American Intelligence on Soviet Missile Programs, 1945-1954

THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHTQ U A R T E R L Y

Volume 21, Number 32014

www.spacehistory101.com

IGY SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITIES AND THE PREHISTORY OF

TIROS

AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE ON SOVIET MISSILE PROGRAMS,

1945-1954

AN INTERVIEW WITH JAMES WEBB:

ADMINISTRATION OF EXPLORATION

MAKING HISTORY:THE RAMOS PROGRAM

FFeeaattuurreess

4 The Promise and the Threats of Satellite Capabilities: IGY Scientific Communities and the Prehistory of TIROSBy Angelina Long Callahan

21 An Interview with James WebbBy T. H. Baker

37 American Intelligence on Soviet Missile Programs, 1945-1954By Christopher Gainor

47 Making History: The RAMOS ProgramBy Doran J. Baker, A.T. Stair Jr., Bartell C. Jensen,

M.K.Jeppesen

ContentsVolume 21 • Number 3 2014


BBooookk RReevviieewwss

54 JJuusstt SSaayy YYeess:: WWhhaatt II’’vvee LLeeaarrnneedd aabboouutt LLiiffee,, LLuucckk,, aanndd tthhee PPuurrssuuiitt ooff OOppppoorrttuunniittyyBook by Bernard Schwartz

Review by Scott Sacknoff

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Review by Asif A. Siddiqi

57 TThhee IInntteerrnnaattiioonnaall AAttllaass ooff MMaarrss EExxpplloorraattiioonn::TThhee FFiirrsstt FFiivvee DDeeccaaddeessBook by Philip Stooke

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Review by Linda Billings

FRONT COVER CAPTION

Circa 1957, the artwork was used by Convair Astronautics (SanDiego, California), a division of General Dynamics, in an adver-tisement celebrating the successful test flight of the AtlasIntercontinental Ballistic Missile. The first successful test launchof an SM-65 Atlas missile took place on 17 December 1957.Though the artwork is unsigned, Convair's resident artist at thattime was John Sentovic. In 1994, General Dynamics sold itsSpace Systems Division to Martin Marietta (now LockheedMartin). Permission to use the image has been granted byLockheed Martin and the original ad can be found in the person-al archives of Paul Carsola, a researcher who has contributed toQuest in the past.

Q U E S T 21:3 201437


By Christopher Gainor

IInnttrroodduuccttiioonnOne of the most important and most misunderstood events

related to the history of American space exploration was the

United States Air Force’s decision in 1954 to give high priority

to the Atlas missile, America’s first intercontinental ballistic mis-

sile. The USAF’s decision to move ahead with ICBMs also led

to the creation of the Titan and Thor missiles. These liquid fueled

rockets were designed to loft nuclear weapons to military targets

in the Soviet Union, but it turned out that all of them were better

suited for use as space launch vehicles. Thus Atlas and Titan

rockets, and the Delta rockets that derived from Thor, formed the

heart of America’s launch vehicle infrastructure from 1958 until

the end of the twentieth century.

Accounts of the early years of America’s space programs

have stressed the smaller Redstone rocket built by the U.S. Army

team led by the rocket experts from Germany under the leader-

ship of Wernher von Braun, and the Vanguard satellite launch

vehicle built under the supervision of the U.S. Navy. A derivative

of the Redstone launched America’s first artificial satellite of the

Earth, Explorer 1, and a handful of satellites that followed.

Vanguard was used for even fewer launches. Within a year of the

first U.S. satellite, Atlas and Thor were being employed to

launch satellites and space probes, and soon they and Titan rock-

ets were launching the overwhelming majority of U.S. satellites

and other space vehicles.1

While von Braun and his team played an important part in

the early U.S. space program, including the very early satellites,

the Redstones used to loft two U.S. astronauts on suborbital

flights in 1961, and their subsequent work for NASA developing

the Saturn family of launch vehicles for the Apollo program,

their importance has probably been exaggerated in part because

of von Braun’s prominence in 1950s and 1960s America as a

promoter of space exploration. Von Braun and his associates

even wrote a number of early histories of space exploration, cre-

ating what has been called the “Huntsville School” of spaceflight

history.2

The history of Atlas and other Air Force-developed rockets

used as space launch vehicles was lost in the emphasis on activ-

ities of the von Braun team. In recent years, Gen. Bernard

Schriever, the person who spearheaded development of Atlas and

other missiles inside the Air Force, has received overdue recog-

nition for his work.3 But the USAF’s decision in 1954 to give

Atlas a high priority for development has been surrounded first

by secrecy and then by controversy. Much of the controversy

stems from the fact that the Soviet Union launched the first arti-

ficial satellite of the Earth, Sputnik, in 1957 atop its own R-7

ICBM well before the United States could launch a satellite of its

own. Historians Robert L. Perry and Edmund Beard, who

focused on the actions and attitudes inside the USAF, criticized

the air force for its concentration on aircraft during this period at

the expense of guided missiles because of the attachment of air

force officers to piloted aircraft.4 Beard, in his influential book,

Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics, repeat-

ed the widespread belief that the Soviet Union had defeated the

United States in the race to develop the first ICBM, and argued

that the United States could have developed an ICBM “consider-

ably earlier” than it did, but waited until 1954 to begin its ICBM

program while the Soviet Union began work on its ICBM in

1946. Both these arguments reflected beliefs that were wide-

spread in the United States as a result of the controversy that fol-

lowed Sputnik.5

More recent historical examinations of the history of both

the Soviet and American missile and space programs have

thrown into question many of the assumptions that arose from

the Sputnik controversy.6 One of the big questions that has been

raised deals with what American authorities knew—or didn’t

AAMMEERRIICCAANN IINNTTEELLLLIIGGEENNCCEE OONN SSOOVVIIEETT MMIISSSSIILLEE PPRROOGGRRAAMMSS,, 11994455--11995544

General Bernard A. Schriever (right) with members of AvcoCooperation (today: Textron, Inc) inspects an experimental missilewarhead re-entry vehicle in 1959. Creating an effective nuclear-armed missile force was one of his main goals. Credit USAF Museum

Q U E S T 21:3 201438


know—about the state of Soviet Russia’s missile programs in

the early years of the Cold War in the first decade after World

War II. The question of American intelligence on missiles has

been raised in relation to the Air Force’s decision in 1954 to give

the Atlas missile a high priority for development. Therefore this

article will look at the question of what American authorities

knew about Soviet missile programs before and at the time they

decided in 1954 to build Atlas.

