A Fiery Peace In A Cold War Part 9

Getz proceeded to cast a reporting net that encompa.s.sed every detail of every enterprise in Schriever's little empire. For example, each month prior to the main briefing, the Air Force project officers and the Ramo-Wooldridge engineers working on a missile had to get together, reach agreement on the current status of all aspects-engines, guidance, warhead, and so forth-and then sign their a.s.sent on a chart that ill.u.s.trated this. Milestones were established, such as a completion date for each stage in the testing of a missile. The milestones were often not met, of course, and when this happened, the charts had to indicate exactly how much slippage had occurred and why.

The Black Sat.u.r.day briefing, held in the Arbor Vitae control room, became the major event of the month at headquarters. Getz was its maestro. Prior to arriving in California, his nickname had been "Bill," from his middle name of William. Soon, behind his back, he was being called "Cecil B. De Getz," after Cecil B. DeMille, the famous Hollywood producer and director of spectacular epics like The Ten Commandments The Ten Commandments and and Samson and Delilah. Samson and Delilah. Getz's productions began at 8:45 in the morning and extended until well after 5:00 in the afternoon, with ten-minute personal relief breaks at midmorning and mid-afternoon and an hour off between noon and 1:00 for lunch. He ran the sessions with ruthless efficiency, because he knew this was what Schriever wanted in order to pack as much as possible into a single day. A missile team would be allotted fifty minutes to make its presentation. If a briefer was starting to run over on his time, Getz would flash on a screen behind him a sketch of a hook pulling a man off a stage. The trick never failed to elicit laughter from the briefing room, but if the briefer ignored the message, Getz would abruptly inform him, even in the middle of a sentence, "Time's up!" Getz's productions began at 8:45 in the morning and extended until well after 5:00 in the afternoon, with ten-minute personal relief breaks at midmorning and mid-afternoon and an hour off between noon and 1:00 for lunch. He ran the sessions with ruthless efficiency, because he knew this was what Schriever wanted in order to pack as much as possible into a single day. A missile team would be allotted fifty minutes to make its presentation. If a briefer was starting to run over on his time, Getz would flash on a screen behind him a sketch of a hook pulling a man off a stage. The trick never failed to elicit laughter from the briefing room, but if the briefer ignored the message, Getz would abruptly inform him, even in the middle of a sentence, "Time's up!"

Schriever's subordinates had aptly dubbed the monthly briefing Black Sat.u.r.day because "the Boss" was not interested in good news. At a time when the upper echelons of the American military were beginning to suffer from the disease of professional arrogance and lack of imagination, and the fare of a normal briefing was "Progress," Schriever took an opposite approach. He wanted to know the problems, on the not irrational a.s.sumption that if they were solved, success would take care of itself. "I don't like to be surprised," he would say. "Give me the bad news. I can take it. I will not fire you for giving me the bad news. I will fire you if you don't give me the bad news." The briefings thus tended to be succinct recitals of woe, with frequently tentative ideas on how a team was going to solve a problem that continued to baffle. The discussions that followed sometimes helped, sometimes not. The paperwork burden and the time consumed in team meetings to reach agreement on the status of every aspect of every project made Getz the most unpopular man in the command. Yet no one dared ignore him because they knew that Schriever wanted what he was demanding. And there was no revolt because all understood that the system enforced discipline and teamwork. Everyone was made aware of what everyone else was doing and thus could pitch in to a.s.sist. Most important of all, the focus stayed where it mattered-the gradual elimination of impediments to getting the job done.

THE TRIALS OF ATLAS AND A CHRISTMAS SURPRISE.

