by Amy Cherrix
As von Braun continued to wait for his chance to build a new rocket in the United States, he had no reason to wonder what the Soviets were up to. Knowledge of Korolev’s success with the R-2 would have made bad matters worse. Von Braun’s patience with the American army was exhausted. For five years he and his team had dutifully fulfilled the terms of their contracts. They had gradually educated themselves about American culture and improved their English-speaking skills, though von Braun’s accent was now tinged with a distinct Texas twang. The US Army had the best German engineers at their disposal, not to mention von Braun’s original rocket plans and schematics, and yet they did nothing. “We can dream about rockets and the Moon until Hell freezes over,” he vented to his colleague Dr. Adolf Thiel. “Unless the people understand it and the man who pays the bill is behind it, no dice.” Wernher von Braun decided to take his plea directly to the American people.
With the army’s permission, he gave passionate presentations to local civic groups and clubs. He talked to anyone who would listen. When he described satellites orbiting the Earth and the possibility of travel to other planets, awestruck audiences responded with standing ovations. Concerns about his role in the war faded as the charismatic von Braun spun a romantic vision of space travel—a future he assured them was within reach. A future he knew with absolute certainty he could deliver.
And while the German engineer shared his message of progress with the American public, the secretive Soviets were about to deliver a public message of their own: they had become a nuclear power.
Chapter 10
The Cold War
On August 29, 1949, Soviet nuclear physicists unleashed a shock wave of paranoia and fear on America with the successful testing of their first atomic bomb. Until that point, most Americans perceived the Soviet Union as a backward country that had been devastated by World War II. However, while it was still recovering from the war, and millions of Soviets were desperately poor, the population also included well-educated people and many folks who fell somewhere in between. How had they produced an atomic bomb? As it turned out, they had some help.
The Soviet Union had enlisted the assistance of an average-looking, thirtysomething married American couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The pair became communists sometime during the early 1930s. Their zealous belief in the cause led them to become spies for the Soviet Union, who wanted them to steal intelligence on America’s atomic bomb.
Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, worked as a machinist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the bomb was being developed under the code name Manhattan Project. With access to classified bomb-building intelligence inside the lab, Greenglass took mental notes of what he saw and drew pictures from memory. When it was time to pass along the stolen information, Julius Rosenberg set up a secret protocol to help Greenglass identify his contact. Rosenberg gave him half a box top from a container of Jell-O. His contact, Rosenberg said, would be carrying the other half. Whether or not the Rosenbergs directly contributed to the Soviets’ acquisition of a nuclear bomb remains a matter of debate. But it was enough to convict them both of treason. The couple was executed in 1953.
The threat of nuclear war did not die with the Rosenbergs. The world now had two nuclear superpowers, each one ready to defend itself using the deadliest weapon ever created. The stakes had never been higher, and the United States and the USSR began competing in an arms race, expanding their arsenals with ever larger, more destructive nuclear weapons. They foolishly believed that the creation of more weapons of mass destruction was the best way to defend their countries. This potentially catastrophic game of brinkmanship was an aggressive political tactic in which the rival countries deliberately forced each other to the edge of confrontation. The goal of brinkmanship was for one country to gain a strategic advantage over its rival. The country with the most dangerous weapon won the upper hand, at least for a while, until its enemy developed a new weapon that surpassed it. But this arms race was a pointless exercise, of course. It didn’t matter how many bombs were built; in all-out nuclear war, everyone would lose. Ironically, the threat of mutually assured destruction prevented the Soviet Union and the United States from launching a nuclear attack. This tense and threatening period became known as the Cold War.
Earl Reichert of Battle Creek, Michigan, and other Americans like him, weren’t taking any chances. They sought peace of mind by constructing bomb shelters in their backyards. Stockpiled with food and water, these underground fortresses would theoretically help families survive a nuclear attack. “War will come sooner or later,” Reichert said. “And we want to be protected against bomb-blast and radiation.” Reichert’s doomsday refuge was a twenty-by-forty-foot fortress made of thirty-one feet of solid concrete and sixteen-inch steel beams and buried beneath four feet of earth. “You buy life insurance but no one benefits from it until you’re dead,” he said. “This kind of insurance keeps you alive.”
American television networks warned about a possible Soviet nuclear attack. A commercial featuring a friendly animated turtle named Bert reminded kids to “duck and cover” when they saw the flash of an atomic blast. It was absurd to think that all it would take to survive a nuclear bomb was to duck beneath a table and cover one’s head. Nevertheless, in schools across the country, American students regularly practiced diving under their desks in mandatory duck-and-cover drills.
Schoolchildren participate in a duck-and-cover drill in their classroom during the 1950s.
As tensions mounted between America and the USSR, their symbolic differences were about to erupt on the ground in Korea.
During World War II, Korea had belonged to the empire of Japan. When the Allies defeated the Japanese, Korea was divided into two zones: the Soviet-occupied north and the US-occupied south. On June 25, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, sparking the Korean War. The United States and the Soviet Union were both involved as supporters on opposite sides of the fight but did not engage each other directly. It was a proxy war between the two superpowers—one not taking place on their own soil—that lasted three years, killing as many as two and a half million people.