TThhee TTeeaa PPoott CCoommmmiitttteeeeThe USAF decided to give Atlas a high priority as a result

of the report of the Strategic Missiles Evaluation Committee,

which also became known as the von Neumann Committee, after

its chair, the Princeton mathematical genius John von Neuman,

and more popularly as the Tea Pot Committee, after its code

name.7 The committee was formed in October 1953 by Trevor

Gardner, the assistant to the secretary of the Air Force for

research and development, to look into America’s long-range

strategic missile programs. Von Neumann, who had immigrated

to the United States from Hungary to flee inter-war anti-semi-

tism, was also heavily involved in developing thermonuclear

weapons and sat on many military and scientific advisory

groups. In 1953, he had impressed both Gardner and an up-and-

coming Air Force officer named Bernard Schriever of the poten-

tial of thermonuclear weapons, which are also known as hydro-

gen and fusion bombs. Von Neumann told Gardner and

Schriever of how these new weapons had hundreds of times the

power of the atomic bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima

and Nagasaki in 1945, and that thermonuclear weapons then

under development would weigh in the neighborhood of a ton,

far less than the original atomic bombs. The great power and low

weight of these new weapons caused Gardner, Schriever and

others to look more seriously at missiles as a means of deliver-

ing thermonuclear weapons.8

The Tea Pot Committee split into three subcommittees,

with one reporting on the Snark cruise missile, a second report-

ing on the Navaho rocket-ramjet cruise missile, and the third,

which was headed by von Neumann himself, that reported on the

Atlas ballistic missile program that had been established in 1951

but had a low priority up to that time. At a meeting of the full Tea

Pot Committee, von Neumann summed up in a “masterly fash-

ion” and persuaded his colleagues that the Atlas was likely to

have the greatest success.9

The committee’s report went to Trevor Gardner on 10

February 1954. While the report said, “available intelligence

data are insufficient to make possible a positive estimate of the

progress being made by the Soviets in the development of inter-

continental ballistic missiles,” it added that evidence exists

showing Soviet “appreciation” of these missiles and “activity” in

the field. The committee report claimed that a Soviet lead in

ICBMs “certainly cannot be ruled out.” Based on von

Neumann’s strong concerns about the danger presented by the

Soviet Union, the report’s original draft had contained stronger

language about Soviet missiles, stating that “intelligence data …

indicate that the Soviet (sic) are active in the development of

ballistic missiles” and that the “Russians are probably signifi-

cantly ahead of us in long-range ballistic missiles.” But faced

with what Schriever’s biographer Neil Sheehan called “sparse

and inconclusive” information, the committee insisted on the

compromise language quoted above. Von Neumann added a per-

sonal statement warning of his “grave concern” about a Soviet

lead in this field. The fears about Soviet missiles were the main

justification given in the report to go ahead with Atlas and con-

tinue the other missiles.10

The work of the Tea Pot Committee contained strong but

ambiguous hints about what American authorities knew about

Soviet capabilities. Others involved in this decision muddied the

waters with statements about Soviet progress in long-range mis-

siles. Trevor Gardner was long concerned about the Soviet mis-

sile threat. Nearly a year before the Tea Pot Committee report,

he warned in a March 1953 article in Air Force Magazine that

the United States and the Soviet Union were in a race to devel-

op ballistic missiles. When he submitted his resignation as assis-

tant secretary of the Air Force in 1956 over his disagreements

with budget restraints of the time, Gardner wrote a number of

articles in popular magazines warning that the Russians could

gain a lead in ICBMs. Tea Pot Committee member Simon Ramo

Atlas, the Air Force’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, was anational priority and one of Gen. Schriever’s major achievements.(U.S. Air Force photo) Credit USAF Museum

Q U E S T 21:3 201439


highlighted in his 1988 memoir intelli-

gence findings in 1953 that he claimed

showed that the Soviets were “well

along” developing their own ICBM and

that the Soviets had an “early lead” over

the United States in the race for this

weapon.11 In the light of the Sputnik

controversy, these assertions were easy to

believe.

But now that sixty years have

passed since the time of the Tea Pot

Committee and the decision to build

Atlas, the time has come to ask what U.S.

military and intelligence agencies really

knew about what the Soviet Union was

doing with ICBMs. The opening of

Soviet archives after the end of the Cold

War in 1991 and the declassification of

many relevant American documents also

make this reassessment possible. The

assessment of American intelligence on

Soviet ICBM programs must begin with a

fresh look at what the Soviets were actu-

ally doing in this field.

SSoovviieett MMiissssiilleess aanndd BBoommbbeerrssUntil the final days of the Soviet

Union, American intelligence and mili-

tary officials knew little about the evolu-

tion of the Soviet ICBM program, partic-

ularly what happened during the first

decade following the end of World War

II. Popular accounts and Edmund Beard’s

influential work had described Soviet

rocket efforts as a coherent program with

the aim of developing an ICBM that start-

ed in 1946, eight years ahead of the

United States.12 The revised account of

the development of Soviet ICBMs, as it

began to emerge in the 1990s, has turned

out be be surprisingly similar to the evo-

lution of long-range missiles in the

United States. To provide some perspec-

tive on what American officials knew and

did not know about Soviet missile pro-

grams during that time, it is necessary to

look at what we know today about Soviet

nuclear bomb, missile and bomber air-

craft programs.

The Soviet Union had begun work

on the atomic bomb and long-range

bomber aircraft before World War II

ended. Assisted by spies in the United

States, Canada, the United Kingdom and

elsewhere, the Soviets were able to keep

track of developments in nuclear physics

and in the Manhattan Project that pro-

duced the first atomic bombs for the

United States. But President Harry S.

Truman’s disclosure to Soviet dictator

Josef Stalin at Potsdam in July 1945 of

American possession of the atomic

bomb, and the subsequent bombing of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, drove home to

Stalin the power and importance of this

new weapon, and it was only then that

Stalin ordered his team of nuclear physi-

cists, headed by Igor V. Kurchatov, to

accelerate their work on developing

nuclear weapons. This work bore fruit in

August 1949 when the first Soviet

nuclear weapon was exploded.13

Rocket and space travel enthusiasts

in the Soviet Union began developing

rockets and rocket engines starting in the

late 1920s, and their activities came

under the control of the Soviet military

in 1933. Their experimental work on

rockets was strongly affected by Stalin’s

Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, which

decimated the ranks of the Soviet military

and the Communist Party. Marshal

Mikhail N. Tukhachevsky who was in

charge of military armament programs,

including rockets, was arrested in June

1937 and executed. The arrests also

swept up many leading aircraft designers

such as Andrei N. Tupolev and rocket

engineers, most famously Sergei P.

Korolev. While both men survived the

terror and the war, many of their col-

leagues were executed or died of starva-

tion, disease, or overwork in the prison

camps of the gulag. When war clouds

gathered in 1939, Tupolev, Korolev, and

many of the surviving skilled prisoners,

were put to work in prison-based design

bureaus, where they spent most of the

war working mainly on aircraft. The

Soviet Air Force required fighter aircraft

to stave off the Luftwaffe more than it

needed bombers, so designs for Soviet

bomber aircraft languished during the

war. Soviet forces used only one type of

rocket during the war: the solid fuel

Katyusha artillery rocket.14

Late in the war Korolev and

Valentin P. Glushko, Russia’s top rocket

engine designer who had also been arrest-

ed, were allowed to return to rocket

design, and in 1944 they were freed while

they continued their work. In July 1944,

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill

asked Stalin for help locating parts from

a German V-2 ballistic missile that had

crashed in Poland shortly before the Red

Army overran the area. Stalin let British

and American experts inspect the area,

but only after his own forces had scoured

it for V-2 parts. Although many German

rocket engineers chose to surrender to

American forces at war’s end, others

agreed to work with the Soviets. The

Soviets set up an operation in Germany to

work with German experts to exploit

rocket and other technologies, including

nuclear technology and aircraft engines.