The launching of Atlas at Cape Canaveral began on June 11, 1957, with an ostensible failure, a left punch for Schriever to absorb after taking a right, as the disappointment came just twenty-two days after Thiel and Mettler incinerated Thor 103 on its pad by overpressurization of the LOX tank. In Atlas, an ICBM designed to hurl its warhead 6,330 miles, Bennie was dealing with a missile larger and more complicated than the intermediate-range Thor and thus considerably more p.r.o.ne to trouble. Atlas was approximately seventy-five feet long, ten feet in diameter, and had in excess of 40,000 parts. In firing position, it was as high as a seven-story office building. When fully loaded with fuel and a simulated hydrogen bomb in its reentry vehicle warhead, it weighed 243,000 pounds, in contrast to Thor's 110,000.

Where the 1,725-mile Thor could loft itself with one of Hall's booster engines, improved to 150,000 pounds of thrust, Atlas needed 360,000 pounds. To obtain it, three engines were lined up at the base of the rocket, two 150,000-pound boosters, one on each side, with a 60,000-pound sustainer engine set between them. Atlas was what is referred to in the guided missile business as a stage and a half rocket. All three engines at the base fired simultaneously for liftoff, but two minutes into the flight, after the rocket had long cleared the dense air of the atmosphere and was on its way to maximum speed, the two booster engines were cut off by a radio control signal from the ground during testing and by the onboard inertial guidance system after it had been deployed. Another signal fired a release mechanism on the framework to which the big boosters were mounted and they fell away back to earth. The 60,000-pound sustainer engine in the middle, separately attached to the bulkhead at the base of the fuel tank fuselage, was kept burning for close to another three minutes to bring the Atlas within a fraction of the 16,000 miles per hour necessary to hurl the warhead the full 6,330 miles. With a last signal, tiny "retro" rockets at the front of the fuselage blasted into life. They snapped the warhead free from the fuselage, sending it off on its curved journey upward through s.p.a.ce, reaching a point more than 800 miles above the earth at the apogee, before arching down to its target. This, in any case, was how the Atlas was supposed to work. Getting it to do so was another matter now to be undertaken.

Because they were moving through uncharted terrain, everyone involved-Convair, the Ramo-Wooldridge group, and Bennie's project officers-had decided to test the Atlas in four stages. The Series A missiles would check out the functioning and air-worthiness of the fuel tank fuselage and the propulsion system. These missiles would be the lightest in the series at 181,000 pounds, as they would be equipped with only the two main booster engines, not the sustainer. They would also be flown the shortest distance, a mere 530 miles. The completeness of the missiles and the length of the flights would then gradually increase through Series B and C, until, in Series D, missiles identical to those that were to be deployed would be tested at the full range of 6,330 miles.

Atlas 4A, the first readied for flight (missile numbers often did not correspond to launch sequence because flaws would be discovered in preflight tests and another missile subst.i.tuted), reached Cape Canaveral in late March 1957. It came, as all of its relatives would, by trailer truck on a 2,622-mile journey across the continent from the Convair plant at San Diego. Even with the nose cone removed and shipped separately to shorten it, the missile was still too long and bulky to fly to the Cape in a C-124 Globemaster. And so a special sixty-four-foot-long trailer was fashioned, a steel cradle on wheels, and the missile, wrapped in a canvas shroud, was loaded into it and the trailer hooked to a truck. The trip took nine days because, for safety reasons, driving was restricted to daylight. There were armed guards on the trailer truck and in accompanying vehicles.

At dawn on June 11, 1957, Atlas 4A stood on the launch pad, the stainless steel of its fuel tank fuselage section gleaming in the first washes of the sun rising over the Atlantic. The day of a missile launching at the Cape could no longer be kept hidden. There were too many leaks and giveaway signs of preparation, and so on this day thousands of spectators lined Cocoa Beach five miles to the south to watch America's first intercontinental ballistic missile soar in the inauguration of a new epoch. The countdown in the blockhouse had started earlier, at 5:00 A.M. A.M., half an hour before sunrise. The Atlas had pa.s.sed months and months of preflight checks of the components in California and then of the a.s.sembled missile at the Cape, including a short, static firing of the engines on the launch pad. It was rigged out with telemetry sensors to monitor its performance during the flight. The care of the preparations was evident in the monotonous but confident manner in which the countdown unfolded for three hours and twenty minutes. There were only two hitches that paused it, both toward the end of the sequence. A joint in a line feeding LOX from a storage tank to the missile sprang a leak and had to be replaced. Then an electrical circuit breaker tripped, cutting off the connection between a control console in the blockhouse and the missile. A Convair technician walked out of the blockhouse to the electrical transfer room near the launch pad and the now fully fueled missile and reset the breaker. The blockhouse door was closed again and the last steps of the count completed. Little green lights flashed across the control panel of the Convair test conductor, who had led the countdown, as he pressed the b.u.t.ton to start the ignition sequence.

