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
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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
55 AA BBrriieeff HHiissttoorryy ooff RRoocckkeettrryy iinn IISSRROOBook by P.V. Manoranjan Rao and P. Radhakrishwan
Review by Asif A. Siddiqi
57 TThhee IInntteerrnnaattiioonnaall AAttllaass ooff MMaarrss EExxpplloorraattiioonn::TThhee FFiirrsstt FFiivvee DDeeccaaddeessBook by Philip Stooke
Review by Maria Lane
59 WWiizzaarrddss,, AAlliieennss,, aanndd SSttaarrsshhiippss:: PPhhyyssiiccss aanndd MMaatthh iinn FFaannttaassyy aanndd SScciieennccee FFiiccttiioonnBook by Charles L. Adler
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60 SSaallllyy RRiiddee::AAmmeerriiccaa’’ss FFiirrsstt WWoommaann iinn SSppaacceeBook by Lynn Sherr
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61 AA SSiinnggllee SSkkyy:: HHooww aann IInntteerrnnaattiioonnaall CCoommmmuunniittyy FFoorrggeedd tthhee SScciieennccee ooff RRaaddiioo AAssttrroonnoommyyBook by David P.D. Munns
Review by Roger D. Launius
62 EExxpplloorriinngg SScciieennccee tthhrroouugghh SScciieennccee FFiiccttiioonnBook by Barry Luokkala
Review by Emily Margolis
63 BBeeyyoonndd tthhee GGoodd PPaarrttiicclleeBook by Leon Lederman and Christopher Hill
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64 WWhheeeellss SSttoopp:: TThhee TTrraaggeeddiieess aanndd TTrriiuummpphhss ooff tthhee SSppaaccee SShhuuttttllee PPrrooggrraamm,, 11998866--22001111Book by Rick Houston
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52 LLuucckkyy PPllaanneett:: WWhhyy EEaarrtthh IIss EExxcceeppttiioonnaall——aanndd WWhhaatt TThhaatt MMeeaannss ffoorr LLiiffee iinn tthhee UUnniivveerrsseeBook by David Waltham
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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