The leading rocket engineer who joined

the Soviets was Helmut Gröttrup, who

was responsible for the V-2’s guidance,

control and telemetry. Russian engineers,

including Korolev and Glushko, came to

Germany to help exploit rocket technolo-

gy.15

The Soviets invited German

experts in various fields to parties on 21

October 1946 that continued well into the

night. At 4:00 a.m. the next morning,

more than 2,552 German experts, includ-

ing 302 involved with missile programs,

were ordered onto trains that carried them

and their families to Russia. Although

German rocket experts continued to work

alongside Russians in the months that

followed and helped launch captured V-

2s in October and November 1947 at the

new Soviet launch site at Kapustin Yar,

near Stalingrad, increasingly the

Germans were made to work separately

from Soviet engineers. In 1948 the entire

German rocket group was moved to an

isolated location 300 km from Moscow.

As the Germans’ separation from the

Russians and from outside information

on scientific advances continued, their

value to the Soviet program decreased.

All but a handful of the Germans were

returned to East Germany by the end of

1953, and American intelligence officials

lost no time in interviewing them.

Because they had been separated by then

from the Soviet missile program for five

years or more, the information they had

for the Americans was of little value.16

In 1945 Stalin read a report written

for the German military on a rocket-pow-

ered long-range antipodal bomber by

Q U E S T 21:3 201440


Austrian rocket engineer Eugen Sänger

and his mathematician wife Irene Bredt.

This prompted Stalin to commission his

air force to work on a Soviet antipodal

bomber. A scheme in 1948 to kidnap

Sänger from his postwar home in France

failed when aviation engineer Georgii A.

Tokaty, who was sent to carry out the

task, defected to the West. By then, the

plans for the bomber were foundering

over the great difficulties involved build-

ing such a craft, and Tokaty’s value to the

west was limited because he was not

involved in the missile program.17

Stalin signed a ministerial decree

on 13 May 1946 establishing a high-level

committee to oversee missile programs

similar to a structure used for the nuclear

weapons program. In his 2010 account of

Soviet missile and space programs, histo-

rian Asif Siddiqi argued that missile pro-

grams were far less important to Stalin

and the top Soviet leadership than nuclear

weapons and bomber aircraft. While

Stalin met several times during these

years with leading aviation designers like

Tupolev and nuclear physicists like

Kurchatov, Stalin met only once with

Korolev, and Siddiqi noted that the high-

level missiles committee was dissolved in

1949. Unlike the United States but like

Nazi Germany, ballistic missiles in the

Soviet Union were put under the jurisdic-

tion of the Red Army’s Main Artillery

Directorate, because the Army, which had

enjoyed success with Katyusha rockets

during the war, expressed a greater inter-

est than the air force did in ballistic mis-

siles. The main missile design bureaus

were put under the Ministry of

Armaments, which was also separate

from the aviation industry. With the sup-

port of a powerful patron, Minister of

Armaments Dmitri F. Ustinov, Korolev

was put in charge of his own design

bureau in the northern suburbs of

Moscow.18

During their only meeting on 14

April 1947, Korolev reported to Stalin

about the state of rocket programs, and

Stalin responded with questions about the

relative merits of rockets and bomber air-

craft. Stalin had set Tupolev to work in

1943 on designing a bomber aircraft after

the Americans rejected requests to send

the Soviets bomber aircraft through the

Lend-Lease program that the United

States had set up to supply badly needed

arms and equipment to wartime allies

including the Soviet Union. Stalin had

hoped to get America’s most advanced

bomber, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress.

After three B-29s made emergency land-

ings in the Soviet Union in 1944 follow-

ing bombing raids on Japanese territory,

and a fourth crashed in Soviet territory,

Stalin refused to return the B-29s and

ordered Tupolev to create a Soviet replica

of the aircraft, which was far more

advanced than any Soviet aircraft at the

time.19

The early Tu-4s had serious devel-

opment problems, and the Tu-4 did not

enter service until 1949. The Tu-4’s limit-

ed range allowed it to reach only the

western United States on a one-way flight

from the Soviet Union, and only after

passing over Alaska and Canada.

Unhappy with the state of Soviet jet tech-

nology in 1951, Tupolev refused to

attempt to build a jet bomber with the

required range to attack the United States.

Stalin gave the job to the design bureau of

Vladimir M. Myasischev and provided it

with many resources to do the job.

Myasischev’s long-range jet bomber still

fell short of the range requirements for

round-trip flights to the American main-

land, and it was only built in limited num-

bers. Tupolev’s bureau began work in

1950 on a long-range bomber with turbo-

prop engines, the Tu-95, known in the

West as the Bear. The aircraft first flew in

1952 and entered service four years later.

Despite its limitations, it remains the

mainstay of the Russian long-range

bomber force to the present day. Steven

Zaloga, an authority on Russian forces,

contends that U.S. intelligence agencies

exaggerated the threat from Soviet

bombers, creating the “bomber gap” con-

troversy in 1955 and sparking massive

American spending on anti-aircraft mis-

siles and radars in Canada, Alaska,

Greenland, and the northern states to pro-

tect against Soviet bombers. Only when

U-2 reconnaissance aircraft began over-

flying the Soviet Union in 1956 did

American leaders learn the true dimen-

sions of the Soviet bomber threat.20

In the late 1940s, Korolev and his

team worked mainly on developing

Soviet rockets to match the German V-2

ballistic missile. After replicating the V-2

with the R-1 rocket, Korolev’s design

bureau proceeded in 1948 with the R-2

rocket, an uprated version of the R-1 with

a range of 600 km, and then with three

new rockets—a tactical missile known as

the R-11 to replace the R-2 with easier-to-

handle fuels, and two medium range mis-

siles to strike targets in Europe and Japan,

the R-3 with a range of 3,000 km and the

R-5 with a range of 1,200 km. The R-11

tactical missile later became famous as

the Scud missile that has been adopted by

other countries, including Iraq during the

Gulf War of 1991. Korolev’s 1951 and

1952 design and technical studies for the

R-3, whose range fell far short of an

ICBM but promised a major increase in

range over the R-2, also explored tech-

nologies that would be needed for mis-

siles of an intercontinental range. The R-

3 quickly ran into problems with the new

rocket engines that would be needed for

the missile.21

Korolev’s team and a group of

mathematicians under the tutelage of

Mstislav Keldysh, one of the top Soviet

scientists of the time, were also beginning

studies of more advanced missiles,

including ballistic missiles and winged

missiles. Because Korolev had worked

with aircraft in the 1920s before turning

to rockets, he was aware of the possibili-

ties of winged missiles, and his team

designed a rocket-ramjet missile similar

to the USAF Navaho missile. In 1953

Korolev shifted the winged missile work

to two other design bureaus in the avia-

tion industry so that he could concentrate

on ballistic missiles. Boris Chertok, one

of Korolev’s top managers, wrote that

Korolev’s affiliation with the Ministry of

Armaments dictated that he give prefer-

ence to ballistic missiles over winged

missiles, which would fall under the sep-

arate aircraft industry. Both cruise missile

projects continued, until one was can-

celled in 1957 and the other in 1960,

when ballistic missiles had carried the

day (and the Navaho had also been can-

celled).22

Stalin gave little attention in his

final years to the development of missiles

and instead focused on nuclear weapons

and bomber aircraft. The relative priori-

Q U E S T 21:3 201441


ties can be shown by the fact that nuclear

weapons programs were allocated rough-

ly 14.5 billion rubles, nearly seven times

as much money as was spent on missiles

during the 1947 to 1949 time period. The

final months before Stalin died in March

1953 saw him reduce his day-to-day

supervision of military programs. That

and the many changes in the Soviet lead-

ership until Nikita Khrushchev consoli-

dated power in 1957 represented a period

of often haphazard change in the institu-

tions and managers that controlled long-

range missile programs. Stalin’s death

and the political changes it brought made

1953 a key year for Soviet missiles just as

the changes in Washington, DC, that

accompanied the new Republican admin-

istration headed by President Dwight D.