To the relief and joy of those on the Cape so intimately involved and the bystanders on Cocoa Beach, Atlas 4A rose and began a magnificent flight, for twenty-four seconds. Then, all of a sudden, the engines lost thrust. The flare of rockets no longer lit the sky. Only orange smoke billowed from the engine nozzles. The Atlas flipped wildly through a loop-the-loop and fell back into its trail of fire. The voice of the range safety officer at Central Control came up on the blockhouse intercom: "Destruct." This time justifiably, he punched the b.u.t.ton flashing a radio signal to the packet of explosives on the missile and scattered the Atlas in pieces of flaming debris. "That was a total waste," someone in the despondent blockhouse said. "h.e.l.l, no," replied Edward Doll, one of the Ramo-Wooldridge engineers, pointing out that what looked bad was actually good news. They had just watched the Atlas gyrate through a series of extreme contortions in the sky and the missile had not broken up from the stress. Karel Bossart's radical weight-saving design of the Atlas fuselage that doubled as its fuel tank had been a worry for everyone. John Medaris and Wernher von Braun had just been shown to be self-serving Ca.s.sandras in predicting that the "balloon," as they had scornfully referred to the Atlas, would crumple under the strains of liftoff and flight. "We proved it could stand three G's," Doll said, engineer's shorthand for three times the force of gravity. And Bossart was present at the Cape that day to witness the vindication of his idea. Bennie could thus console himself with a partial success, but he knew that the Pentagon and the White House, like the spectators on Cocoa Beach, would see the launch as another of Schriever's missiles gone down in flames or burned up on the pad.

Partial success was certainly not enough after the second Atlas launched, 6A, which took almost three and a half months to ready, put in a virtually identical performance on September 25, 1957. The rocket flew for thirty-two seconds before the failure of a LOX regulator, as the telemetry would reveal, led to another loss of thrust and destruction. Jacobson's promising accomplishments with Thor provided some diversionary comfort, but this vanished that October 4 with the shock of Sputnik. The pressure on Schriever ratcheted up enormously. The third Atlas, 12A, had to fly as promised and everyone involved, from the launch crew in the blockhouse at Canaveral to those waiting at the other end of the direct Teletype line at the Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles, shared the unnerving suspense. The rocket's booster engines burned faultlessly for the full two minutes after liftoff on December 17, 1957, the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Wright brothers' flight, sending the missile the 530 miles down the Caribbean range for which the flight had been programmed. Eisenhower was in Paris, where he could pa.s.s on the encouraging word to the other Allied leaders at a NATO meeting he was attending. Even Democratic Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who was cranking up his Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee to give the administration a thrashing, had a compliment. "That is mighty good news," he said.

