and his staff had taken over as a Summer White House at Lowry Air Force Base, near Denver, stated that "there would be the gravest repercussions on the national security and on the cohesion of the free world" if the Soviet Union acquired an ICBM before the United States did. The president was therefore designating the ICBM project "a research and development program of the highest priority above all others." He ordered the secretary of defense to build it with "maximum urgency." The plotters had won none too soon. Ten days later Eisenhower suffered his first heart attack. It would be two months before he was able to preside over a gathering on the scale of the July 28 missile briefing, and that was a cabinet meeting under controlled circ.u.mstances at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland.

NO MORE NITPICKING.

Those words, "highest priority above all others" and "maximum urgency," were what Gardner and Schriever had been scheming and hoping for so long. They lost no time seizing the momentum a president's p.r.o.nouncements could release. With forty-two potential naysayers in their path, Bennie and his staff at WDD in California had been driven to distraction by the hurdles races they constantly had to run to get anything accomplished. One day at the Pentagon, Schriever had grown so exasperated with an Air Force functionary called the deputy a.s.sistant secretary for logistics that his habitual self-control had shattered like a gla.s.s. .h.i.tting the floor. "You son of a b.i.t.c.h," he had abruptly shouted at the man, "you are holding up the whole G.o.dd.a.m.n program." His surprise loss of temper had intimidated the bureaucrat and won the argument for him on this occasion, but obviously one could not do business like this on an everyday basis and survive.

In late August, Schriever had begun to doc.u.ment precisely how this bureaucratic octopus held the ICBM project in its tentacles. Bennie had his staff draw up a dozen flip charts listing the mult.i.tude of offices and agencies involved and ill.u.s.trating, with lines going here and there in a bewildering, crisscrossing maze, how many had to be contacted to approve what and how long the tortured process was taking. When they were completed, Schriever dubbed them his "spaghetti charts," and headed off to Washington to brief Gardner. As he went through one chart after another even Gardner, who had heard so often from Schriever of what an incredible tangle they were encountering, was astonished. "Let's go down and see Quarles," he said as soon as Schriever was done, taking him by the arm and marching to Quarles's office. The secretary was about to leave for a meeting, but Gardner was insistent. "Don, you've got to listen to this," he said. With Quarles standing behind his desk, Bennie propped his charts up on an armchair in front and repeated his briefing, this time to Quarles's astonishment. "Is that really what you have to do?" he asked Schriever. a.s.sured that it was, Quarles said, "Well, we've got to do something about this." Turning to Gardner, he said, "Trev, you set up a study effort and come up with some recommendations on how to do it." With this license in his pocket, Gardner proceeded to settle the argument once and for all.

On the same day, September 13, 1955, that Eisenhower signed the NSC directive with the magic words, Gardner named a civilian official to head such a study who was both a supporter of the ICBM enterprise and familiar with the obstacles it was encountering. His name was Hyde Gillette and he was the deputy for budget and program management in the Office of the a.s.sistant Secretary of the Air Force for Financial Management. Gillette formed a twenty-five-member committee and allowed Gardner and Schriever to select its members and to seed it with their own people. Schriever, Ramo, and Ford were members, along with ten of Schriever's officers from WDD. Gillette divided the committee into seven panels to cover all aspects. It met both in Washington and out at WDD. Within five weeks, the work was done. Gardner swiftly approved the committee's report and sent it to Wilson's office on October 21, 1955.

