A Fiery Peace In A Cold War Part 8

The LOX tank of Thor 103 had ruptured, incinerating the missile on the pad, the intensely hot fire causing enough damage so that Mathison and the contractors again had to refurbish the pad. And crew fatigue and the loss of focus that accompanies it had been the cause. One of the earlier countdowns had reached the point where they had fueled the missile. Over the subsequent hours, as the countdown was repeatedly aborted and then resumed, enough of the volatile LOX vaporized so that the supply in the missile's oxidizer tank had to be topped off with more. A technician was a.s.signed to make certain they did not overpressurize the tank in the process. The faces of the instruments of the time were the old-fas.h.i.+oned variety known as a.n.a.log, not the brightly lit and colored numbers of the digital gauges that lay in the future. There were two pressure gauges for the oxidizer tank. One was a dial with a needle. The second was a drum on which was placed a round paper graph printed with lines to delineate levels of pressure. As the drum slowly rotated, an inking arm traced the amount of pressure in the tank. An investigation disclosed that while the technician might have kept looking at the gauge, he had lost so much alertness from exhaustion that he was no longer seeing it. Otherwise, he would have noticed that the needle had swung over into the red. The inked line on the paper delineated enough overpressure to burst the seal on the oxidizer tank and send Thor 103 to its fiery oblivion. Mettler was so embarra.s.sed by what happened that he avoided seeing Schriever or talking to him on the phone for several days. He was not fired. Instead, Schriever removed Hall.

Bennie was in serious trouble. While he had nothing to show for Thor but three fiascoes, the Jupiter of his Army rival, Major General John Medaris, and of Medaris's prized team of Wernher von Braun and his German rocketeers, had been flying well. The first Jupiter, launched on March 1, 1957, approximately five weeks after Thor 101 exploded eighteen inches above the pad, had flown for seventy-two seconds before breaking up. The second, sent aloft on April 12, flew for ninety-two seconds before disintegrating. Telemetry disclosed that when the missile turned, fuel sloshed back and forth in the tanks with enough momentum to overcome the Jupiter's steering controls. A solution was rapidly worked out and adjustments made to the missile. On May 31, 1957, just ten days after the overpressurized LOX tank burst and Thor 103 perished in pyrotechnic wonder, a third Jupiter lifted off from Cape Canaveral. It sailed 1,610 miles down the Caribbean range, approaching the entire distance of 1,725 miles required for a full-fledged IRBM. Superior knowledge and skill acquired over years of hands-on experience were telling in the contest. For all their brainpower and engineering diplomas, with the exception of Thiel, Bennie's team was a pack of amateurs up against professionals. The difference was evident in a matter as simple as countdown times. Von Braun and his Germans did not engage in any attention-draining, twenty-four-hour countdown sessions. The countdown time for the first Jupiter ran an hour and fifty-five minutes, for the second two hours and fourteen minutes. The von Braun equipe equipe got the third Jupiter, the one that flew nearly as far as needed, into the air in eight minutes. Von Braun had been able to find out quickly what had gone wrong on his first two launches because he instrumented Jupiter extensively. His missile carried sensors to transmit 150 points of telemetry. Thor was instrumented for less than a third of these. He also flight-tested components for Jupiter by launching them in Redstone missiles. In all, he was to stage twenty-nine Redstone firings at Canaveral for this purpose. It was no wonder that while Schriever was months behind schedule in Thor firings, Medaris was a bit ahead of schedule with Jupiter. got the third Jupiter, the one that flew nearly as far as needed, into the air in eight minutes. Von Braun had been able to find out quickly what had gone wrong on his first two launches because he instrumented Jupiter extensively. His missile carried sensors to transmit 150 points of telemetry. Thor was instrumented for less than a third of these. He also flight-tested components for Jupiter by launching them in Redstone missiles. In all, he was to stage twenty-nine Redstone firings at Canaveral for this purpose. It was no wonder that while Schriever was months behind schedule in Thor firings, Medaris was a bit ahead of schedule with Jupiter.

The previous year, Medaris had lost two important battles in the rivalry with the Air Force over ballistic missiles. On November 20, 1956, Secretary Wilson had issued a new "roles and missions" directive specifying that although the Army was building Jupiter, the Air Force would be responsible for its "operational employment." In other words, once Medaris and von Braun finished perfecting Jupiter, they would have to turn the missile over to the Air Force to deploy against the Soviets. Wilson had also decreed that in the future Army missiles would be restricted to a 200-mile range. The decisions, certainly approved by Eisenhower if not perhaps instigated by him, probably had as much to do with saving money by avoiding more duplication as they did with ruling that the Air Force was the logical service to control long-range missiles. But losing two battles did not amount to losing the war. If Thor was sufficiently discredited, Medaris could argue that it ought to be canceled on the grounds that the Air Force was incapable of building a satisfactory intermediate-range ballistic missile, at least within an acceptable period of time.

If he accomplished this, he could move on to the argument that since the Air Force had failed at the IRBM, how could anyone logically expect it to succeed at the far more difficult task of an ICBM? This need, so vital to the nation's security, should therefore be entrusted to his U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency and his superb German rocket builders, whose track record would a.s.sure success. Medaris had always had ambitions that went far beyond the intermediate-range Jupiter. He and von Braun had already discussed the possibility of a rocket big enough to carry men to the moon and in August 1958 would obtain approval from the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency to start designing it. Von Braun would also welcome the chance to move on from Jupiter to an ICBM because it would entail the creation of large rocket boosters, a sine qua non for s.p.a.ce travel. Both men began denigrating Thor to anyone who would listen and also criticizing Atlas. The ingenious weight-saving concept Karel Bossart had first devised in the 1940s, a fuselage of thinly rolled steel that was inflated by the rocket's fuel, was "a balloon" that was unlikely to withstand the traumatic stresses of launching. While this scenario of the Army taking over the ICBM program because Schriever made a hash of Thor might seem far-fetched decades later, it was not far-fetched in 1957. Medaris had a trump he could play if Bennie gave him an opening. He had von Braun and von Braun's credibility in the making of rockets.