It was clear by this time that there was a major flaw in the 150,000-pound-thrust booster engine, a flaw that had been responsible for the loss of thrust on the original Atlas launch of June 11, 1957, and for some of the failures in the Thor and Jupiter launches. The flaw was the worst kind an engineer could face, because it appeared randomly, sometimes twice in a row but on average about every five or six launches. The rest of the time the engines functioned fine. And to make the problem still more intractable, the engineers disagreed on where the flaw lay. Thiel's former German colleagues on the von Braun team told him right away, and as it turned out correctly, that the defect was in the turbo-pump, which mixed the RP-1 and LOX together at extremely high speed as they were fed into the burn chamber of the engine. They were convinced that the force of liftoff caused the bearings within the pump to shift. The bearings were then seizing up in flight, stopping the pump and the flow of fuel to the engine and, if the pump overheated enough, causing it to blow up and take the missile with it. The answer, they said, was to put a restraining mechanism on the bearings to hold them in place. The Ramo-Wooldridge rocket engine specialist disagreed. He said the failures were being caused by a misalignment of the outlet from the fuel tank to the pump.

Ed Hall, who had been a.s.signed by Bennie to develop a revolutionary ICBM with a solid-fueled rather than a liquid-fueled engine, was off on his own brainstorming and did not get involved. The argument endured for months with others injecting their guesses and no solution in view. Bennie, who had come to have a particular trust in Mettler, asked for a memo advising him what to do. Mettler urged him to keep firing missiles until they could sort out an answer because the failures were random and they were learning so much with each launch. Most Air Force generals, their careers at stake as Schriever's was, would have halted, focused on fixing the engine no matter how much time was lost, and then resumed testing. In his race with the Soviets, time was a commodity with which Bennie Schriever was unwilling to part. He took Mettler's advice and pressed on. The turbopump was not fixed until well into the fall of 1958.

After that first successful Atlas flight on the fifty-fourth anniversary of the opening of the aerial age, there were days of triumph and months of heartbreak, but the ultimate goal of an operational intercontinental missile force as a deterrent to a Soviet surprise attack was always in sight. On August 2, 1958, the second Atlas in the B Series, 4B, gave, on signal, a perfect rendition of the five prescribed steps of flight. The booster engines shut down after two minutes, the release mechanism jettisoned them, the sustainer continued to burn for nearly another three minutes until it too was cut off, the two diminutive vernier engines made the final corrections in speed and angle, and the miniature retro rockets then came to life and freed the warhead to take flight through s.p.a.ce. On November 28, another missile in the B Series, Atlas 12B, became the first to fly the entire 6,330-mile course.

Then came a Christmas surprise thought up by Mettler and several Convair engineers. On December 28, 1958, Atlas 10B, fitted with a special aerodynamic nose cone, blasted off a pad at Cape Canaveral. Inside the nose cone were two battery-powered tape recorders fitted to two radio transmitters, a pair of each in case one of the devices should fail. Instead of being sent on the high looping course of an ICBM, Atlas 10B was directed along a lower course parallel to the earth, and instead of cutting off the booster and sustainer engines, they were kept burning until the entire missile reached the speed of 17,300 miles per hour, escaped the gravity pull of earth, and flew into orbit. Every 101 minutes, it completed a circle of the globe. On the thirteenth pa.s.s over the United States, another radio signal from Canaveral turned on the tape recorders and transmitters and the voice of Eisenhower broadcast Christmas greetings to the peoples of the earth. "Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you from a satellite circling in outer s.p.a.ce," the president said. "My message is a simple one. Through this unique means I convey to you and to all mankind America's wish for peace on earth and good will toward men everywhere." Project Score, as the project had been code-named, lacked the shock of Sputnik, but it was still quite an accomplishment. Spent of its fuel, the Atlas had become a satellite weighing 8,800 pounds. It continued circling the earth for thirty-three days, traveling 12.5 million miles before falling back into the atmosphere near Midway Island in the Pacific on January 21, 1959, burning up in a fiery climax.