Wilson abandoned his opposition in the face of Eisenhower's decision. He approved the reforms in a memo to Quarles on November 8. Subsequently called the Gillette Procedures, they were a dramatic and drastic streamlining of the decision-making process. Three quarters of the forty-two reviewing agencies and offices were jettisoned and the remaining ten consolidated into two committees. At the top was the Ballistic Missile Committee of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, chaired by Wilson's deputy. Beneath it at the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force level was the Air Force Ballistic Missile Committee. Quarles chaired this committee, but Gardner managed to have himself appointed its vice chairman and liaison with its OSD counterpart. The Gillette Procedures pushed authority downward to those who were doing the work. Schriever was to decide how the job was to be done. His WDD command was to draw up and present to Quarles's committee on December 1, 1955, a comprehensive five-year plan covering everything from missile design to trial launches at Cape Canaveral. Gone were the days of piecemeal requests and incessant bureaucratic tussles to obtain permission for each and every element of the project. Everything would be included in one doc.u.ment. Authorization to proceed would be granted by Quarles's committee in one-year increments for the year currently under consideration. This was subject to review by the higher committee at Wilson's level, but approval was virtually automatic. Once authorization had been given, the plan for that year's work became the equivalent of a directive that Schriever could use as a shield to ward off interference by anyone.

He and Gardner did not succeed in getting a separate budget for the ICBM. Missile funds would continue to be included within the overall Air Force appropriation. But they got the next best thing to it. A budget annex accompanied the comprehensive development plan submitted to Quarles's committee and, once approved, the funds became the WDD budget for that year. No other Air Force organization could touch them. As a fillip to their achievement, Gardner and Schriever arranged for scientific advice that would be critical when necessary but unfailingly supportive. The ICBM Scientific Advisory Committee that von Neumann had helped them to organize under his chairmanship for WDD was named the scientific advisory body for both the Wilson and Quarles committees. The same November 8 memo from Wilson to Quarles approving the Gillette Procedures stated that "the Air Force ballistic missile programs [would] be subject to no other outside scientific consultant review." Bennie Schriever's troubles were by no means at an end. In some ways, they were just beginning. But two and a half years after his pilgrimage to von Neumann's office at Princeton, the road ahead of him was finally open.

A RADAR IN TURKEY.

One day in September 1954, at General Electric's facilities in Syracuse, New York, a retired Air Force officer who had worked in R&D at the Pentagon and then been hired by GE's marketing department walked into the office of Burton Brown. A genial man who towered six feet, six inches, Brown was a specialist in longdistance radar. "Is there any way you could build a radar that would see a missile at a thousand miles?" the retired Air Force officer asked.

"Well, I don't know. Maybe. What have you got in mind?" Brown replied. The retired officer had become acquainted with Trevor Gardner while still on active duty and would stop by to see Gardner whenever he happened to be in Washington. He had done so on his latest sales-generating trip. He said Gardner had told him that the Soviets were test-launching guided missiles from a site near the port of Odessa on the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. Gardner wanted to intercept and track the missiles in order to learn as much as possible about their capabilities. "Let me think about it a little bit," Brown said.

When he saw the man the next day, Brown said he might have a solution. Radar works by sending out pulses of high-frequency electromagnetic waves. The waves bounce off the targeted object or objects and are picked up by a receiver. Depending on how the receiver is designed, the radar operator can detect the distance, direction, and speed of moving objects like aircraft or ships, or the location of stationary objects like buildings. The difficulty in this case was that radar waves are sent out on line-of-sight beams. The curvature of the earth over the roughly 1,000-mile distance between possible sites in West Germany and Odessa might be sufficiently great so that the beams would overshoot the missiles, and the rockets would fly under the beams. Brown did not see the problem as insurmountable. He proposed to overcome it by constructing an extremely large transmitting station in Germany that would direct huge electromagnetic waves down toward Odessa. He would then put the receiver that was to pick up the reflection of the radar waves off the missiles much closer to Odessa, on the coast of Turkey across the Black Sea just south of the Soviet Union. The proximity of the receiver to the launching ground should enable them to pick up enough reflections of the radar waves to track the missiles.