Schriever saw Medaris's game right away. Suddenly the minor project he had not wanted had turned into a nightmare threatening the major project that had become his life's ambition. He blamed Hall for what had occurred because the failures were not flaws in the missile itself. They were failures in the testing process and Bennie felt that Hall, as chief of propulsion for WDD and program director for Thor, should have been paying enough attention to avert them. The difficulty, as always, was Hall's personality. Hall was convinced that Mettler and the entire Ramo-Wooldridge contingent were unnecessary. They were interlopers. There was already enough technical expertise within the Air Force itself, Hall believed, for the service to act as its own prime contractor and systems engineer and to guide industry in the creation of both the IRBM and the ICBM. Schriever, who had good reason to believe otherwise and who was in command, was not about to jettison the partners.h.i.+p with Ramo. There was thus nothing Hall could do to change the situation, but he could not bring himself to accept it. And, as was to be expected with him, he did not hesitate to voice his resentment. As a result, he did not get along with Mettler and the rest of the Ramo-Wooldridge team a.s.signed to Thor. Thiel was an exception, perhaps because Hall respected his knowledge, but Thiel in turn had decidedly mixed feelings toward Hall because of his behavior. On one occasion, when Hall had come to Canaveral to witness the launching of a Jupiter, he began calling out "Blow! Blow! Blow!" as the rocket rose. Some of Thiel's former German colleagues, with whom he swapped information and maintained cordial relations despite the rivalry, were sitting close by in the reviewing stands. He was embarra.s.sed to the quick that they would see him a.s.sociated with someone so lacking in politeness and protocol as to shout for their missile to blow itself up. "He was really a horrible guy ... very arrogant," Thiel said.

Hall did fulfill his role of program director by partic.i.p.ating in all of the working sessions in California. He was not, however, perhaps because of his antagonism toward Mettler, attending the launches at Canaveral, where he would have had the authority and responsibility as the senior Air Force representative to exercise supervision and control. Instead, he was delegating the task to a subordinate on his staff but was not giving the officer a charter to wield the same supervisory power he could have brought to bear. Because Schriever's management method consisted essentially of gathering around him men with outstanding apt.i.tude for particular endeavors, or sharp-witted enough to grasp a new task swiftly, and then turning them loose to accomplish their roles while he surveyed all as a kind of high-tech ringmaster, Bennie had tolerated Hall. The lesson on how to get men to do what he wanted had been learned and practiced ever since, as a junior lieutenant, he had been given a Civilian Conservation Corps camp full of rambunctious boys to govern in Texas. "Talented people can be difficult," he once remarked. "You have to let them do things their way." But the tolerance was extended only as long as they produced for him and Hall was definitely not producing on Thor. Schriever had to find a replacement for him as soon as possible.

THE RELUCTANT RESCUER.

A day or so after Thor 103 burned on the launching pad and while he was still on the East Coast, Schriever telephoned the lieutenant colonel who had so briskly instructed Mettler to abort the launch, Richard Jacobson, his chief of test facilities and operations. "Jake," he said, "I need you to take over the program." Jacobson had been warned by one of Schriever's deputies to expect the call and he had his answer ready. "General, I don't want it," he replied. "I really don't want it." He explained that he had striven hard to establish a reputation for performance in the Air Force and had too much to lose by getting involved with a sinking enterprise. "I can understand that," Schriever said, "but you know we're in a terrible compet.i.tion with the Army, and if we can't make an IRBM work, the Army's going to say we can't make an ICBM work, and we're going to lose the whole guided missile program. You've got to make Thor work." The pressure on Schriever had become excruciating. One of his officers recalled long afterward that during a staff briefing on a Sat.u.r.day, when Bennie had left orders he was not to be disturbed, his secretary had appeared at the doorway and said there was a call he had to take in his office. "That was Eisenhower," he said, as he walked back into the meeting, "and I'm not sure I'll be here on Monday." day or so after Thor 103 burned on the launching pad and while he was still on the East Coast, Schriever telephoned the lieutenant colonel who had so briskly instructed Mettler to abort the launch, Richard Jacobson, his chief of test facilities and operations. "Jake," he said, "I need you to take over the program." Jacobson had been warned by one of Schriever's deputies to expect the call and he had his answer ready. "General, I don't want it," he replied. "I really don't want it." He explained that he had striven hard to establish a reputation for performance in the Air Force and had too much to lose by getting involved with a sinking enterprise. "I can understand that," Schriever said, "but you know we're in a terrible compet.i.tion with the Army, and if we can't make an IRBM work, the Army's going to say we can't make an ICBM work, and we're going to lose the whole guided missile program. You've got to make Thor work." The pressure on Schriever had become excruciating. One of his officers recalled long afterward that during a staff briefing on a Sat.u.r.day, when Bennie had left orders he was not to be disturbed, his secretary had appeared at the doorway and said there was a call he had to take in his office. "That was Eisenhower," he said, as he walked back into the meeting, "and I'm not sure I'll be here on Monday."

Jacobson felt bad having to refuse Schriever anything because he had such respect for the man. The respect had been earned at the Pentagon one day back during the interregnum before the adoption of the Gillette Procedures. If they were to maintain schedule and proceed "to the maximum extent that technology would allow," as General White, the vice chief of staff, had directed in May 1954, they needed approximately $130 million for the next fiscal year. The launch complexes to be built at Canaveral, the downrange monitoring stations through the Caribbean, and other essentials, all had to be paid for. Yet they had so far been allotted only $38 million. Schriever arranged an appeal before a board of the Air Staff. Jacobson was awed by the galaxy of stars in the room. The chairman of the committee was a three-star general and all of its members had at least two and a couple of them three.

Schriever, followed by Jacobson and others from the WDD staff, briefed the committee on why they absolutely had to have the additional funds. The generals listened patiently and then discussed the matter among themselves. The three-star chairman turned to Schriever. "General, we have other high priority things and we don't have the funds," he said. "You're going to have to live with the $38 million and make your schedule." Schriever, as was his wont, had been sitting behind a table with his feet propped up on another chair. It was a favorite position because it was relaxing and solved the problem of what to do with his long legs. He took his feet off the chair and stood up, a conspicuous figure with the single star on his shoulder tabs before this multistarred committee. "Gentlemen," he said, "you can tell me what schedule you want me to make, in which case I'll tell you how much money you will have to provide. Or you can tell me how much money you will provide and I will tell you what schedule you will get. But you can't tell me both." Jacobson was astonished. A junior general running a program, no matter what the priority, was expected to salute and march off once his betters had rendered judgment. The program would then fall far behind schedule, or perhaps not get finished at all, but the requirements of seniority and protocol and budget would be satisfied. The committee had expected Schriever to behave accordingly. "My G.o.d," Jacobson thought, "these guys are going to eat him alive." The chairman broke the silence. "General, let us discuss it," he said. "We'll get back to you. Just wait outside." In about ten minutes they were summoned back into the room. "General," the three-star said to Schriever, "you're absolutely right. You've got your money."