As fear of communist expansion increased with the escalating war in Korea, the German engineers who had been cooling their heels in the Texas desert became essential to America’s Cold War defense strategy. Congress authorized more military spending, and the Pentagon approved a plan to develop a nuclear missile capable of reaching the Soviet Union. A new Army Ordnance Guided Missile Center was announced. It would be headquartered at an abandoned World War II chemical weapons facility in Huntsville, Alabama, called Redstone Arsenal. After five years of waiting, von Braun and his team were finally getting their first new rocket project, one that would help defend the United States against the USSR. It wasn’t a spaceship, but it was a sign of confidence in von Braun and his team’s ability. His entire group would have to be quickly relocated to Alabama.
There was only one problem: those pesky paper clips attached to the original file of every German who had been brought to the United States outside of the established immigration system. Before any of von Braun’s team could move to Huntsville and begin their official employment with the army, they each had to reenter the country legally for the first time. Getting their paperwork in order was also essential because the Germans would be allowed to apply for citizenship after they had legally been in the United States for five years.
One by one, the engineers reentered the United States using the same strange procedure. When it was von Braun’s turn, he climbed aboard an El Paso streetcar, escorted by an American officer in civilian clothes, paid the five-cent fare, and and rode into Ciudad Juárez, across the US-Mexican border from El Paso, where everything had been prearranged with the Mexican and American officers. At the American consulate, he submitted the necessary paperwork and paid a fee of eighteen dollars in cash. His paperwork was stamped and the two men returned to the border. When the streetcar neared the American side, von Braun was asked t
o state where he had come from. He answered, as required, “Mexico,” and his papers were stamped again. With that, von Braun had established his legal presence in the United States. After five years, he and his Operation Paperclip team would be eligible to apply for American citizenship. Recalling the momentous day, von Braun later said that the five-cent streetcar ride to Juárez “was the most valuable nickel [he] ever spent!” Back at Fort Bliss, he packed his bags, ready to set off toward his new home, Huntsville, Alabama, where he and his team would be civil service employees of the United States government.
IMMIGRATION CONTROVERSY
In the 1950s, von Braun’s privileged status as a contract employee of the United States Army and his value to national defense helped clear red tape to facilitate his entry into the country. Today, immigrants without the kind of privilege von Braun benefited from aren’t as fortunate. They endure risky, sometimes deadly journeys across hundreds or thousands of miles, hoping to enter America and build a better future. Tragically, many of them die trying.
Chapter 11
Welcome to the Watercress Capital of the World!
1949
The first time Huntsville mayor Robert Searcy saw the group of German engineers, he thought they were “a bunch of crazy rocket men.” The quiet and isolated town of fifteen thousand people was tucked into the Appalachian foothills of northern Alabama. Some of the locals greeted the engineers with curious smiles and friendly handshakes. Other times, the “outsiders” drew suspicion from those who were hesitant to trust newcomers.
The team took it all in stride. They had finally escaped the dry, dull Texas desert and arrived in a lush green landscape that reminded them of Germany. The self-proclaimed “Watercress Capital of the World” earned its title, as fields of watercress and cotton stretched around it for miles. Von Braun loved it all. Maria had given birth to their first daughter, Iris Careen, before they left Texas, and Huntsville was a beautiful place to raise his growing family.
The team settled in at the Redstone Arsenal, now the home of the Army Ordnance Guided Missile Center. Von Braun was named project director of America’s first ballistic missile, the Redstone rocket. The Redstone was essentially a much bigger V-2 and would become the first large-scale missile powered by liquid fuel.
CLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE DOSSIER
TOP SECRET
DO NOT COPY!
The historic Redstone rocket test stand at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Subject: Redstone missile
Nickname: “Old Reliable”
Description: Single-stage rocket.
Range: 200–250 miles
Length: 69 feet
Weight: 39 tons
First successful test launch: August 20, 1953
Payload capacity: up to four-megaton thermonuclear warhead
As the German team set up shop in Huntsville, the details of von Braun’s connection to Mittelwerk remained hidden. No one—not the media, the government, or the American public—was digging around in his past. The Soviets had a nuclear weapon, and safeguarding the United States with a nuclear missile was the national priority. The Germans were perceived as smart, capable technologists who were willing to lend a helping hand when America needed it most.
In exchange, von Braun and his team were rewarded with the opportunity to rebuild their lives and careers. As German rocket specialist Ernst Stuhlinger put it, they were finally “free to move around, to rent or to buy houses, to join churches and civil organizations . . . and to eventually become real citizens of the United States of America.”