Eisenhower played a role that year in

advancing America’s ICBM program.

The Soviets exploded a low-power ther-

monuclear bomb in August 1953, and

while the bomb was less advanced than

American thermonuclear bombs of the

time, the test opened the eyes of the

Soviet leadership to the potential of ther-

monuclear bombs.23

Andrei Sakharov, the brilliant

Soviet physicist who became known as

the father of the Soviet thermonuclear

bomb and later won fame as a champion

for human rights, was asked to give a

report that fall to a meeting of the Soviet

Politburo where he was asked to estimate

the weight of upcoming thermonuclear

bombs, which the Soviet leadership want-

ed to mount on an ICBM being proposed

by Korolev. Sakharov wrote his report

based on a promising but ultimately

unsuccessful concept, and estimated that

the thermonuclear bomb would weigh

five or six tons. Before the Politburo got

Sakharov’s report, Korolev obtained the

cancellation of the R-3 program so that he

could concentrate work on a true inter-

continental ballistic missile. Korolev’s

bureau was forced to scrap its plan for an

ICBM that could carry a three-ton war-

head and scale up the size and power to

carry the heavier warhead at the same

time as the U.S. Air Force was suggesting

that the Atlas missile be reduced in size

and power to carry a thermonuclear war-

head weighing about a ton. Based on the

proposal of Korolev and his design

bureau, the Soviet Council of Ministers

approved a decree that gave Korolev the

go-ahead to start work on an ICBM that

became known as the R-7. The decree

was issued on 20 May 1954, within a few

weeks of Atlas winning similar approval

in the United States following the report

of the Tea Pot Committee in February

1954.24

Especially as outlined in Asif

Siddiqi’s most recent account, The RedRockets’ Glare, the Soviet path to

approval of the R-7 ICBM between 1945

and 1954 turns out to have been quite

similar to the American path to approval

of Atlas—official indifference to the idea

until 1953, when the possibilities of the

marriage of long-range missiles to ther-

monuclear bombs, which packed much

greater power in less weight than fission

or atomic bombs, were realized by mili-

tary authorities. During the years between

1945 and 1954, engineers in both super-

powers had seen how German rocket

experts had advanced rocketry during

World War II with the V-2 ballistic mis-

sile. Building on the Germans’ knowl-

edge and captured parts, American and

Soviet experts slowly made advances in

the technology needed for ICBMs until

the arrival of thermonuclear weapons

around 1953 caused military and political

leaders to give them the resources they

needed to build the first ICBMs.

IInntteelllliiggeennccee oonn SSoovviieett MMiissssiilleessIn the early years of the Cold War,

American policy makers were deeply

frustrated by the low quantity of intelli-

gence available from the Soviet Union.

Their frustration was deepened by their

still-fresh memories of Japan’s surprise

attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. While

American predictions of when the Soviets

would develop their own nuclear

weapons had varied, the news of the first

Russian nuclear test in August 1949

caused great concern in military and sci-

entific circles in the United States. The

Soviet Union’s nature as a closed society

Atlas, the Air Force’s first intercontinentalballistic missile, was a national priority andone of Gen. Schriever’s major achieve-ments. (U.S. Air Force photo)

Credit USAF Museum

Q U E S T 21:3 201442


frustrated American intelligence gather-

ers, and their problem was worsened by

the fact that the first few years after World

War II were a time of “disarray” for U.S.

intelligence services, in historian Michael

D. Gordin’s recent account. Truman

closed down the wartime Office of

Strategic Services in September 1945,

leaving intelligence in the hands of the

individual armed services. In 1946, the

Central Intelligence Group was set up,

followed by the Central Intelligence

Agency in 1947. But in its early years, the

CIA was “understaffed, underfunded, and

a long way from its goal of synthesizing

and correlating American intelligence.”25

There was very little of the intelligence

infrastructure that we take for granted

today. And the CIA’s early attempts to

recruit or deploy spies in the Soviet

Union bore almost no fruit.26

The United States attempted to

break Soviet secrecy with balloons and

aircraft to learn what the Soviets were

doing to develop missiles and other

weapons. The USAF flew aircraft along

the boundaries of communist countries to

test radars and other defenses. The 1949

Soviet nuclear test, which was conducted

in secret, was found out due to USAF air-

craft specially equipped to detect fallout

in the atmosphere from nuclear tests once

it had drifted outside of Soviet territory.

In the late 1940s, the CIA and the U.S.

military launched high altitude balloons

from western Europe with cameras in

hopes that they would drift over Soviet

territory for recovery near Japan. The

plan failed. In 1950, in the wake of the

first Soviet nuclear explosion, Truman

and Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed to try

more aggressive overflights of Soviet ter-

ritory. Many flights returned information

about military emplacements near Soviet

borders, but much territory remained out

of range, and several aircrews lost their

lives. Aware of reports that the Soviets

were launching missiles deep inside

Russia at Kapustin Yar, the Royal Air

Force in cooperation with the CIA sent a

specially equipped Canberra bomber over

the area in 1953. The aircraft was nearly

downed by Soviet anti-aircraft fire, and

this near failure ended aerial reconnais-

sance in Soviet airspace until the U-2

started flying in 1956. In 1955, the United

States set up long-range radars and elec-

tronic signals listening posts in Turkey to

gather information from Soviet missile

tests. Both the U-2 and the radars were

brought into use long after the USAF had

given Atlas the go-ahead.27

President Truman had received a

report in November 1949 from the CIA

on Soviet flame and combustion research

that could be applied to rocket and jet

research. The report found that Soviet

capabilities in this area “are clearly of a

high order.” The CIA found that there was

“substantial evidence” that this research

was aimed at improving rocket and jet

engines. These projects, the report said,

could increase the effectiveness of both

defensive and offensive capabilities for

the Soviet military.28

A National Intelligence Estimate

produced by the CIA in November 1950

on “Soviet Capabilities and Intentions”

did not mention missiles. A special

National Intelligence Estimate the follow-

ing October on “Soviet Capabilities for a

Military Attack on the United States

before July 1952” stated that the Soviet

Union probably possessed V-1-type

cruise missiles with a range of one hun-

dred nautical miles that could be launched

from ships or submarines. A later

National Intelligence Estimate, in March

1957, on “Soviet Capabilities and

Probable Program in the Guided Missiles

Field” contained the following statement:

“We have no direct evidence that the

USSR is developing an ICBM, but we

believe its development has probably

been a goal of the Soviet missile pro-

gram.” The document projected that the

Soviet Union would have a 5,500-nauti-

cal-mile range ICBM ready for opera-

tional use by 1960 or 1961. The estimate

also stated, accurately, that the Soviet

Union could orbit an artificial satellite in

1957. Later in 1957 after the launch of

Sputnik, Eisenhower began receiving

intelligence estimates that exaggerated

the Soviet ICBM capability until photos

from the U-2 and the first successful U.S.

military reconnaissance satellite in

August 1960 showed the true state of the

Soviet ICBM threat.29

IInntteelllliiggeennccee ffoorr tthhee GGuuiiddeeddMMiissssiilleess CCoommmmiitttteeee

The lack of American intelligence

on Soviet missile activity is shown in for-

merly classified documents relating to the

work of the U.S. Air Force and the

Guided Missiles Committee (GMC) of

the Department of Defence that was sup-

posed to coordinate military missile pro-

grams until it was disbanded in 1953. In

August 1947, the GMC discussed foreign

intelligence information on Russian guid-

ed missile test ranges. “It is evident that

little or no direct knowledge of work

being done at Russian guided missile test

ranges can be obtained,” the GMC was

told in a report, which suggested that

“proper evaluation of intelligence from

widely separated fields, many apparently

having nothing to do with guided mis-

siles” may be needed to determine what

the Russians were doing on their missile

test ranges.30

USAF Maj. Gen. Earle E. Partridge,

describing secret testimony in 1947 to the

Finletter Commission on America’s Air

Policy, wrote: “The USSR appears to be

conducting intensive research to produce

surface-to-air guided missiles patterned

after German developments, and in some

measure in assembling and reconstructing

German missiles.” He wrote that there is

“no specific intelligence” that indicates

Russia is developing a long-range sur-

face-to-surface missile, but that “we can

presume the Russians are working on a

long range guided missile.” Partridge

suggested that Russian forces had made

use of a larger number of German scien-

tists than had American forces. Because

of this, he wrote, Russia could be farther

advanced in guided missiles than the

United States.31 Industry witnesses to the

commission stated their belief that the

Russians “had absorbed” German devel-

opment techniques for missiles, and their

testimony suggested that the “Russians

are probably further advanced than we are

in these fields.”32

On 20 May 1949, three months

before the Soviet Union exploded their

first nuclear bomb, a Defense Department

technical evaluation group submitted a

report to the GMC, based on briefings

from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the three

Q U E S T 21:3 201443


services, and the CIA. The report project-

ed that if war came in the 1950s, it would

be a conflict of “extended duration” in

which the Soviet Union would have

strategic bombers comparable to the B-29

and guided missiles similar to German V-

2 and Wasserfall anti-aircraft missile by

1951-52. In fact, Soviet bombers and

missiles with those capabilities were

coming into service that year. Gordin, in

his recent study of the effects of the first

Soviet nuclear explosion in 1949, wrote

of the dramatic growth of U.S. intelli-

gence estimates of the size of the Soviet

nuclear stockpile in the months following

the August 1949 nuclear explosion, along

with larger estimates of the Soviet ability

to deliver nuclear weapons with bombers.

In November 1950, CIA analysts predict-

ed the Soviet Union would have 165

nuclear bombs by the middle of 1953.

The actual number was probably less than

fifty. These growing figures no doubt bol-

stered the arguments of those who want-

ed to proceed with an American ICBM.33

Late in 1950, Fred Darwin, the

executive director of the GMC, expressed

his frustration about the amount of infor-

mation available on Soviet missiles and

bombers, saying the Guided Missiles

Committee “is being handicapped by

insufficient technical intelligence infor-

mation.” He added that this problem “is

further aggravated by the cumbersome

and time-consuming methods now in use

for bringing such meager information as

is available” to the GMC. “This situation

has made it difficult to assess the United

States program in relation to that of the

Soviet Union and to insure that our pro-

gram is properly focused,” he added,

complaining that some information was

still being held from the committee, some

of it from intelligence more than a year

old.34

Both Jacob Neufeld’s and Doris

Krudener’s official histories of Air Force

missile programs reported that in late

1951 and early 1952, the Air Force had

received intelligence reports suggesting

that the Soviets had developed a rocket

engine capable of generating 265,000 lbs

of thrust, twice the power of any

American engine, and that bigger engines

were being developed. The reports in fact

were incorrect, as the Russians were

experiencing greater difficulty than the

United States developing large rocket

engines and had not begun work on the

less powerful RD-107 engines that were

used in the R-7 ICBM.35

In August 1952, the GMC met at

the Air Technical Intelligence Center in

Dayton, Ohio, to discuss Russian missile

programs. A presentation on propellant

development noted that since the German

technical personnel and facilities had

been moved to the Soviet Union in 1946,

large quantities of ethyl alcohol and

hydrogen peroxide had been found at

Khimki near Moscow, where rocket

engines were indeed being developed,

and that a liquid oxygen plant was under

construction in the area. All these sub-

stances are useful as rocket fuels and oxi-

dizers. Another paper stated that “100 V-

2 power plants were manufactured at fac-

tory 456” between 1948 and 1950. A

paper on guidance systems said “captured

Russian electronic equipment shows a

marked improvement via German influ-

ence.” A member of the committee wrote

that much more needed to be learnt about

Russian missile research since most

information had come from German

rocket experts who had worked in isola-

tion in Russia, none of who had informa-

tion on what their Russian counterparts

were doing. The report complained of a

lack of information on surface-to-surface

ballistic missiles.36

In a congressional appearance in

late 1957 following the launch of Sputnik,

Wernher von Braun testified that he had

been given access to intelligence debrief-

ings of German scientists who had

worked in the Soviet Union and had

returned to Germany in 1952 and 1953.

“On the basis of these reports, I came to

the conclusion that the Russians not only

had made very poor use of the German

talent they had taken along to Russia, but

actually that there had been a lot of mis-

management of their program,” an assess-

ment that he later admitted “proved to be

entirely erroneous.” When von Braun

became an American citizen in 1955, he

gained access to more information,

including the fact the Germans did not

work directly with the Russian engineers

after 1947. The Germans who worked in

the Soviet Union, in his words, were “left

completely in the dark about the fact that

there was a Russian program outside of

their own operation” and were “poorly

used.”37

CCoonncclluussiioonnBefore embarking on their own

ICBM program in 1954, decision makers

in the U.S. government had very little

solid information on the state of Soviet

missile programs. Their main source of

information up to that time, German rock-

et experts who had worked in the Soviet

Union, had been separated from Soviet

rocket work since the Soviets had suc-

ceeded in launching recovered German

V-2s in 1947. Ultimately, the Americans

had no information on the Soviet ICBM

program because it did not win priority

until 1954 at roughly the same time the

USAF gave its go-ahead to the Atlas

ICBM.