Back in a bind again, Schriever was not about to relent with Jacobson. He pointed out that as far as he could tell, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the missile. "All three errors have been because of the way in which they tested," he said. "And you, as director of tests, know more about how to get this thing done than anybody and I want you to do it." Jacobson tried again to wiggle away. "Boss, I got to tell you, I don't want my name on that G.o.dd.a.m.n program. You're going to lose that program." Jacobson was a.s.suming that, with Jupiter flying so smoothly, should Thor run into much more trouble, Secretary Wilson, if for no reason other than to please a president who was always seeking ways to reduce the military budget, would reverse himself and declare Jupiter the nation's IRBM. Schriever cut a deal with Jacobson. "I'll tell you what, Jake, I'll leave you as director of tests, but I'll make you acting program director of Thor," he said, underscoring the word "acting." "If you're concerned about it being on your record, it will never appear." Jacobson relented, partway. "Well, you've got a program director named Ed Hall," he said. "I'll get him out of your way," Schriever replied. And so he did, but not in a manner that would disgrace Hall and force his departure. Ed Hall was too gifted a man to lose. Schriever had in mind a new prospect appropriate to those gifts, one he knew Hall would take up with enthusiasm. He wanted to keep Hall around until matters matured enough for him to a.s.sign Hall to it. In effect, he suspended Hall while he s.h.i.+fted Jacobson into his job. He told Hall that although Jacobson would be taking over Thor, Hall would officially remain the program director. He was to wait in this holding pattern until Schriever could arrange an alternative worthy of him.

In Jacobson, Schriever had found a man who could rescue him from his predicament, for Richard "Jake" Jacobson was a man prepared to expend whatever energy and perseverance were required to achieve his ends. He was extremely intelligent, one of the smartest officers ever to serve Schriever. Enemies called him "Jake the Snake." The epithet was undeserved, a parting shot from officers angry at having been bested by him in some professional sc.r.a.pe. While he would resort to guile when necessary, Jacobson was no intriguer. He was normally as candid as he had been on the telephone with Schriever, his forth-rightness reinforced by the cuss words that laced his language. The son of a prosperous family of Jewish ancestry in the ladies garment business in Birmingham, Alabama, he had grown up in a house with four African-American servants, including the chauffeur. His father steered him into business administration at the University of Alabama because it was a.s.sumed he would take up the family trade, but he found the subject boring and soon switched to his first intellectual love, mathematics, and developed an interest in flying.

By the fall of 1943 he was in England, a twenty-three-year-old captain in the U.S. Army Air Forces, piloting a C-47 transport in a troop carrier group. When a call went out for volunteers to fly a special ("special" being the military euphemism for "dangerous") mission, Jacobson raised his hand and found himself in a squadron that dropped the first paratroops, the "pathfinders," during an airborne landing. He was designated lead pilot of one of the three-plane flights, called "serials," into which the squadron was organized. The pathfinders were equipped with radio beacons to guide the subsequent waves of C-47s with the ma.s.s of airborne infantry to the correct landing zones. The trick was to drop the pathfinders on the right spot, always difficult in those years of relatively primitive navigation instruments and particularly so at night, as had to be done for the Normandy invasion. In the predawn hours of D-Day, Jacobson led his three-plane serial at fifty feet over the English Channel, then up to 700 feet as they crossed Normandy's Cotentin Peninsula to gain enough alt.i.tude for the parachutes of the pathfinder troops crowding the planes to open. He suddenly realized that his navigator had failed to alert him to a turn and he was off course. He took his three C-47s back out to the Channel and up over the Cotentin and into the German antiaircraft fire once more, so that these parachutists would not fling themselves out the doors and into battle in vain. He was awarded the Silver Star for Gallantry and later, from Charles de Gaulle's Free French government, a Croix de Guerre.

A Silver Star and a Croix de Guerre were not all he had brought home from the war. He had, in another instance of Jacobson persistence, won a brunette English beauty named Ethel Davies, called by her nickname, Peg. She was as strikingly lovely as Jacobson was strikingly homely. He had a beak of a nose, large ears that stuck out, and while still in his twenties, except for the hair on the side of his head, which he kept clipped short in military fas.h.i.+on, he was bald. He spotted her on a railway platform in Nottingham in the East Midlands, near the airfield where his squadron was stationed, and asked if he could sit beside her on the train. "Well, I suppose so," she replied. "It's a free country." She was in uniform. Britain drafted its women for non-combat duty during the war, and to avoid ending up as a secretary, Peg Davies had joined the Royal Signals branch of the women's army organization, the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She was working as a switchboard operator at a depot in the vicinity. Her stop was first and by the time she got off, Jacobson had maneuvered the conversation around to learning the name of the place and what she did there.

When he called the switchboard soon afterward to ask for a date, she told the other operators not to put him through. She had been struck on the train by his baldness and found it hard to believe he was as young as he claimed to be. The bald Englishmen she knew were in their fifties. He kept calling and she kept refusing to take the calls. Then one evening, right after she had finished was.h.i.+ng her hair, a guard at the depot gate sent word to her barracks that an American officer was there asking to see her. She dressed, wrapped her damp hair in a big white towel, and walked down to the gate. It was Jake. She decided that if he was this persistent, he was worth at least one date. He courted her on a motorcycle filched from a British airborne outfit during a pre-D-Day practice drop, with Lucky Strike cigarettes, Hershey bars, and hefty No. 10 cans of grape juice, and he took her to dinners at a restaurant in Nottingham that still served steaks, locally reputed to be horse meat. He also stayed on active duty an extra year so that he could fly back to England and marry her at a registry office in Shrops.h.i.+re in 1946.

Foresight into the coming importance of guided missiles had led Jacobson to Schriever. He brought his English bride home to Birmingham and spent the next two years completing undergraduate studies for a bachelor's in mathematics. Although he had left the service, he was still enrolled in the Reserve. While attending some mandatory Reserve schooling, he was informed by a general he knew that if he applied for a Regular commission, the newly independent U.S. Air Force would send him to MIT for two years of graduate study under Charles Stark Draper, the G.o.d of inertial guidance. He would receive the full pay and allowances of the lieutenant colonel's rank he now held in the Reserve, along with tuition and any other expenses. He arrived at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, which Draper headed, on a Sat.u.r.day morning and found the renowned professor in s.h.i.+rt sleeves sweeping the floor of the former shoe polish factory. Jacobson mistook him for a janitor until he asked directions to Dr. Draper's office and the great man introduced himself. Because of sundry delays between Birmingham and Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, it was 1952 by the time Jacobson received his master's degree in engineering from MIT. The question now was what to ask the Air Force to let him do with it. The Matador and Snark missiles were still in the development stage, but they caught his attention. Guided missiles, he decided, were in the Air Force to stay and he might one day want to command a missile unit. Nuclear weapons were also obviously here to stay and so he thought it would be a good idea to learn how to mate nuclear warheads to missiles.