The following Monday, a visitor from the Pentagon appeared in Brown's office, identified himself as Dr. Chalmers Sherwin, chief scientist of the U.S. Air Force, and said, "Let me hear your proposal." Brown described it. The visitor listened and then thanked Brown and left. There were no questions. Brown a.s.sumed that meant the end of the matter. But on Tuesday he got a telephone call from someone in Trevor Gardner's office. Mr. Gardner wanted Brown to fly down to Washington the next day and brief him on the proposal. Brown and an a.s.sociate prepared some charts and dutifully appeared in Gardner's office at the Pentagon on Wednesday. Gardner, like the scientist, listened quietly during the briefing, saying little, which surprised Brown. Gardner's reputation for aggressiveness had reverberated to Syracuse and Brown had expected to be handled roughly. As he put it in an interview in his modular retirement home in Florida forty-three years later, Brown had heard that Gardner was definitely "not a deadpan-type guy." Gardner also raised no questions or objections when Brown told him that the work would take two years and cost about $5 million. At the end of the briefing, Gardner said, "Let me have what you said in writing on Friday." He explained that he was going out of the country and wanted to study the proposal before he left. And so Brown and his a.s.sociate rushed back to Syracuse, hurriedly put their ideas down on paper, and had a memorandum typed and in Gardner's office by courier on the last day of the week.

On Monday, Burton Brown got another telephone call he was not expecting. It was from an acquaintance of many years who happened to be the senior civilian technician at the Air Force's main electronics facility, the Air Development Center at Rome, New York, about forty miles east of Syracuse. "Hey, what have you been telling Trevor Gardner?" his acquaintance asked. "We have an order from Gardner's office to put you people under contract right now for some kind of radar. What the h.e.l.l are you talking about? Come on down tomorrow and tell us about it." When Brown arrived at Rome, he found about twenty people a.s.sembled in the conference room there to hear him. Two of them, he was to discover, were officers from the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, the organization Hap Arnold had created to uncover the secrets of German technology, now targeted on the Soviet Union. At the end of Brown's presentation, one of the officers stood up and introduced himself. He was Lieutenant Colonel James Manatt, chief of the guided missiles section at ATIC. "Mr. Brown, that is very interesting, but there are two things wrong with this," he said. "Number one, the launch point is not Odessa." Taken aback, Brown asked where it was. Manatt explained that it was a place called Kapustin Yar, near Stalingrad at the bend of the Volga River. Apparently, the fact that Air Force intelligence knew of the mere existence of Kapustin Yar was considered such a big secret in 1954 that he had previously been deliberately misled. He called for a map and measured off the distance from Odessa to Stalingrad. It was more than 650 miles. He could not possibly pick up missiles being launched that far away with a radar transmitter situated in Germany, no matter how big. The curvature of the earth definitely fell off sufficiently between Germany and Stalingrad so that the missiles would fly under the beams. Despite being misled, Brown felt exceedingly foolish. He regarded himself and GE as under a verbal contract at this point to deliver a radar that could detect and track the Soviet missiles and "here we are sitting with an invalid proposal ... and it's just all nuts." Manatt had more bad news for him. "The second thing," he announced, "this two-year delivery schedule you have got, that's for the birds. We have to have a radar on the air to see what goes on at the beginning of the next Russian firing season, June first next year [June 1, 1955], not two years from now."

Brown formed a steering committee of radar experts from the Air Development Center at Wright-Patterson, the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT, and elsewhere in academia to puzzle out the problem. They decided to begin with the fact that they were going to have to abandon any attempt at secrecy, such as clandestine radar receiving stations on Turkey's Black Sea coast. To get close enough to observe what was going on at Kapustin Yar, they would have to build the biggest radar installation in the non-Communist world in eastern Turkey. This would put them on the most direct line south from their target. They would still be roughly 800 miles away, however, and so they would have to construct an antenna the size of a football field.