The lack of intelligence on Soviet

missiles, especially after the Soviets

exploded their first fission bomb in 1949,

probably lent weight to arguments in

Washington in favor of ICBMs, simply

because the secrecy that surrounded the

creation of a Soviet nuclear bomb encour-

aged those who feared that missiles were

also being produced in secrecy but had

little or no solid evidence to back up that

fear. Recent scholarship shows that the

main impetus for the initiation of the

Soviet ICBM program was the creation of

the thermonuclear bomb, just as the same

technical advance caused American poli-

cy makers to give Atlas a high priority in

the same time period. The main reason

Americans had little sense of Soviet plans

for ICBMs was simply that the first

Soviet ICBM, the R-7, did not officially

win authorization until May 1954, at

roughly the same time the Atlas got its

own go-ahead. Before that time, work on

the R-7 involved only a small group of

engineers headed by Korolev.

The first test flights of R-7 and

Atlas ICBMs in 1957 were incorrectly

seen as marking the beginning of the

ICBM as an effective weapon. Even

when America’s first Atlas ICBMs were

put on alert in 1959, the ICBM formed an

insignificant part of the U.S. nuclear arse-

Q U E S T 21:3 201444


nal. Those first Atlases stood on launch

pads in the open, and they required fuel-

ing and other extensive preparation

before they could be launched. Even

though silos were soon built to protect

Atlas missiles, America’s ICBM force

didn’t really become effective until the

mid-1960s when solid-fuel Minuteman

missiles, which were ready for nearly

instantaneous launch around the clock,

replaced Atlas and Titan I. The newer

missiles also benefitted from improved

missile guidance systems, along with the

equally important work done by recon-

naissance, mapping and geodesy satel-

lites of establishing exactly where targets

in the Soviet Union were located, and

where they stood in relation to the missile

launch pads in the United States.38

In the months following Sputnikand other Soviet space successes, Soviet

Premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted that

his government was turning out ICBMs

“like sausages.” But the truth was that the

R-7 was difficult to assemble and launch,

and was as unsuited to be an operational

ICBM as it was suited to be an effective

launch vehicle for satellites and space

probes because it had been designed to

launch six-ton payloads rather than the

smaller warheads the Atlas and Titan

could carry. The R-7’s power as a space

launcher gave the world the illusion that

it was far superior to Atlas as a weapons

system, and ready for use first, when in

fact Atlas was more effective and put

America well ahead in the race to devel-

op an ICBM system. Only six R-7s could

ever be put on alert at one time because

there were only six of the gigantic R-7

launch pads. Soviet ICBMs therefore

were well behind America’s ICBM force

until another Soviet design bureau suc-

ceeded in developing a rocket better suit-

ed to be an ICBM that came into service

starting in 1962.39

By the time of the Cuban missile

crisis in October 1962, the Americans

were capable of delivering 4,000 nuclear

warheads, mostly with bombers, 179 war-

heads on ICBMs and at least 112 on sub-

marine-launched ballistic missiles, while

the Soviets could hit back with only 220

warheads, including twenty on ICBMs. In

the years that followed, the United States

continued to build up its nuclear forces,

but the Soviets were determined never to

be caught short again and worked even

harder to match its adversary until missile

forces reached an uneasy equilibrium that

lasted for the final two decades of the

Cold War.40 At the time of the Cuban

missile crisis, the first Minuteman mis-

siles came into service, and before the

end of 1962, the final Atlas ICBMs were

put on alert. The Atlas missile’s short tour

of duty as an ICBM ended in 1964 and

1965 when most were removed from

service, and many were converted for use

as space launch vehicles. In the years

that followed, America’s ICBM force was

composed of Minuteman ICBMs comple-

mented with some Titan IIs. Some

advanced versions of Minuteman mis-

siles remain in service today.41

The Atlas and the R-7 were more

useful as space launch vehicles than as

weapons carriers. The R-7 was used to

launch satellites even while it was still

undergoing testing, while the Atlas was

held back as a space launch vehicle until

late 1958, and this helped foster the illu-

sion that the Soviet Union was ahead of

the U.S. in missile and space technology

at the time of Sputnik. The R-7 could

carry a far larger payload than Atlas, and

the result was a number of Soviet space

“firsts” culminating in 1961 with the

launch of the first human in space, Yuri

Gagarin, which caused President

Kennedy to issue his challenge to put an

American astronaut on the Moon before

the end of the 1960s. The Soviet missile

and space programs suffered setbacks,

but these were hidden behind a wall of

secrecy until the end of the Cold War. The

prestige won by the Soviet Union with its

space achievements inspired Kennedy,

who was by his own admission not a

space travel enthusiast, to challenge the

Soviets in 1961 for this prestige with his

lunar goal that took form in the Apollo

program.42 The Soviet achievements

also inspired a set of myths about early

missile programs in both superpowers

that persist to the present day.

AAbboouutt tthhee AAuutthhoorrThis article is adapted from Christopher

Gainor’s PhD dissertation, “The United

States Air Force and the Emergence of the

Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, 1945-

1954” (Department of History and

Classics, University of Alberta, 2011).

Christopher Gainor is International

Programs Editor for Quest. He holds a

PhD in the history of technology from the

University of Alberta and a Master of

Science in Space Studies from the

University of North Dakota. He is the

author of four books, including Arrows tothe Moon: Avro’s Engineers and theSpace Race (Apogee Books: 2001) and

numerous articles on space exploration

for Quest and other publications. He is

currently writing a book on the early his-

tory of the Atlas ICBM.

NNootteess1 See Chuck Walker and Joel Powell,Atlas: The Ultimate Weapon (Burlington,ON: Apogee Books, 2005), and RogerLaunius and Dennis R. Jenkins, eds. ToReach the High Frontier: A History of U.S.Launch Vehicles (Lexington: University ofKentucky Press, 2002).

2 The term Huntsville School was coinedby historian Rip Bulkeley in The SputniksCrisis and Early United States Space Policy(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,1991) 204-8. Once settled in the UnitedStates, the von Braun team was based atHuntsville, Alabama. Prominent examplesof these histories include Willy Ley,Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space. (NewYork: Viking, 1968); and Wernher vonBraun and Frederick I. Ordway III, TheHistory of Rocketry and Space Travel (NewYork: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969).

3 See Neil Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in aCold War: Bernard Schriever and theUltimate Weapon (New York: RandomHouse, 2009), and John ClaytonLonnquest, “The Face of Atlas: GeneralBernard Schriever and the Development ofthe Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile,1953 – 1960” (Ph.D. Diss., DukeUniversity, 1996).

4 See Edmund Beard, Developing theICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics(New York: Columbia University Press,1976), Robert L. Perry, The Ballistic MissileDecisions (Santa Monica, CA.: RAND

Q U E S T 21:3 201445


Corporation, 1967), and Robert Perry, “TheAtlas, Thor, Titan and Minuteman,” inEugene M. Emme (ed.), The History ofRocket Technology (Detroit: Wayne StateUniversity Press, 1964) 142-61. Perry wrotethe 1964 article while he was employed bythe USAF. See also See Thomas P. Hughes,Rescuing Prometheus: Four MonumentalProjects that Changed The Modern World(New York: Pantheon, 1998) 69-139.

5 Beard, Developing the ICBM, 4, 8, 218.

6 See Christopher Gainor, “The Atlas andthe Air Force: Reassessing the Beginningsof America’s First Intercontinental BallisticMissile,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 54,No. 3 (April 2013), 346-70.