The same general who had urged him to go to MIT arranged his a.s.signment to the guided missiles section of the Special Weapons Command at Albuquerque's Kirtland Air Force Base. He spent the next two years there, weaponizing nuclear devices from Los Alamos, first for missiles and then for bombers and fighters as well. His superior was Colonel Charles Terhune, whom Schriever had recruited as his second man, WDD's deputy commander for technical operations, while putting together his Schoolhouse Gang in Inglewood in the summer of 1954. A test pilot at Wright Field and fighter pilot in the Pacific during the Second World War, Terry Terhune had a deserved reputation within the Air Force as an engineer of consummate ability. Once at the School-house, Terhune began rounding up other officers with engineering prowess for Schriever. The Air Force personnel department had selected Jacobson for a term at the Naval War College after his a.s.signment to Kirtland, a comfortable academic year in Newport, Rhode Island. Terhune warned him that, with Schriever's authority to put a hand on whomever he wanted, Jacobson was coming to Schriever's shop sooner or later, and, if he wanted a good position, he had better come sooner. He told Peg they would not be going to Newport and came sooner, near the end of 1954. Moose Mathison, who had become Jacobson's deputy at Kirtland, followed in 1955. It was Jacobson who, with Schriever's a.s.sent, had then sent him to Canaveral as WDD's delegate to oversee construction of the launch complexes there. "Colonel, do you have any experience in test operations?" Schriever had asked Jacobson on his arrival at Inglewood. "No, sir," Jacobson had replied. "Do you know anything about testing?" Schriever had probed. "No, sir," Jacobson said. "Good. You're my director of tests," Schriever announced. Terhune had a.s.sured him Jacobson was a quick study. Bennie had therefore a.s.sumed he would learn. And he did.

The first thing Jacobson did after taking over Thor was to send an officer he trusted to the Douglas plant at Santa Monica to find out why the company was not performing as it had promised and the original contract required. The Thors had been arriving at Canaveral with many parts missing. The unlaunchable missiles sat in one of the a.s.sembly buildings at the Cape until the parts arrived from California after long delays, and were installed. Even if Thor 101 had not blasted the pad so badly that repairs had taken two months, lack of parts would have delayed the launch of Thor 102, the missile the range safety officer mistakenly blew up, for an equivalent period of time. Jake's investigator found, as Jacobson recalled years later, that the manufacturing procedures at the Douglas plant were "in sad shape" and the engineers there "didn't seem to give a d.a.m.n." Jacobson briefed Schriever on what he had learned and said he intended to wake up the slackers. "Boss, I'm going to close down Douglas Aircraft Company until they straighten out," he said. "I'm going to get their attention." Get it, he did. He telephoned one of the senior executives that he was cutting off all payments until Douglas began producing on time and up to quality standards. Three days later the Douglas executives were in his office with a plan of reform. Hall took umbrage at Jacobson's brusque methods and, his pride hurt because he was still officially the program director, went over to Santa Monica and told the engineers to ignore Jacobson. They immediately telephoned Jacobson and asked him what they should do. He said to put Hall on the phone, but Hall refused to talk to him. Jacobson called the Air Force security people and had them escort Hall out of the plant. The issue took months to square away and, while Jacobson relented after a time and allowed funds to flow again, the threat that he would once more stop the money was enough to keep Douglas on good behavior.

Jacobson's next move was to appoint Moose Mathison his deputy. Whenever he could not be at Canaveral to oversee work on a Thor and preparations for a launch, Mathison was to act as his delegate and to speak with equivalent authority. The same would hold true in the blockhouse during a launch. If he happened to be absent for any reason, Mathison was the man. Like Schriever, Jacobson understood how thoroughly dependent the Air Force was on Mettler and Thiel and their a.s.sociates. He was determined, again among his first tasks, to impress on the staff of approximately eight officers he had inherited from Hall that in the future he wanted teamwork with the Ramo-Wooldridge men, not internecine warfare. Hall's staff were not an untalented bunch. One staffer was Sidney Greene, who, while a major at the Air Development Center at Wright Field back in 1952, had risked his career to divert $2 million to Hall for the prototype of the Rocketdyne engine that was powering Thor and would also power Atlas. But Jacobson discovered that instead of welding his staff into a team, Hall had each man doing his own thing with little interaction beween them. He decided that inviting them all to dinner at his house with their wives would be a good way to break down barriers and asked Peg to telephone the women and set it up.

In these years in the military, when the wife of your husband's boss called to invite the two of you to dinner, you said, yes, thank you. Peg was baffled and angered by the negative responses she got. She rang Jake back. "I'm not dealing with that bunch," she said. Jake convened a staff meeting. "Mrs. Jacobson and I are going to have a little affair Friday night, and we would like each of you to come with your spouse. We think you will enjoy it," he said. "It is not a command performance, but I will take the name, rank, and serial number of any son of a b.i.t.c.h who doesn't show up." Attendance was 100 percent and Jake began to transform his staff. He sat them down with Mettler and Thiel and their people and, making no attempt to hide the peril that Thor was in, said the project was doomed unless both sides learned to cooperate. Mettler in turn promised all the support he could muster from the Ramo-Wooldridge group. "Jake, you tell us what you want done and we'll do it," he said. They went over all their launch procedures and tightened up. There were to be no more foolish gambles with time and alertness. Instruments were checked and double-checked. There were to be no more backward-flying DOVAP radars.

Nearly three and a half months went by before they could get another Thor ready to launch, but this time, on August 30, 1957, Thor 104 flew downrange for ninety-six seconds before it blew apart. Jacobson's shaking up of Douglas now began to pay off in dramatically shorter launch intervals. Thor 105 was readied a lot faster and did a lot better on September 20. It lofted up and away, the engine shutting down instantly as it was programmed to do at 137 seconds and releasing the empty warhead, which flew on for 1,495 miles before impacting into the Caribbean. Twenty-one days later they crossed the finish line. On October 11, 1957, Thor 106 lifted off in a ballistic missile's storm of fire and thunder and tossed its warhead off down the full required 1,725-mile course along the islands of the West Indies chain to splash into the Caribbean off Venezuela.

THOR VS. JUPITER.

The success Jacobson wrought came none too soon. That August, Eisenhower, as part of a renewed campaign to constrict the military budget, had instructed Wilson to end the absurd expense of two IRBM programs. Wilson had established a committee consisting of Schriever and Medaris, with Wilson's special a.s.sistant for guided missiles, William Holaday, as chairman, to decide whether the nation's IRBM was to be Thor or Jupiter.

Eisenhower and Wilson were not naive men and it is difficult to believe they thought that either Schriever or Medaris would consent to the cancellation of his own missile. The committee appears to have been structured as it was so that Holaday could permit each of the contestants to argue his case, examine the test results at Canaveral, and then render judgment for one side or the other. Disagree the two contestants did. On September 25, 1957, Medaris sent Holaday a lengthy, point-by-point memorandum, thickened with nine attachments, which extolled Jupiter as the superior missile, its worth demonstrated by its testing record and guaranteed by superior rocket makers under Wernher von Braun. His recommendation was: 1. The JUPITER be continued as the IRBM and, 2. The THOR project be cancelled as expeditiously as possible.