The next six months were the most heartbreaking time. Testing of the C and then the D Series, the model that was to be deployed initially, began with a string of failures. Only two of the eight missiles of both series launched during the first half of 1959 were truly successful. The other six did not just blow up on the pad, but neither did they meet most of their test objectives. The mid-1958 "Ph.D. type" operational capability that Trevor Gardner had dreamed of back in 1954 had proven impossible to meet, but so did the June 1959 deployment date that Schriever set. The testing did improve the accuracy of the missile during the first half of 1959, eventually attaining a consistent accuracy of 2.3 miles by subst.i.tuting an aerodynamic ablative reentry vehicle for the blunt-nose Mark 2 heat shield type first designed for Atlas. As had happened with Thor, occasional random misses were occurring in the launches aimed at the circle of hydrophones off Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. And again as with Thor, a.n.a.lysis convinced the engineers that the high winds in the upper atmosphere were from time to time catching the heat shield of the Mark 2 and pushing it off trajectory. While Bennie had been willing to tolerate the flaw in Thor because it was an intermediate-range missile and he was in a rush to finish the project, he was unwilling to ignore it in America's first ICBM.

To obtain an ablative RV, they could not simply copy the one von Braun had pioneered for Jupiter, because the Atlas's nose cone would be reentering the atmosphere at the much higher speed of 16,000 miles per hour, thus generating a lot more heat. As the ablative type worked by coating the nose cone with a compound of plastic and other material that burned off on reentry-deflecting heat from the nose cone itself and the hydrogen bomb inside-the question was exactly how much and what composition of coating was required. At the suggestion of Simon Ramo, Schriever had commissioned Lockheed to create a three-stage rocket called the X-17, or Athena, for the precise purpose of mimicking the conditions under which an ICBM warhead reentered the atmosphere. A scaled-down model of the RV was mounted on the rocket and the first two stages launched it into s.p.a.ce. The third stage was then ignited and fired the nose cone back down into the atmosphere. The X-17 turned out to be an example of the technologist outsmarting himself with gimmickry a bit too fancy for the moment. The X-17 declined to go fast enough on the downward leg to replicate the reentry heat of an ICBM warhead.

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

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

WHOSE MISSILE GAP?.

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

The Soviet leader had a receptive audience in the United States for these lies. Aroused by Sputnik, Democratic Party leaders accepted the purported missile gap as real and accused the administration of allowing the United States to lapse into a position of strategic inferiority. One of those crying out the loudest was the Democratic senator from Ma.s.sachusetts, John F. Kennedy, who was to make the missile gap one of the central issues in his victorious presidential campaign of 1960. Influential fearmongers like Paul Nitze and chronic alarmists in the press like the Alsop brothers, Joseph and Stewart, who shared a syndicated column, added to the presumed state of peril. Nor were the military services averse to exploiting the situation in order to force an increase in the Pentagon budget. The worst offender was the Air Force's a.s.sistant chief of staff for intelligence, Major General James Walsh. In November 1959, he predicted that the Soviets would have 50 ICBMs by mid-1960 and "an operational ICBM force of about 250 (185 on launcher) by mid-1961, 500 (385 on launcher) by mid-1962, and 800 (640 on launcher) by mid-1963." Eisenhower, who knew Khrushchev was lying from the U-2 photography and other intelligence, which, for security reasons, he refused to share with his opposition, attempted rea.s.surance but was simply not believed. (To his credit, Schriever did not join in fostering the scare, although he naturally benefited from the loosening of the budget strings.) The truth was that by 1959 there was a missile gap. The gap was widening steadily in favor of the United States, not the Soviet Union. Soviet rocket engineers like Sergei Korolev had been ahead through the mid-1950s with soundly constructed medium-and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. After Bennie Schriever and the Schoolhouse Gang got going in the summer of 1954, however, the key in the ignition had been turned and the motor started to reverse positions in the race once it reached the level of an ICBM. With the a.s.surance of a 1,500-pound hydrogen bomb for the warhead by the time the missile was ready, Schriever and company could commence by designing a practical ICBM. They were not forced, as Korolev had been because the Soviet Union was three years later than the United States in acquiring the hydrogen bomb, to begin by designing a behemoth rocket capable of carrying a 5.4-ton fission, or atomic, warhead, and thus to produce a totally impractical ICBM. By mid-1960, when the Air Force's intelligence chief predicted that the Soviet Union would have fifty ICBMs, it had emplaced the only four of Korolev's R-7 proto-ICBMs it was ever to deploy at Plesetsk, 600 miles north of Moscow. Khrushchev was to admit years later that the R-7 had "represented only a symbolic counterthreat to the United States."