In between committee sessions, Brown studied earthquake maps. Turkey and the entire surrounding area are notorious for violent earthquakes, which pose an obvious threat to a radar installation, particularly one of these gargantuan dimensions. The maps were covered in red to indicate earthquake zones, but Brown noticed one spot about twenty-five to thirty miles in diameter that was relatively earthquake-free. It was just below the city of Diyarbakir, on the upper reaches of the Tigris River in southeastern Turkey, approximately 430 miles southeast of the capital of Ankara. The region is one of the most ancient in the inhabited world, the scene of peoples and empires succeeding one another over many centuries, the land worn down by man and the uses and abuses to which he puts the earth. Antique Diyarbakir is itself built on the ruins of the still more ancient city of Amida. Mount Ararat, the solitary 16,496-foot mountain where the Bible says that Noah's ark landed after the Deluge, rises from the dismal landscape off to the east where Turkey meets Armenia and Iran. The Diyarbakir region is currently known as Turkish Kurdistan, because it is peopled by the Kurds, an originally nomadic, mountain race whose spread of habitation extends over into Armenia and Iran and down into Syria and Iraq. They are Muslims, but neither Arab nor Turk, speak a language of their own, and have struggled unsuccessfully over the more recent centuries to form an independent Kurdistan. Besides being earthquake-safe, Diyarbakir held another advantage for Brown. The Turkish air force had a fair-sized airfield there with a small contingent of U.S. Air Force advisers. Brown could use the airfield as a base from which to scout.

In November 1954, he flew to Turkey with three colleagues from GE, a young geologist, and two officers from the Air Force Security Service's headquarters in San Antonio. The AFSS is the Air Force's electronics spying agency. It listens to the communications and eavesdrops on anything else it can profitably glean on the military activities of opposing nations, in 1954 obviously the Soviet Union and its allies. GE was going to supply the technicians to operate the radar installation, but the AFSS would administer it. They landed in Ankara and then headed down to Diyarbakir in two twin-engine C-47 transports of Second World War vintage. One carried them and a Turkish interpreter and the other a pair of jeeps in which to explore for a site. They bunked at the small compound at the airfield where the U.S. Air Force advisers lived. Brown and the others then went in search of an American Protestant missionary whom they heard had lived in the area for a long time. Brown a.s.sumed the man would be familiar with the countryside around the city and thus could help them select a site. Somehow, they left the Turkish interpreter back at the advisers' compound at the airfield. But, spotting some children in the city they thought might help them, they stopped the jeeps and were soon surrounded by a flock of about fifty curious Kurdish youngsters. One of the Americans took out a Turkish/English dictionary and p.r.o.nounced as best he could the Turkish word for "church." His p.r.o.nunciation apparently made the word sound to the children like the Turkish one for children's playground.

As Kurds, the children did not speak good Turkish in any case. They all nodded a.s.sent and beckoned to the Americans to follow them. Parking the two jeeps, Brown, the two Air Force officers, the other GE men, and the geologist walked for what seemed about a mile through a labyrinth of dirt streets until they came to a dead end. There was no church nearby. The place looked like a handball court and was clearly a children's play yard. One of Brown's colleagues resorted to sign language. He clasped his hands together and raised them as in prayer. Then he made the sign of the cross. The children understood that immediately and, being militant Muslims, picked up stones and anything else that lay to hand and pelted the Americans, who ran for their lives back down through the dirt streets. They were rescued by some adults who emerged from mud houses at the tumult and stopped the youngsters.

The Turkish interpreter managed to locate the missionary the next day through the local authorities. Brown invited the man and his wife to dinner at the best of the town's hotels. They were a forlorn couple. They had been laboring in Diyarbakir for twenty years and their congregation still numbered only ten people. The wife said the atmosphere was so hostile to the conversion of people to Christianity that she feared they would one day be attacked. The dinner was also Brown's first experience with Turkish food. The hotel was attractive and clean, but the meat and vegetables tasted to him as if they had been cooked in rancid b.u.t.ter. He was glad to get back to the canned American military rations served at the little Air Force compound. The missionary was also of no help in locating a site for the radar installation.