Schriever countered in his brief that Thor was the better choice for the country because it could be fielded faster than Jupiter. The prototype Jupiters were being built individually at the Redstone a.r.s.enal. The final design of the missile would subsequently have to be farmed out to industry for production. (Medaris intended to use the Chrysler Corporation, which was manufacturing Redstone.) In contrast, because the test model Thors were being created by Douglas on production tooling, the Air Force had the ability to move right into full production and then deployment as soon as the problems common to any new missile were solved. Furthermore, Schriever argued, the Army was building only a missile, not an IRBM weapon system that could be fielded. The Jupiter project lacked provisions for ground support equipment, such as tanks for the LOX and RP-1, shelters to protect the missile from the weather, and other equipment necessary for deployment. By the time the Army got around to furnis.h.i.+ng this equipment, more delay would ensue.

Holaday, who submitted his report on October 8, 1957, after Jacobson had begun to rescue the test launches with Thor 105's 1,495-mile flight on September 20, decided not to place himself in the middle of a nasty interservice row. He beat a bureaucrat's retreat. He said that unless Thor showed marked improvement, "the spectacular success which has been achieved by the Jupiter test flights" might eventually force its choice. But he recommended that in the meantime the Defense Department "continue both programs until we have a better basis for resolving the various problem areas."

In his report he did, however, state "a firm requirement" that whichever missile might eventually be chosen must have the capacity for upgrading "to a 2,000 nautical mile [2,301 statute mile] range from the present design" of 1,500 nautical. Medaris claimed that while Jupiter could easily achieve 2,020 nautical miles (2,324 statute), Thor would never be able to fly more than 1,660 nautical (1,909 statute) because of its heavier reentry vehicle. Thor's reentry vehicle, designated the Mark 2, weighed 3,500 pounds and was the same RV designed for Atlas. In the hustle to put Thor together, it had been adopted without any remodeling to size it down for the smaller rocket. It was a heat s.h.i.+eld, or "heat sink," type. Its nose consisted of a ma.s.sive, conical s.h.i.+eld of solid, machined copper, five eighths to three quarters of an inch thick and six feet in diameter. Behind the s.h.i.+eld was a stainless steel compartment in which the one-megaton hydrogen bomb was to ride. The s.h.i.+eld alone weighed more than a thousand pounds. As this blunt nose RV descended back into the atmosphere, the s.h.i.+eld absorbed the extreme heat generated by the friction of the air and protected the bomb behind it. Because of its shape and the size of the s.h.i.+eld, it was also aimed to enter the atmosphere at a shallow angle, thereby slowing itself down as it descended and reducing heat that way as well.

Jupiter's reentry vehicle, which weighed 3,000 pounds, was the one technological advance the Army missile had over Thor. It was an ablative type, the first of its kind to be mounted on an American ballistic missile and a tribute to the knowledge gleaned from experience by von Braun's team. The word, originally a grammatical term for nouns or p.r.o.nouns indicating separation, later also denoted the removal of tissue by a surgeon, the melting of ice or snow, typically from a glacier, or the erosion of rock by wind action. In this age of guided missiles coming into being, "ablative" referred to a reentry vehicle coated with a compound of plastic and other heat-absorbing elements. As the RV plunged back into the atmosphere and friction built up from the density of the air, the coating was enveloped by the red-hot abrasion and progressively burned away, thereby diverting the heat that would otherwise destroy the reentry vehicle and the hydrogen bomb inside it. Usually conical-shaped, or rounded like the nose of a torpedo (Jupiter's was conical, if much smaller in diameter than Thor's), an ablative RV had distinct advantages. It descended at a steep angle and retained its speed, making it more accurate because it was less subject to deflection from its course by the winds of the upper atmosphere. For this reason, an ablative RV was later adapted for Atlas. In the case of Thor and Jupiter, any minor difference in accuracy was largely academic, as both were first-generation area-destroying weapons referred to as "city busters" in the language of nuclear weaponry.

Thor was stuck with its 3,500-pound reentry vehicle, Medaris contended. There was no practical way to shave off the 500 pounds necessary for the missile to reach the required 2,000 nautical mile range. "This would mean a complete nose cone redesign with attendant high cost and extensive re-test programs," he wrote. What he did not calculate was that an IRBM, flying a far shorter distance than an ICBM, also flew at considerably less than an ICBM's speed, about 10,000 miles per hour. The higher the speed, the greater the heat generated on reentry. Thus the warhead on Thor did not need anything approaching the heat protection afforded by the copper heat s.h.i.+eld designed for the Atlas, which was six feet in diameter.

Jacobson, because of his knowledge of guided missiles, understood this. When Schriever, who was in Was.h.i.+ngton at the time, pa.s.sed the word to Jake that he had to fly Thor 2,000 nautical miles, Jacobson responded, "h.e.l.l, that's easy." He instructed Mettler to trim hundreds of pounds (later he could not recall the precise figure) off both the heat s.h.i.+eld and the bomb compartment behind it. When the engine of Thor 107 was ignited on October 24, 1957, the rocket flew flawlessly on past the 1,725-mile mark and over the Windward Islands, the last of the West Indies, to plunge into the Atlantic Ocean 3,043 miles from its launching pad on Cape Canaveral. The issue was never raised again. For some reason, Neil McElroy, the Procter & Gamble executive who succeeded Wilson as secretary of defense that October, never enforced Holaday's requirement to extend the reach to 2,000 nautical miles. The 1,500-nautical mile range was retained. Jake flew the subsequent Thors with the original Atlas heat sink reentry vehicle. There was no necessity to fas.h.i.+on a lighter one. Holaday's recommendation to wait and see turned into permanent hesitation. The Army and Air Force went on duplicating money and effort as each continued to build its own IRBM. Major General John Medaris had lost his power play. Bennie Schriever's ICBM program was safe.

SPUTNIK.