7 Besides Von Neumann, the committee’smembers included Simon Ramo and DeanWooldridge of the Ramo-WooldridgeCorporation, Charles C. Lauritsen, Clark B.Millikan and Louis G. Dunn of Caltech,George B. Kistiakowsky of Harvard andJerome B. Wiesner of the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology, both future presi-dential science advisors, Hendrik Bode ofBell Labs, Lawrence A. Hyland of BendixAviation Corp., and Allen E. Puckett ofHughes Aircraft. Sheehan, in A Fiery Peacein a Cold War, provides an excellent accountof the Tea Pot Committee, including how thecode name Tea Pot was selected to helpconceal the committee’s purpose on 211.

8 Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War,178-200; John C. Lonnquest, and David F.Winkler. To Defend and Deter: The Legacyof the United States Cold War MissileProgram (Rock Island, Ill.: Department ofDefense Legacy Resource ManagementProgram, Cold War Project, DefencePublishing Service, 1996) 33-4; Lonnquest,“The Face of Atlas,” 60, 78-83; JacobNeufeld, Ballistic Missiles in the UnitedStates Air Force 1945-1960 (Washington,D.C.: United States Air Force History Office,1990) 98. Interview of Gen. BernardSchriever by Martin Collins, 5 September1990, RAND History Project, National Airand Space Museum, SmithsonianInstitution, Washington, DC.

9 L.A. “Pat” Hyland, Call Me Pat: TheAutobiography of the Man Howard HughesChose to Lead Hughes Aircraft (VirginiaBeach, VA.: The Donning Company, 1993)336-43.

10 “The Tea Pot Committee Report,” includ-ing correspondence, Appendix 1 of J.Neufeld, 249-265; Sheehan, A Fiery Peacein a Cold War, 217-20.

11 Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War,199, 464-7; Simon Ramo, The Business ofScience: Winning and Losing in the High-Tech Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988)78-89.

12 Beard, Developing the ICBM, 12, 218.See also Bulkeley, The Sputniks Crisis, 60-1.

13 Two recent works on this topic areCampbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko, TheAtomic Bomb and the Origins of the ColdWar (New Haven: Yale University Press,2008) and Michael D. Gordin, Red Cloud atDawn: Truman, Stalin and the End of theAtomic Monopoly (New York: Farrar, Straussand Giroux, 2009).

14 Zaloga, Target America, 64-7, 111-2;Asif Siddiqi, The Red Rockets' Glare:Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination,1857-1957 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2010) 114-95. For moreon Korolev, see Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo,and James Harford, Korolev: How One ManMasterminded the Soviet Drive to BeatAmerica to the Moon (New York: John Wiley& Sons, Inc. 1997).

15 Asif Siddiqi, “Germans in Russia: ColdWar, Technology Transfer, and NationalIdentity,” in Carol E. Harrison and AnnJohnson, eds., National Identity: The Role ofScience and Technology. Osiris 2009: 24.(Chicago: History of Science Society) 120-43; Zaloga, Target America,113-21; Siddqi,The Red Rockets’ Glare, 196-240.

16 Siddiqi, “Germans in Russia.” Zaloga,Target America, 113-21.

17 Siddiqi, Red Rockets’ Glare, 286-7;Zaloga, Target America, 121-4. Tokaty, whowrote memoirs after defecting to the west,has also been identified as Grigory Tokaty-Tokayev.

18 The 13 May decree is reproduced inBoris Chertok, Rockets and People:Creating a Rocket Industry, Volume 2(Washington D.C.: National Aeronautics andSpace Administration, 2006) 10-5; Siddiqi,Challenge to Apollo, 25, 33-40; Siddiqi, TheRed Rockets' Glare, 222-3, 232-40, 245-7;Zaloga, Target America, 115-8.

19 Zaloga, Target America, 63-79; StevenJ. Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword: TheRise and Fall of Russia’s Strategic NuclearForces, 1945-2000 (Washington, D.C.:Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002) 12-6,35-9; Siddqi, Challenge to Apollo, 60-1.Many accounts, including David Holloway,Stalin and the Bomb: the Soviet Union andAtomic Energy, 1939-1956 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1994) 247, have stat-ed that the Soviet ICBM program began atthe April 1947 meeting, based mainly onthe post-Sputnik writings of Tokaty, who hadlittle direct knowledge of the Soviet missileprogram. Siddiqi’s description of the meet-ing in Challenge to Apollo is based onKorolev’s own accounts.

20 Zaloga, Target America, 79-88;Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 227-45;Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare, 271-2, FredKaplan in The Wizards of Armageddon (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1983), discuss-es the origins of the ‘bomber gap’ in theUnited States in some detail, including itsrelationship to the ‘missile gap’ controversythat followed, 155-73.

21 Zaloga, Target America, 125-32; Siddqi,Challenge to Apollo, 61, 71-88; Siddiqi, TheRed Rockets’ Glare, 248-60.

22 Zaloga, Target America, 132-4, 143-5;Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword, 42-5;Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, 125-8;Chertok, Rockets and People, vol. 2, 231-2;Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare, 248-60,274-8.

23 Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare, 244-8,264-70; Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, 97-109. The first true Soviet thermonuclearbomb was exploded in November 1955.

24 Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare, 270-8;Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo, 128-9; Zaloga,Target America, 134-41; Zaloga, TheKremlin’s Nuclear Sword, 42-6; Chertok,Rockets and People, vol. 2, 275-6, 289-90;Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, 294-319;Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 1990) 180-1.

25 Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn, 82.

26 Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn, 80-3.Bulkeley discusses American intelligenceon Soviet rocket and space programs in TheSputniks Crisis, although many of his con-clusions are outdated. See also William E.,Burrows, Deep Black: Space Espionage and

Q U E S T 21:3 201446


National Security (New York: BerkeleyBooks, 1988); G.A. Tokaty, “Soviet RocketTechnology,” in Emme, History of RocketTechnology, 271-84; and Beard,Developing the ICBM, 163-4.

27 Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday:Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair(New York: Harper and Row, 1986) 77-9;Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 215-7. The U-2 flights ended abruptly in May1960 when a U-2 piloted by Francis GaryPowers was shot down by the Soviet mili-tary. R. Cargill Hall and Clayton D. Laurie,eds. Early Cold War Overflights, 1950-1956: Symposium Proceedings, Held atthe Tighe Auditorium, Defense IntelligenceAgency, 22-23 February 2001, Volume 1:Memoirs (Washington: Office of theHistorian, National Reconnaissance Office,2003). R. Cargill Halland Clayton D. Laurie,eds. Early Cold War Overflights, 1950-1956: Symposium Proceedings, Held atthe Tighe Auditorium, Defense IntelligenceAgency, 22-23 February 2001, Volume 2,Appendices (Washington: Office of theHistorian, National Reconnaissance Office,2003). R. Cargill Hall, “StrategicReconnaissance in the Cold War: FromConcept to National Policy.” Prologue,Volume 28, No. 2, Summer 1996.

28 Central Intelligence Agency, Office ofScientific Intelligence, “Soviet Flame andCombustion Research and its Relation toJet Propulsion (Including RocketPropulsion)” 10 November 1949,President's Secretary's Files (PSF),Intelligence, Box 258, Folder O.S.I./S.R,Harry S. Truman Presidential Library(HSTL).