And so Brown and his contingent set off to scout the region about ten miles south of the town. He was appalled at the poverty and desolation. The Kurdish farmers were dressed in baggy pants and sheepskin coats, but went barefoot, despite the November cold. Even the village chief had no shoes. They had few cattle, mainly camels, and their plows, drawn by oxen, were crude wooden contraptions that bit only about three inches into the hard soil as the farmers maneuvered them around the many boulders. Brown thought the fields resembled rock orchards with sprigs of winter wheat showing here and there. He noticed that about one out of every four of the dirty, tatteredly clad children was blind and diseased in one eye. The Turkish interpreter from Ankara regarded these people, with whom he was barely able to communicate, with scorn. (Turkish abuse of the Kurds was to provoke a rebellion in the area during the 1980s that took 30,000 lives.) He told Brown that the blindness came from filth and indicated that in his opinion the Kurds were a subspecies of humanity. Brown had the interpreter question the farmers about earthquakes. Had the houses ever shaken? Did their fathers ever speak of the houses shaking? What about their grandfathers? He noticed that despite the poverty, the houses had electricity. Ice storms can impose great weight on a radar antenna. Had the farmers ever seen ice build up on the electric wires?

When the responses to all the questions were negative, he foraged for a site, setting up his surveyor's transit theodolite on tripod legs at various likely places and pointing it in the direction of Stalingrad to measure the horizon. To achieve optimal results in sending the radar's electromagnetic waves beaming into the Soviet Union, he needed as low a horizon as possible, less than a degree and a half. After he had found a field with the horizon he wanted, he had one more check to make as a precaution against earthquakes. He needed to know how far down the bedrock was on which he could rest the foundations for the antenna and the rest of the station. The young geologist he had brought along a.s.sured him it was only about three feet below. How did he know that? Brown asked. The geologist pointed at a nearby mound and explained that it was an extinct volcano. The eons since its extinction would have deposited a covering of soil and debris above its once molten rock, but about three feet down they ought to run into solid basalt. Brown didn't believe him. He had twenty laborers with picks and shovels brought from the town. Marking off a fifteen-foot square in the dirt with a stick, he told them to dig. Soon he had a fifteen-foot-square hole in the ground, roughly three feet deep, with basalt rock at the bottom.

"The rug does not shake," Brown telegraphed his superiors at GE in Syracuse. He a.s.sumed from all of the talk about the threat of earthquakes before he left that they would understand he was signaling he had found a safe site. He asked the Turkish interpreter how much land they could have for the radar station. The interpreter said as much as they wanted. Brown calculated they would probably need about ten acres for the huge antenna, the transmitter and receiver, and housing for the approximately one hundred GE technicians who would be required to operate the facility. The Air Force Security Service intended to add a detachment of ten officers and men and they would also obviously need housing. Someone on high reached an agreement with the Turkish authorities to turn the land over to the Air Force. Whether the Kurdish farmers were compensated is unknown.

After Brown returned to the United States, he discovered that the word had been put out in the Air Force, probably by Gardner through Twining and White. No matter what he wanted, everyone was eager to cooperate. He had originally intended to ship the monster antenna, a.s.sembled in pieces at Syracuse, and the related equipment by sea and then to put everything together on the site. It was not until mid-January 1955 that all was ready to go, however, and he was afraid that sea shipment, followed by overland transport to Diyarbakir, would be too slow to meet the June 1 on-air deadline. During a steering committee meeting at the Pentagon, he asked, "How's chances for an airlift?" An Air Force colonel down at the end of the table said, "Let me see." He picked up the phone, dialed a number, and spoke to an officer at the other end. "How much stuff have you got?" he asked Brown. "Four hundred and fifty tons," Brown said, expecting to be told this was a ridiculous imposition on the Air Force and he would have to find himself a ship. The colonel relayed the figure over the phone and returned to Brown, "Okay, you're in. Can you have it at Dover [Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the Military Air Transport Service center] in ten days?" Brown said yes he could, and he did. Prefabricated barracks-type housing for the hundred GE technicians and ten-man AFSS contingent, along with generators, a water purification system, and a sewage treatment plant, were also airlifted in pieces to Diyarbakir. The airfield there turned out to be long enough to handle the big American transports coming into service, like the mammoth Douglas four-engine C-124 Globemaster, with two ma.s.sive doors at the front of the fuselage that swung open to roll cargo, vehicles, or machines on and off.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ces 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 s.p.a.ce 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.