Permitting the Air Force and the Army the extravagance of duplicating IRBMs became the least of Eisenhower's concerns after Sputnik, the Soviet surprise of October 4, 1957. Near the end of August, the Russians announced that they had flight-tested an ICBM. Sergei Korolev's monster R-7 rocket, the Semyorka, had flown a 4,000-mile course from its launching pad at the new Soviet test center at Baikonur, also known as Tyuratam, in Kazakhstan in Central Asia all the way across Siberia to the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Bering Sea. The test was not perfect. The reentry vehicle disintegrated about six miles above the earth. No matter: the length of the flight was what counted. The Semyorka (designated the SS-6 Sapwood by NATO intelligence officers) was in reality the precursor of a Soviet ICBM. Designed to carry a super-size 5.4-ton fission, or atomic, pay-load because the Soviet Union did not explode its first full-fledged hydrogen bomb until November 1955, let alone begin the process of downsizing one for an ICBM warhead, the rocket was so huge it weighed twenty-three metric tons with its tanks empty, meaning that it could be moved only by rail. The steps necessary to prepare it for flight and fuel it with LOX and kerosene took twenty hours, versus the fifteen minutes for which the Atlas was being designed. The Soviets were to deploy only four Semyorkas at another new launch center readied in 1959, Plesetsk, south of Arkhangelsk (Archangel) in the far north of western Russia. Khrushchev's son Sergei remembered that his father also recoiled at the cost, about half a billion rubles per R-7 site. "What will we do, we'll be without pants," Khrushchev complained to Korolev.

But if its bulk and long readiness time rendered the R-7 impractical as an ICBM, its power made it ideal for the launching of satellites. The trick to tossing a satellite into orbit was to burn the rocket engines long enough to gain sufficient velocity to escape the gravitational pull of the earth. The R-7 had plenty of capacity for that. The August announcement of an ICBM was played down by Wilson and Eisenhower and caused only ripples in Was.h.i.+ngton and in the country as a whole. The event of October 4 was another matter. That evening Baikonur time, Korolev, as the Soviet Union's leading rocket designer, watched through his personal periscope in the blockhouse as his Semyorka lifted off carrying in its nose cone a metal ball polished to a silvered finish. Reed-thin radio antennae for the small battery-powered transmitter within the ball trailed back to the sides. The whole weighed only 83.6 kilograms, 184.3 pounds. The voice of the launch controller called off the drama over the blockhouse's loudspeaker system as the rocket attained the required velocity and the nose cone separated and flew into orbit. The glistening ball was released and began circling earth, its little transmitter emitting a beep, beep, beep beep, beep, beep that told the world the Soviet Union, and not the United States, had inaugurated the s.p.a.ce Age. that told the world the Soviet Union, and not the United States, had inaugurated the s.p.a.ce Age.

The ball was named Sputnik, simply the Russian word for "satellite," and it provoked a national ordeal of soul-searching in the United States. However much Americans worried about the Soviet Union, they had always a.s.sumed it was technologically inferior, incapable of besting the United States in everything from kitchen appliances to rockets that would open s.p.a.ce. Was America, proud America, now slipping into second place? What was overlooked in the furor was that the Soviet Union was a selectively superior nation. In the highly stratified and contorted society that Stalin had hammered into being, while most citizens suffered austere lives of deprivation, the state created and concentrated highly advanced science and technology in areas that interested it and rewarded those scientists and technologists who served it, as Stalin had rewarded Igor Kurchatov and those who had produced the atomic bomb for him, with comfort and privilege. Sputnik was a manifestation of this pattern.

The creation of the R-7 meant that the Russians had a lead, and as was to be proven, a quite temporary one, in long-range rocketry. With it, they had been the first to decide to launch a s.p.a.ce satellite. Sputnik did not mean, as Khrushchev crowed, and as many Americans now were afraid, that the Soviet Union was the future. Its overall technological and economic strength, with wide gaps in its infrastructure, was immensely inferior to that of the United States. Eisenhower could have sent up a s.p.a.ce satellite ahead of or virtually simultaneous with the Russians had he been willing to spend the money and had he thought it necessary. The secret U-2 flights over Russia were, he believed, keeping him reasonably well informed of Soviet military advances. (He could have eased the political pressure on himself by sharing this unique intelligence with the Democratic leaders.h.i.+p of Congress, but he considered the photography too sensitive to do so.) A s.p.a.ce satellite to conduct photographic reconnaissance after the U-2 had outlived its usefulness was in the secret planning stage. He saw no need to go to considerable expense to throw up some interim but militarily useless satellite. (And as Schriever and his a.s.sociates were to learn, the real trick was not to hurl a satellite into orbit. It was to bring back to earth intact what you put into the satellite.) Dwight Eisenhower was the last American president to believe that military spending which was not absolutely necessary was money wasted and that a well-founded economy was as important to the security of the country as armed might. His achievements during the Second World War also gave him confidence in his military judgment. He listened to his admirals and generals and then made up his own mind. He was caught unawares by Sputnik because he failed to foresee the psychological and political repercussions if he permitted the Soviets to get a s.p.a.ce satellite up first. He had left it to the Navy to send a tiny satellite into orbit for the 195758 International Geophysical Year with an inadequately tested rocket called Vanguard, which blew up on its pad on December 6, 1957, two months after Sputnik, to the further embarra.s.sment of the nation. It was to be Wernher von Braun, on January 31, 1958, approximately four months after Sputnik, and with the administration's belated support, who demonstrated that satellites were not a Soviet monopoly. Using Juno I, a multistage rocket derived from the Redstone, he lofted Explorer I, an eighteen-pound satellite, into orbit.

Few Americans, however, viewed Sputnik in this perspective. The Democrats, who had long been critical of the administration for its parsimony toward the military, went on the a.s.sault. The formidable Senate majority leader from Texas, Lyndon Johnson, accused Eisenhower of imperiling America by his obsession with balancing the budget. Senator Symington called for a special session of Congress, declaring that "unless our defense policies are promptly changed, the Soviets will move from superiority to supremacy." "Scoop" Jackson, the clandestine ally of Bennie and Trevor Gardner in obtaining the Gillette Procedures, urged observance of "a week of shame and danger." Johnson soon announced the opening in late November of lengthy hearings by the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Commitee on Armed Services, which he headed.

The hearings were to endure through January 1958 with dozens of prominent witnesses and to subject the administration to rising political pressure. Nor did it help when, on November 3, 1957, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Korolev, at Khrushchev's behest, launched Sputnik 2. It weighed 1,120 pounds, six times the heft of Sputnik 1 and sixty-two times the weight of von Braun's little Explorer I, and orbited the globe with a mongrel dog named Laika aboard. American animal rights activists protested after the poor creature died from overheating of the capsule, but the Soviet press p.r.o.nounced Laika a martyr for the cause of s.p.a.ce. The leadoff witness at the Johnson hearings was that genius of scaremongering Dr. Edward Teller. He warned that the Russians might beat Americans to the moon, that they might learn to control the weather and render the United States a second-cla.s.s nation by restricting rainfall over the North American continent, and that within ten years they would have the best scientists in the world because Russian students were such math and science whizzes. Despite the ludicrousness of much of Teller's testimony, his appeal to undertake a major educational reform in the United States by raising the level of scientific and mathematical education, an appeal reiterated by a number of the witnesses to follow, was well taken. The National Defense Education Act of 1958, which provided federal funds for the teaching of math, science, and foreign languages, was the first harvest of these reforms.