29 National Intelligence Estimates arecontained in RG 363.5, Records of theCentral Intelligence Agency, TextualRecords (General), National Archives andRecords Administration (NA). “SovietCapabilities and Intentions,” NIE-3, 11November 1950, is contained in box 1,folder 1. “Soviet Capabilities for a MilitaryAttack on the United States before July1952,” SE-14, 23 October 1951, is in box1, folder 20. “Soviet Capabilities andProbable Program in the Guided MissilesField,” NIE-11-5-57, 12 March 1957, iscontained in box 10, folder 4. This NIEsuperseded another NIE, dated 5 October1954, which was not available. For moreon post-Sputnik U.S. intelligence esti-

mates, see Peter J. Roman, Eisenhowerand the Missile Gap (Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press, 1995) 30-62.

30 “Background Data on QuestionsSubmitted in Enclosure A,” attached toKarl F. Kellerman, Committee on GuidedMissiles, to the Program Division, Researchand Development Board (RDB), “ForeignIntelligence,” undated but probablyNovember 1947, in RG 156, Office of theChief of Ordnance, Records Relating to theArmy Guided Missiles Program, Box 12, file“GM 291/ Foreign Intelligence,” NA.Emphasis in original.

31 Maj. Gen. E.E. Partridge, acting deputychief of staff, operations to Secretary ofthe Air Staff, “Data for the President’s AirPolicy Commission Concerning GuidedMissiles,” Routing and Record Sheet, 28October 1947, attached to Mary R. Self,History of the Development of GuidedMissiles: 1946-1950 (Dayton Ohio:Historical Office of the Air MaterialCommand, 1951).

32 Memorandum to Colonel Boatner andCaptain Pihl, “Air Policy Commission,”Memo No. 39, undated but probablyOctober 1947, attached to Self, History ofthe Development of Guided Missiles.

33 Technical Evaluation Group, Committeeon Guided Missiles, RDB, “The NationalGuided Missiles Program,” 20 May 1949,in RG 218, Records of the Joint Chiefs ofStaff, Box 107, file “JCS 334 GuidedMissiles Comm (116-45) Sec 2,” NA;Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn, 257-9.

34 Draft, Fred A. Darwin to Chairman,RDB, “Intelligence Information Pertainingto Guided Missiles,” 20 December 1950,in RG 156, Office of the Chief of Ordnance,Records Relating to the Army GuidedMissiles Program, Box 12, file “GM 291/Foreign Intelligence,” NA.

35 J. Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in theUSAF, 71; Doris E. Krudener. History ofBallistic Missiles Site Activation: Plans,Policies and Decisions 1954-1961,Volume 1 Narrative (Revised Edition)(Norton AFB, Cal.: Historical Division, USAFBallistic Systems Division, 1964) 22;Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, 217;Zaloga, Target America, 140-1. The intelli-gence sources weren’t specified. When theSoviets later began building the R-7 ICBM,

they turned to multi-chamber engines as away to get around the problems of buildinglarge rocket engines.

36 I.D. Black, “Trip Report: GuidedMissiles Intelligence Panel,” 11 August1952, in RG 330, Records of the Secretaryof Defense, Box 394, file “123/IntelligenceGM,” NA. This presentation has beenincluded in many historical treatments ofICBMs because it was mentioned in ErnestGeorge Schwiebert, History of the U.S. AirForce Ballistic Missiles (New York: Praeger,1965), 58.

37 United States Senate. Hearings beforethe Preparedness InvestigatingSubcommittee, Committee on ArmedForces, Inquiry into Satellite and MissilePrograms. 1st and 2nd Sessions, 85thCongress. 14 December 1957, 582.

38 Sheehan, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War,406-20; Neufeld, Ballistic Missiles in theUSAF, 176-9, 205-22.

39 Zaloga, Target America, 150-60, 189-99; Zaloga, The Kremlin’s Nuclear Sword,47-57.

40 Zaloga, Target America, 213.

41 Office of Public Affairs, Department ofDefense, “Final Atlas ICBM SquadronBecomes Operational in SAC,” NewsRelease, December 19, 1962; Walker andPowell, Atlas: The Ultimate Weapon, 163.

42 See John M. Logsdon, John F. Kennedyand the Race to the Moon (New York:Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 237-9.

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PPuubblliisshheerr: Scott SacknoffEEddiittoorr: Dr. David Christopher Arnold

AAssssiissttaanntt EEddiittoorrssHoward Trace—Oral HistoriesKeith Scala—TechnologyDr. Christopher Gainor—International Dr. Roy Houchin II—Military SpaceJoel Powell—Human Flight &

Robotics

CCoovveerr GGrraapphhiiccss:: Gary MilgromPPrrooooffrreeaaddeerr:: Joni Wilson

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TThhee SSppiirriitt ooff SStt.. LLoouuiiss

In October of 1968 I finished my

work on the Support Crew of Apollo 10 and

then was assigned to the Support Crew of

Apollo 11. At that time, Apollo 8, 9, 10, and

11 were “queued” up to challenge the Moon.

In December I flew to Patrick Air Force

Base and awaited the launch of Apollo 8, the

first launch to the Moon. I was invited to

the pre-launch party for Apollo 8 but had to

miss it because of an unwise social commit-

ment. However on launch morning I and all

the other observing astronauts viewed a pic-

ture-perfect launch of Apollo 8 and 2 1/2

days later were all in the Observing room at

Mission Control to “witness” Apollo 8’s

entry into lunar orbit based on observations

of data and conversations of the flight con-

troller in the Control Center.

Everything went well and hours later

we were treated to on-board video and ver-

bal descriptions of their view of Earth and

areas near the United States. Jim Lovell

was captivated by the clarity of the view he

had of the Bahama Islands. The crew read

from the first chapter of Genesis and sent

heart-felt greetings to those of us who

looked-on and listened in awe-struck

silence.

The return trip was made without inci-

dent and the crew was welcomed home by

many grateful loved ones. The crew was

feted at the White House and then sent on a

goodwill tour of their home planet which

went off without a hitch.

Two spectators at the pre-launch

party, launch, and the return to Earth were

Eddie Richenbacker and Charles Lindbergh

both of whom were highly grateful for the

recognition. In January 1969 a large box

arrived at the Astronaut Office. The staff

opened the box and discovered copies of

The Spirit of St. Louis addressed to all the

astronauts and NASA VIPs.

In reading Lindbergh’s account of his

navigation across the Atlantic, I was amazed

by the similarity of his description of the

“dead reckoning” navigation technique he

described and the method we were taught 25

years later in flying school. I really felt a

kinship with a man I had always admired

greatly.

BBiillll PPoogguuee,, PPiilloott,, SSkkyyllaabb 44courtesy: Heritage Auctions lot 40525

FFrroomm tthhee AArrcchhiivveess

Q U E S T 21:3 20142


Wernher von Braun in frontof the S-IC engines of aSaturn V at the Space andRocket Center, Huntsville,Alabama. Credit: NASA

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American Intelligence on Soviet Missile Programs, 1945-1954

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