A COMPEt.i.tOR.

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 a.s.sist by a boot in the b.u.t.tocks from the jumpmaster when he hesitated at the door), was embittered by Eisenhower's policy of Ma.s.sive 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 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 a.r.s.enal 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 pa.s.sed 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 Chiefs 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 a.s.signed 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 "compet.i.tion 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 a.s.sign 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 a.s.sembly 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 G.o.d 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.

THE TEAM OF METTLER AND THIEL.

"Rube" Mettler was to cap his career by taking a seat with the cardinals of the American aeros.p.a.ce 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 inst.i.tutions 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 salt.w.a.ter-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. a.s.signed 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 a.s.sistant 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 a.s.sumed 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 in 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 gla.s.s tubes containing a near vacuum. The vacuum allowed free pa.s.sage 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 p.r.o.ne 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.

Mettler was fortunate to have someone experienced in rocketry to serve as his deputy-a forty-year-old Austro-German aeronautical engineer named Adolf Thiel, another veteran of the V-2 program and a refugee from the Redstone a.r.s.enal. Although "Dolf" Thiel had come to the United States in 1946 with the original group of German rocketeers under the clandestine Operation Paperclip, he had never been part of the von Braun coterie. A slender man of medium height, with a prominent nose and thinning brown hair, Thiel had a friendly if intense manner that hid a quick temper. He had been born in Vienna and grew up there, but went to Darmstadt, just south of Frankfurt, for his higher education, because Darmstadt's university offered courses in aeronautical engineering. In 1940, right after he received his master's degree, he was put to work on the V-2 project. He did not, however, move to the rocket center at Peenemunde to join the rest of the V-2 team. Instead, under a contract the university negotiated with the German military, he did mathematical calculations for the Peenemunde group on flight mechanics, control systems, and guidance, traveling there frequently to obtain the team's requirements, then returning to Darmstadt to do his equations. In 1944, as part of his work for a Ph.D., he wrote a thesis on the control system for a ballistic missile, to be called the A-9, which was to have enough range to bomb New York. His Ph.D. project was aborted by the interregnum at the fall of Germany a year later and, fortunately for New York, the missile never got beyond the paper stage.

While not a genuine member of the Peenemunde club, his mathematical a.n.a.lyses attracted enough attention for him to be invited to join the group when it was transported to Fort Bliss, Texas, to conduct firings of the captured V-2s at the nearby White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. In 1952, after the German rocket men had been transferred to the Redstone a.r.s.enal in Alabama, Thiel managed to break away from von Braun and received permission to form his own research group. All, with the exception of one German, were American missile technicians. The design of the Army's intermediate-range ballistic missile, XSM-68, emerged from their studies in 1955. It was to be named Jupiter after the chief G.o.d of the Roman state religion (Zeus was his equivalent in the Greek pantheon of G.o.ds), and like Thor was also a.s.sociated with thunder and lightning. By this time, Thiel was an American citizen, eager to part with the Army and join a civilian firm. He began negotiations with Convair to work on the Atlas. Louis Dunn, former chief of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a member of the Tea Pot Committee, whom Ramo had persuaded to become his general deputy for the ICBM project, heard about the negotiations through the industry grapevine. Thiel, like Mettler, was just the sort of man they wanted. A phone call was made and Dunn convinced Thiel that Ramo-Wooldridge would prove a much more interesting organization to be part of than Convair. When Thiel's contract with the Army expired in March 1955, he left Huntsville for Los Angeles, soon to be pitted, as Mettler's second, against his former employer.