Sputnik was definitely a blessing out of the blue for Schriever. He had first heard Quarles speak of the "Poor Man's" approach the secretary wanted the Air Force to adopt when, in the summer of 1956, Quarles had rejected Schriever's Fiscal Year 1957 missile budget and ordered a revision with substantial cost reductions. Quarles was reflecting pressure from Wilson, who was in turn reflecting it from Eisenhower, to rein in military expenditures in order to avoid raising the ceiling on the national debt, then running at approximately $275 billion. In testimony before a Senate committee that summer, Quarles had defended his severe reductions in the overall research and development budget of the Air Force with cla.s.sic Eisenhower thinking: "I believe it both necessary and feasible to provide adequate military defenses and, at the same time, to preserve the sound economic foundations of the Nation." The Air Staff pointed out to General White that if Quarles's economies were accepted, the Air Force would not be obeying Eisenhower's September 1955 National Security Council injunction to field an ICBM force "at the earliest possible date." The president solved that conflict himself by issuing a new NSC directive in March 1957 that changed the attainment of an operational ICBM capability to "the earliest practicable date." Schriever had submitted to Quarles's "Poor Man's" edict in the fall of 1956 and produced another budget, this one for Fiscal Year 1958, of $1.335 billion, 20 percent lower than the previous one, scything down the number of planned ICBMs from 120 Atlas and t.i.tan missiles to 80.

The Air Staff and General White endorsed Schriever's new plan and warned it was "as low as we dare go." But this was not low enough for Quarles and Wilson and the president. They also slashed the number of IRBMs to be deployed, from the original eight Thor and eight Jupiter squadrons totaling 240 missiles to four squadrons of each and 120 missiles in all. A draft agreement to base the Thors in England was signed by Wilson and Duncan Sandys, Britain's minister of defense, in January 1957 and ratified by Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan when they met at Bermuda that March. The Jupiters were eventually to be based in Italy and Turkey after agreements were later reached with both of those countries.

In May 1957, the blade of the economy guillotine fell once more, slicing another $200 million off the "as low as we dare go" missile budget of $1.335 billion. And again this was not enough. In July, Wilson, after he was chided at a National Security Council meeting for not being sufficiently ruthless, announced his intention to squeeze to $1 billion the annual missile costs of all three services, including those for a revolutionary submarine-launched ballistic missile named Polaris that the Navy had initiated. Schriever was nearly forced to eliminate overtime costs at the factories, to delay payments, and to slow down production. The existing program called for six Atlas, seven t.i.tan, and six Thor missiles to come off the line every month. Wilson pressed the Air Force so hard that General White offered to take this down to four of each type per month, despite the delay this would have on deployment, but Wilson withheld agreement on the offer. He ordered the Air Force to study the repercussions of going down to a two-two-two production rate. Schriever did his best to keep the contractors who were building his missiles from becoming utterly discouraged. "There has been no change in national priority," he told the Convair and Douglas and other executives. What was occurring was "certain adjustments of key milestone dates" and "a logical stretch-out" of the program. And all of this was in vain. Despite rea.s.suring words and soothing bureaucratic jargon, he could not prevent a deterioration in the morale of his contractors and within his own staff. They were supposed to be engaged in an enterprise central to the survival of the nation and this n.i.g.g.ardly government was acting as if they were spendthrift schoolboys. Then Sergei Pavlovich Korolev sent his R-7 Semyorka aloft with Sputnik like a s.p.a.ce Age cavalry to the rescue.

THOR READIES FOR ENGLAND.

Aletter to Eisenhower on December 3, 1957, from his new secretary of defense, Neil McElroy, reflected the transformed political reality. McElroy told the president that the planned reductions in spending for ballistic missiles were "of historical interest" only. At an NSC meeting on January 30, 1958, the president gave in to the inevitable. He held firm on the number of Thor and Jupiter IRBM missiles that were to go to England, Italy, and Turkey, probably because he knew he could get away with this as they were to be deployed abroad. These IRBMs were to remain at four squadrons each for 120 missiles in all. The powerhouse ICBMs that were to be based in the United States were a different matter. The earlier total of approximately 120 was restored, divided into nine squadrons of Atlas ICBMs and four squadrons of t.i.tans. A production target of six Atlas, six t.i.tan, and eight Thor missiles per month, virtually the same as the old, was also inst.i.tuted and restrictions on overtime were soon relaxed. Test launching at Cape Canaveral, which had never stopped despite the "Poor Man's" lament, was moving on.

The monitoring and tracking stations downrange through the Caribbean and into the South Atlantic had a.s.sumed increasing importance. The launches had been progressing from simple proofs of propulsion, steering, airframe worthiness, and capability for full distance flight into the more advanced testing necessary to make certain that each and every aspect of the weapon functioned as designed. To evaluate the entire performance of the missiles required a prodigious and far-flung array of monitoring and tracking stations. While Moose Mathison had been fighting off mosquitoes and supervising construction of the launch facilities at the Cape, Jake Jacobson had been busy making certain that this downrange network would be ready for Thor and then Atlas and t.i.tan to follow. The Air Force had engaged Pan American Airways to build the stations with civilian construction crews and subsequently to take charge of the housekeeping ch.o.r.es. The Radio Corporation of America was hired to provide the technicians who operated the radio and radar gear.

The missiles were initially picked up by a station at Jupiter Auxiliary Air Force Base on the Florida coast 110 miles south of Canaveral. The network then jumped seaward, following south and east along the islands that separate the Caribbean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean. The Bahamas led off with a station at Grand Bahama Island, then on down through the rest of the Bahamas to Eleuthera, to San Salvador, where Columbus made his first landfall in the New World, and to Mayaguana; then to Grand Turk Island in the Turks and Caicos Islands; then to the Dominican Republic on Hispaniola Island; on to Mayaguez Auxiliary Air Force Base on the American possession of Puerto Rico; to Antigua in the Leewards, 1,500 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral and far enough down the island chain to measure the range and accuracy of Jupiter and Thor. Next came a long leap to the island of Fernando de Noronha off the coast of Brazil, and after that a second leap to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, midway between Brazil and Africa, approximately 4,500 miles southeast of Canaveral and 625 miles north of lonely St. Helena, where Napoleon was exiled to die. Ascension was to be the preliminary terminal point for Atlas and t.i.tan. Twelve modified Second World War cargo s.h.i.+ps, fitted out with appropriate gear, put to sea whenever there was to be a launch, filling in the gaps, particularly between Antigua and Ascension in the South Atlantic. Undersea cables tied many of the stations back to Cape Canaveral, providing instantaneous and secure communications.