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

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

A VICTORY DESPITE THE BUGS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solid fueling had enabled Hall to shrink an ICBM. The Minuteman he described would be a small boy compared to an Atlas or a t.i.tan. It would weigh, including its solid propellant, about 65,000 pounds at liftoff, compared to 243,000 pounds for Atlas, and would stand approximately fifty-five feet tall, in contrast to ninety feet for t.i.tan. Yet he had sacrificed none of the reach and potency of the ICBM weapon. His rocket was a three-stage affair, each stage smaller and lighter than the last. Stage I, at 50,100 pounds, would provide liftoff and bring the rocket to initial velocity. As it shut down and fell away, the engine of Stage II would kick in and increase speed. Then as it too went silent and dropped off, the engine of Stage III, which weighed only 5,800 pounds, including the solid fuel, the missile's guidance system, and the ablative-type reentry vehicle at the nose with a one-megaton hydrogen bomb inside, would ignite and propel the rocket to terminal velocity for release of the warhead. Nor would there be any scrimping in range. Minuteman would throw its warhead the same 6,330 miles as Atlas and t.i.tan with a CEP, circular error probable, of little more than a mile.

There was a proviso on warhead yield, Hall said. The nuclear weapons designers would have to size a one-megaton bomb down to 500 pounds. Given the rapidity with which the art of downsizing hydrogen weapons was progressing, Hall said, he did not doubt that this could be done by the time the first Minutemen began to flow to an operational squadron. Schriever and Terhune agreed. If the Air Force was willing to settle for a half-megaton warhead of 350 pounds, the Minuteman's range could be extended to a record 7,480 miles. (The nuclear weaponsmiths were indeed displaying an astonishing apt.i.tude for miniaturizing their h.e.l.lish contrivances. When deployed, Atlas and t.i.tan I would both carry thermonuclear warheads yielding four times the one megaton Schriever had counted sufficient at the outset back in 1953, with no appreciable gain in weight beyond the 1,500-pound limit. The first 150 Minutemen were to be fitted with a one-megaton warhead and those that followed with a higher-yield bomb of 1.2 megatons.) Hall's scheme for deploying Minuteman was as radical as the weapon itself. His design, he explained, was intended to deter the Soviets from ever resorting to a surprise nuclear attack on the United States. His plan was to build 1,616 Minutemen (the total included spares) by the end of calendar year 1965 and to deploy them in "missile fields" of one hundred or so. The rockets would be dispersed three miles apart, every one in an underground silo sufficiently hardened with concrete and steel so that if the Soviets. .h.i.t the field with a five-megaton warhead, only one rocket would be lost. The silo covers would then slide open and the remaining Minutemen would be launched right out of the silos in retaliation. Because of their solid fuel, the rockets could be stored in the silos indefinitely. They would be checked constantly to be certain that every one was in working order and that the inertial guidance systems, internal to the missiles and therefore unjammable, were always up and running. If a malfunction was found, the missile would be removed from its silo and replaced by a spare until it could be repaired. Everything would be automated. Unlike the liquid-fueled ICBMs, which had to be launched individually after fifteen minutes of fueling, two or more remote control centers, also dispersed for survival, could fire individual Minutemen or salvo fifty at once, each with the coordinates of a different Soviet city cranked into its inertial guidance. The Russians would, of course, learn of the missile fields and the virtually instantaneous launch capability of Minuteman and draw the appropriate conclusion.