Although Hall was program director for the IRBM project, he did not attempt to micromanage it. He would not have been able had he wanted to do so. He was too busy advancing the North American engine and deciding on a source for the engine for the alternate ICBM, t.i.tan. The Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company of Baltimore, Maryland, was chosen to develop t.i.tan in September 1955. Martin planned to build the missile at a new plant it was constructing on a 4,500-acre tract of land it had purchased near Denver, Colorado. Aerojet General Corporation of California emerged as the best source for a second 150,000-pound-thrust rocket engine to power t.i.tan. Hall left it to Commander Truax and Mettler and Thiel to design Thor. Thiel had thoughtfully brought with him to Los Angeles duplicates of the Army IRBM studies he had supervised at Redstone. It was thus not a coincidence, as Thiel pointed out in an interview years later, that Thor was essentially a copy of the missile that was to become the Army's Jupiter.

Jupiter stood 60 feet high. Thiel made Thor slightly higher at 64.8 feet. Diameter was approximately the same, 96 96 inches for Thor and 105 inches for Jupiter. Both missiles weighed in fully fueled for liftoff and fitted with their nose cones at about 110,000 pounds. The main body of the Jupiter was smoothly rounded all the way to the bottom. To make Thor look slightly different, Thiel tacked on fins that flared out at the base. The fins added nothing in the way of aerodynamic advantage. Each missile relied for its booster on a single one of Hall's North American Aviation engines and on both missiles the engines were attached to gimbals, the improved contrivances that enabled the engines to swing in any direction and thus steer the rocket with their thrust. In addition, Thor was equipped with two small rocket motors of just 1,000 pounds thrust, called verniers, attached to swivels and mounted on each side of the booster engine. They were kept burning after the main booster engine had been shut down and were used to make last-second adjustments in order to release the warhead at the precise angle required for it to hurtle through s.p.a.ce to its target. These minor differences notwithstanding, Thor and Jupiter were, provided they flew as advertised, intermediate-range ballistic missiles of equal worthiness. The compet.i.tors now had to deliver on that question of whether and how each would fly. inches for Thor and 105 inches for Jupiter. Both missiles weighed in fully fueled for liftoff and fitted with their nose cones at about 110,000 pounds. The main body of the Jupiter was smoothly rounded all the way to the bottom. To make Thor look slightly different, Thiel tacked on fins that flared out at the base. The fins added nothing in the way of aerodynamic advantage. Each missile relied for its booster on a single one of Hall's North American Aviation engines and on both missiles the engines were attached to gimbals, the improved contrivances that enabled the engines to swing in any direction and thus steer the rocket with their thrust. In addition, Thor was equipped with two small rocket motors of just 1,000 pounds thrust, called verniers, attached to swivels and mounted on each side of the booster engine. They were kept burning after the main booster engine had been shut down and were used to make last-second adjustments in order to release the warhead at the precise angle required for it to hurtle through s.p.a.ce to its target. These minor differences notwithstanding, Thor and Jupiter were, provided they flew as advertised, intermediate-range ballistic missiles of equal worthiness. The compet.i.tors now had to deliver on that question of whether and how each would fly.

JOHN BRUCE MEDARIS AND WERNHER VON BRAUN.

Schriever's opponent in this compet.i.tion was Major General John Bruce Medaris of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps. He was a man with visions of his own. A handsome, colorful figure to whom the art of promoting his cause seemed to come naturally, he was also an eccentric with a flair for showmanship. He sported a broad and bristling guardsman's mustache and was given to greeting visitors dressed in old-fashioned officer's riding breeches and boots, a short horse whip called a quirt tucked under an arm. To emphasize a point as he spoke, he would snap the quirt down and whack the side of a boot. He was also fond of the trappings of military authority. Anyone approaching his office was given notice that he was about to enter the precincts of an important man. He posted guards outside his door-military policemen in white gloves, spankingly pressed uniforms, and spit-shined boots. Yet for all these pretensions, Medaris was a highly intelligent officer with intiative and a talent for organization. Born in a small town in Ohio, he had joined the Marine Corps in 1918 at the age of just sixteen after the United States had entered the First World War and served as a rifleman in France. At Ohio State University in Columbus after the war studying for a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, he became cadet captain of the school's ROTC unit and won a commission in the Regular Army through a compet.i.tive examination. Bored by a couple of years of duty with infantry regiments, he had switched to ordnance, the branch of the Army that deals with the manufacture, storage, and supply of weapons, ammunition, and other military equipment. There he could exercise his engineering knowledge. But like many officers who found life in the shrunken, neglected Army between the wars too dull and underpaid to be borne, he had dropped out in the 1920s to go into business, retaining a connection through Reserve status.