The radar at the stations, while sophisticated and precise, fulfilled the relatively simple task of tracking the missile. The radio monitors had a more complicated job. They had to pick up and record the telemetry from the sensors fitted into the missiles. Atlas and t.i.tan, before their testing was completed, were to carry sensors for 1,500 points of data during flight. All elements of the weapon, short of putting an actual hydrogen bomb into the warhead and exploding it, had to be proven by test. Not that the bomb was forgotten. A simulated bomb provided by the Los Alamos Laboratory with real arming devices and an actual fuse attached was placed in the reentry vehicle to be sure that the bomb would go off. The telemetry from the test said that it would. Near Antigua and Ascension was a bull's-eye, a circle of hydrophones a mile in diameter set in the water off the islands to measure accuracy. The missile's reentry vehicle was aimed at the center of the circle. Precisely where it landed within the circle, or how far off it missed by landing outside the circle, was determined by instruments attached to the hydrophones. Moose Mathison, who was at Antigua and Ascension on several occasions, recalled the awe-inspiring display in the sky when a missile came in at night. The warhead, which had separated from the missile body, would arrive first, a blazing streak as it hurtled down from s.p.a.ce into the atmosphere toward the waiting ring of hydrophones. Then the missile fuselage, its fuel tanks empty, its rocket motors spent, would appear trailing behind and plunge into the friction of the atmosphere in an even grander show of fireworks as it was incinerated.

The next phase of testing focused on determining the reliability and accuracy of the inertial guidance system that would govern the flight of the deployed missiles, or "war birds" as they were to be dubbed. For the initial testing, Jacobson had relied on the radio control arrangement Convair had invented for Atlas. A radio station on the ground transmitted commands to transponders attached to the steering and other controls of the missile. The weakness of radio was that an opponent could interfere with the signals and deflect the missile from its course. Installed within the missile itself, the inertial guidance mechanism was self-contained and impervious to countermeasures. The inertial technique's history went back to the invention of the gyroscope in the 1800s, but it was not until the Second World War that major advances were made. Like those in rocketry, they were German. The V-2 was the first inertially guided missile. While it was too inaccurate to be effective for military purposes, the ability to fly a rocket of the V-2's size and range through an entirely internal guidance system was, nevertheless, remarkable for its time.

By the beginning of the 1950s and the return of that everlasting stimulus of innovation, the atmosphere of war in the compet.i.tion with the Soviets, Dr. Draper of MIT was in the process of taking inertial guidance to its zenith. (Like John von Neumann, Charles Stark Draper gave of his genius to the needs of the U.S. military. When he retired, he chose as his successor to head his Instrumentation Laboratory at MIT a former pupil and one of Schriever's stars, Brigadier General Robert Duffy.) Schriever had put him under contract to design inertial guidance systems for all three of the Air Force's ballistic missiles, Thor, Atlas, and t.i.tan. Draper built a prototype for Thor at his laboratory. Copies were then reproduced on production tooling by the AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors, which had begun its existence making the little plugs that sparked off the gasoline in GM's piston engines and then graduated into the manufacture of precision equipment. Draper's inertial guidance mechanism was an ingenious contrivance of gyroscopes, accelerometers, and related controls. It calculated the missile's speed and course from the moment the rocket left the pad. The device instantly compared what it found with the correct course data stored in a computer that had also been installed in the missile. With Thor, the course data was basic. It consisted of an azimuth, or compa.s.s bearing, that pointed to the target and the distance of the target from the launch point. The inertial guidance mechanism then issued commands that took the rocket to the proper speed and angle, cut off the engines, and launched the warhead at the precise moment required for an accurate flight to its destination.

The greatest fear Jacobson and Mettler had before the first inertial guidance test was that the old-fas.h.i.+oned vacuum tubes, still being used for the circuit connections in the missile's primitive computer, might not withstand the stress of launch. Their worry may have been justified, because 107 seconds after Thor 112 lifted up and away from the pad on December 7, 1957, it suddenly lost stability, began to veer inland, and had to be blown up by the range safety officer. Two days later, they tried again and this time they could not have asked for a better outcome. The inertial guidance took Thor 113 aloft on a perfect flight and sent the warhead down the Caribbean island chain to splash unerringly into the ring of hydrophones near Antigua. To further test the guidance system and to be certain the fuselage of the missile was st.u.r.dy enough to withstand turbulent crosswinds if the crew had to launch during a storm, they programmed the computer to put the rocket through several violent maneuvers before the inertial guidance a.s.serted itself for a smooth flight to the target. The test was a complete success, the sole casualties the two decorative fins Thiel had tacked on the base of Thor to distinguish it from Jupiter. Both were torn off by the whiplash turns of the rocket. Someone asked why they were bothering with fins anyway. There was no need for them and so Thiel's attempt at a distinctive feature for his rocket child was eliminated on future Thors coming through the Douglas production line.

After several more test launches in July and early August 1958, a decision had to be made. Was Thor ready to be deployed in England? Mettler and Thiel wanted to continue perfecting the missile. Jacobson said no. In this post-Sputnik era, just as Schriever felt pressure coming down from the White House, so Jacobson sensed the same pressure, if usually unspoken, from Schriever. The engine had been upgraded to 150,000 pounds of thrust. They had achieved a reasonable percentage of reliabilty and an average accuracy of about five eighths of a mile. "That's it," Jacobson remembered saying. "What we have is good enough. It performs its mission now. We don't need to do any better. Don't go fiddling with it." Schriever gave his a.s.sent and Jacobson ordered the rocket's configuration frozen. With the final changes from these tests, they had readied the IRBM that Douglas would now begin turning out on its production line for England. Test-launching continued through 1958 and 1959 and into early 1960, but these launches were made to retroactively fix flaws discovered in Thor after deployment got under way. The first Thor landed in Britain aboard a Military Air Transport Service (MATS) C-124 Globemaster on August 29, 1958.

JAMIE WALLACE'S THOR SHOW The officer most responsible for this alacrity was an Air Force major of short stature, Texas-size energy, and a modest, precisely clipped mustache named Jamie Walker Wallace. As his three quintessentially Scottish names (William Wallace, the hero of Scotland's first struggle for independence, was executed by Edward I of England in 1306) announced, his ancestry was hardly pacifist. Born in 1921 in Bolivar, a small town north of Fort Worth in north Texas, the son of two teachers, he had flown 209 missions as a fighter pilot in the Pacific, shot down three j.a.panese planes, and won three Distinguished Flying Crosses and numerous Air Medals. According to Jamie, no one could do anything finer for a man than to let him fly a fighter plane in combat. "h.e.l.l, we've already died and gone to Heaven," he would say with a laugh. After the war and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, he had gone into guided missiles, working on the Matador cruise type for several years. That experience had made him a marked man for Schriever. One day in the fall of 1955, Wallace was walking down the stairs at the Air Research and Development Command in Baltimore. He was a.s.signed then to the Air Development Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force