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

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

"YOU COULDN'T KEEP HIM IN THAT JOB"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet nothing that Ed Hall and Sam Phillips had ever done or would ever do would be more important than bringing Minuteman into existence. Schriever and his comrades had reversed the missile gap in favor of the United States with Atlas and t.i.tan. The creation of Minuteman now put the United States so far ahead in the strategic missile compet.i.tion that the Soviet Union was confronted not with a gap but with a chasm. Not until five years later, in 1966, did the Soviets acquire their first solid-fueled ICBM, designated SS-11 by NATO. By then the United States had 800 Minutemen waiting in silos in the Western and Midwestern states and the total would rise to 1,000 in April 1967 after 200 Minuteman II missiles, a larger and improved version that carried a still bigger warhead, were added to the force. Shortly after that first successful launch at Cape Canaveral on February 1, 1961, LeMay and Tommy Power at SAC proposed that the United States build and deploy 8,000 Minutemen. Robert McNamara, secretary of defense in the new administration of John Kennedy, who had a.s.sumed the presidency in January, decided that 1,000 was enough.

The advent of Minuteman put an end to the fear of a nuclear Pearl Harbor that had haunted Eisenhower. The Air Force organized the Minutemen into wings of 150 missiles, each wing composed of three squadrons of fifty, with five flights of ten comprising a squadron. Every flight was under a separate control center, housed in steel and concrete capsules placed well underground, with entry and exit through equally st.u.r.dy concrete shafts, and manned by two launch officers. Sufficient redundancy was built into the communications system so that if incoming Soviet missiles damaged it, any one of the control centers could fire all fifty Minutemen in the squadron. In practice it took more than a minute for the launch control officers to fire Minuteman. They needed two to three minutes. They had to verify the coded go command before each inserted a separate key into one of the two locks on the launch sequence control computer. Then they simultaneously turned the keys and in sixty seconds the missiles were gone. With the radar and other alert systems the United States possessed in 1961, and was to elaborate extensively in the years to come, this was certainly fast enough for hundreds of Minutemen to fly out of their silos before the Soviet missiles struck. And even if by some miracle the Soviets managed to hit first with everything they had, there would still be plenty of Minutemen intact in their steel and concrete shelters to doom Russia. No Soviet statesman with a vestige of sanity could risk a surprise attack.

BOOK VII.

A SPY IN ORBIT.

AND A GAME OF.

NUCLEAR DICE.

A WOULD-BE SPY IN THE SKY GOES AWRY.

Minuteman was not the only final accomplishment bequeathed by Bennie Schriever and his colleagues. There was another, Discoverer XIV, in its way a complement to Minuteman. On August 18, 1960, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, the first successful photo-reconnaissance satellite rose atop a Thor rocket to photograph, in a single mission, more of the Soviet Union from s.p.a.ce than the U-2s had accomplished in all twenty-four flights over Russia during the four years before one was shot down just three and a half months earlier. "It was as if an enormous floodlight had been turned on in a darkened warehouse," said Albert Wheelon, a Stanford and MIT physicist who was part of the Ramo-Wooldridge team before becoming the CIA's first deputy director for science and technology in 1963. Schriever had taken charge of the Air Force's s.p.a.ce satellite program, Weapon System 117L, back in 1955. It had originated with the Air Development Center at Wright-Patterson, but since he was eventually going to have to supply the rockets to lift the satellites into orbit, Schriever had reasoned that he ought to have control. Tommy Power, whose empire as commanding general of ARDC in Baltimore included the Wright-Patterson laboratories, agreed and gave the project to him. WS-117L encompa.s.sed a family of satellites to perform photographic, electronic, and infrared surveillance. One of the photographic satellites planned was a so-called readout version. The film would be developed aboard the satellite and then transmitted to earth. The second type envisioned a system whereby the camera would feed its undeveloped film into a capsule. Once full, the capsule would be ejected. An attached parachute would burst open after it entered the atmosphere and an aircraft trailing a trapezelike hook would catch the chute canopy or its lines and winch the capsule aboard.

Nothing of substance got done, once more because Donald Quarles was imposing his "Po