It was a privileged statement coming from a man like Stuhlinger. He, like the rest of the Germans, was white, which automatically made him and his German colleagues part of the privileged white class in the rural South of the 1950s. Local banks offered the Germans affordable housing loans. Without assets or a credit history, they could borrow as much as $400. African Americans who had been born and raised in the South could be denied those same privileges for no other reason than the color of their skin. Throughout the South, Black people lived in fear of the Ku Klux Klan, which terrorized and murdered them at will. Like the Nazis in Germany, the Klan traded in hate speech, threatened, and killed, all in the name of ensuring racial purity. American troops had fought this kind of hatred in World War II while at home, their fellow Black Americans were dying from the same type of bigotry.
Downtown Huntsville, Alabama, 1946.
As Huntsville adjusted to its newest residents, development of the Redstone rocket progressed. The Germans knew if it could carry a nuclear weapon, it could also launch a satellite into orbit. Von Braun understood he would need the ongoing support of the American people to pull it off. He remained committed to his speaking engagements, with the unwavering goal of building support for space exploration.
His timing couldn’t have been better. America’s latest obsession was science fiction. Futuristic films, comics, and novels dominated movie theaters and bookshelves, with titles like Destination Moon and The Man from Planet X. These far-flung fantasies offered an escape from the terrifying reality of communism and the Cold War threat. Children formed rocket clubs, turning family garages into workshops and neighborhood playgrounds into launchpads. America was dreaming of space travel.
The Space Prophet
In 1952, Collier’s, a popular American magazine with no less than four million subscribers, planned a series of articles about the future of technology and space travel and invited von Braun to contribute to the series. His first article, “Crossing the Last Frontier,” debuted in March of that year. It was lavishly illustrated with full-color paintings depicting the high-tech future that von Braun described: a large 250-foot-wide wheel-shaped Earth-orbiting satellite, inhabited by people, that would travel over four miles per second, twenty times the speed of sound.
American readers were transfixed by von Braun’s vision of a space age, but satellites were just the beginning. “From this platform, a trip to the moon itself will be just a step,” he wrote. The spectacular near future described by von Braun read like a thrilling science-fiction story, but it was real. Space travel was possible! It was all there in the pages of Collier’s, and closer than anyone had ever imagined, thanks to Wernher von Braun.
All of this would cost money, of course—huge sums. And von Braun knew it. His earliest experiences with rockets in Germany had taught him that money was the real fuel that made a rocket fly. He did not shy away from the truth of the project’s cost. “The job would take ten years and cost twice as much as the atomic bomb,” he wrote. But “if we can do it, we can not only preserve the peace, but we can take a long step toward uniting mankind.”
The tone of the article was optimistic, but the Collier’s editors delivered an ominous warning to their readers in its introduction. “The US must immediately . . . secure for the West ‘space superiority.’ If we do not, somebody else will. That somebody else very probably would be the Soviet Union.” And that was the real threat: that its enemy, the USSR, would beat the United States. Utopian dreams of world peace and cooperation in space captured American minds, hearts, and imaginations, but in truth, prestige and power were the endgame for both rival governments.
Chapter 12
The Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM)
One year later, on March 6, 1953, the New York Times declared: “Stalin Dies after 29-Year Rule. His Successor Not Announced. US Watchful, Eisenhower Says.” At the age of seventy-three, Stalin had suffered an apparent stroke and related brain hemorrhage. By September 1953, Nikita Khrushchev had risen to power and was named first secretary of the Communist Party.
How would the loss of their leader impact the Soviet Union? Believe it or not, some Russians wept. In fact, Sergei Korolev was one of the millions of former Gulag prisoners who mourned Stalin’s death. As illogical as it seems, many Russians did not hold Stalin personally responsible for their suffering. They actually looked up to him.
As for Korolev, he
had continued to admire the Soviet leader. It had not been Joseph Stalin who knocked on his door that terrible evening and ripped him from his family. It had been the secret police, the NKVD. Perhaps it was easier to believe Stalin was ignorant than to accept the ugly truth that the leader of the Soviet Union had been a monster.
Korolev did not speak openly about his time in prison, though the long-term effects of torture occasionally surfaced in the stoic rocketeer, especially at mealtime. He gobbled his food and would wipe his plate clean with a piece of bread. His longing for food and warmth now satisfied, a new hunger took its place. Korolev’s desire to succeed with his rockets was insatiable. He was working on a new project. The most ambitious of any he had undertaken thus far, and one that accelerated the science of rocket engineering. He could not reclaim the years he had lost in the Gulag, but if he succeeded, maybe they would not have been for nothing.
The new rocket, the R-7 Semyorka—from the Russian word for “seven”—would be the most powerful missile in the world, standing as tall as a nine-story building and weighing 280 tons.
It had to be that big. Soviet nuclear physicists were poised to build a three-to-five-megaton thermonuclear device. The R-7 rocket would need to carry the massive warhead over five thousand miles, far enough to reach a major US city. In designing a rocket with the capacity to deliver a weapon of mass destruction of that size to its target, Korolev was also creating the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a rocket powerful enough to travel between two continents. The revolutionary design was the dawn of a new age in warfare, making it possible to launch a rocket attack against enemies thousands of miles away.
INTERCONTINENTAL BALLISTIC MISSILES