In 1939, with the Army gearing up to take on the n.a.z.is and the j.a.panese, he had been recalled to active duty and by 1944 was a full colonel and chief ordnance officer for General Omar Bradley's First Army in the Normandy landing and the campaign through France. Ten years later his career had flourished to the point where he wore the twin stars of a major general and was a.s.sistant chief of the Ordnance Corps at the Pentagon. In February 1956, he was sent to Redstone to form a new Army Ballistic Missile Agency out of the disparate guided missile activities there. He was granted special powers of decision and contracting similar to those Schriever had acquired in the Gillette Procedures. He had also been given a mission by a jealous Army, a mission to take the Army's aspirations in rocketry, which had no limit, just as far as he could.

Medaris's ace in the game of rocket poker that was about to be played was, of course, the Germans. They had "demonstrated capability as the best qualified group of ballistic missile engineers outside the Soviet Union, if not in the world," he was to boast. They represented, along with the American scientists and technicians who had worked under them in the 200-mile-range Redstone missile program at the a.r.s.enal, "over 9,000 man-years experience in guided missiles and rockets." Their leader, Dr. Wernher von Braun, was a man of renown in the 1950s, regarded as the father of the V-2 (although the missile had, in fact, a number of fathers) and thus the leading rocket scientist of the day. Given his past, he naturally had his detractors. Thomas "Tom" Lehrer, the mathematician and satirical singer and songwriter, composed a ditty caricaturizing von Braun: "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

Lehrer was unfair to von Braun in one respect. Von Braun did care where his rockets came down. He was a professional. He wanted his rockets to hit the targets at which they were aimed. But Lehrer nonetheless touched the essential amorality of the man. Rockets in themselves did not fascinate Wernher von Braun. His real pa.s.sion was the exploration of s.p.a.ce. He dreamt of journeys to the moon and Mars. He saw the advancement of rocketry as the path that would one day enable man to roam that previously unreachable realm. "s.p.a.ceships will eventually be used by everybody," he told Daniel Lang of The New Yorker The New Yorker magazine in an interview in 1951. "All this military application of rockets-it's only a part of the picture. A means to an end," he said. In other words, it didn't matter to von Braun whether he built rockets for Hitler or the Americans, as long as his endeavors led into s.p.a.ce. magazine in an interview in 1951. "All this military application of rockets-it's only a part of the picture. A means to an end," he said. In other words, it didn't matter to von Braun whether he built rockets for Hitler or the Americans, as long as his endeavors led into s.p.a.ce.

An elegant German aristocrat, Wernher von Braun was the son of a n.o.ble family that traced its lineage back to the 1200s in the east Prussian region of Silesia. Almost all of the region's two provinces of Upper and Lower Silesia and three neighboring German provinces were erased at the end of the Second World War when Stalin carved a slice off eastern Poland to move the border of Ukraine farther west. Poland was awarded compensatory territory in eastern Germany along the line of the Oder and Neisse Rivers. Virtually the entire German population behind the river line in Silesia and the rest of the area, about 12 million persons in all, was summarily expelled and driven west into the remainder of Germany. Von Braun, born in 1912, was the first engineer and scientist in the family. His father, Magnus Freiherr von Braun, educated in law and economics, had been a high-ranking civil servant, initially in the Prussian state and then, after the First World War, in the fragile Weimar Republic that preceded the n.a.z.is. His mother, the daughter of another aristocratic family and an amateur astronomer, started him on his quest for s.p.a.ce by giving him an astronomic telescope when he was thirteen. Stargazing with the telescope aroused a pa.s.sion for astronomy, which in turn led to dreams of s.p.a.ce travel. In 1930, when he was about to begin studies at the Techn