A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  And so Gardner and Vince Ford set off for Princeton once more in Gardner’s green Cadillac convertible. (Gardner and the Hungarian genius he was going to see shared a taste for expensive automobiles.) The conversation in von Neumann’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study was briefer this time. “I vill do it,” Ford recalled von Neumann immediately replying to Gardner’s request that he chair the committee, turning the w into a v with his Hungarian accent. Gardner was elated on the way back to Washington, driving at his usual madcap speed, whipping around every car ahead of his on a rain-slick road while he called out to Ford the names of prospective members of the committee. Ford had observed that, figuratively speaking, Trevor Gardner seemed to know only two speeds in an automobile—zero when the car was stopped and seventy miles per hour when it was on the move. They took a break in Maryland for a couple of drinks and a steak dinner.

  Ramo and Wooldridge had meanwhile been preparing all that summer to leave Hughes Aircraft after seven years and found their own firm. They were too ambitious to work forever for a company owned by another man and, if they stayed, with the loony Hughes in possession they believed they would never be able to break the aircraft company away from Hughes Tool and acquire the authority they needed to further expand and diversify. To get to see Hughes was extremely difficult and time-consuming. When Ramo did succeed, he could never get a coherent response out of the man, who at one point shifted his residence from a set of frostily air-conditioned hotel rooms in Las Vegas to an old and bare mansion in Santa Monica with a folding camp cot to sleep on, two milk cartons on the floor beside it. Howard Hughes was so bizarre he would not allow himself to be fingerprinted for a security clearance, which meant that he could not participate in decisions involving classified military projects. He could not even enter the research laboratory of his own company. In September 1953 they submitted their resignations, confident that with the reputations they had gained from their accomplishments at Hughes Aircraft, they would have no trouble attracting investment capital and talent to their own enterprise. They envisioned a computer and electronics firm that would focus on the civilian rather than the military market, a version of what the civilian side of IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) became.

  Now it was Ramo who was to be surprised. On Monday, September 14, 1953, he and Wooldridge, their resignations submitted to Hughes the previous Friday, flew from Los Angeles to New York and conferred with attorneys from a Wall Street law firm who were handling the formalities of establishing a company to be called the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation. That Monday evening they took another plane for Cleveland. On Tuesday, they met there with executives of Thompson Products Company, a manufacturer of automotive and aircraft engine parts with an interest in electronics. In return for a share of forthcoming Ramo-Wooldridge stock, Thompson Products agreed to become their financial backer. At noon on Wednesday, they signed the agreement with Thompson Products; in the afternoon they learned from their New York attorneys that they were the owners of a corporation newly registered in Delaware, a practice common for legal and tax reasons; and the same evening they boarded a night flight home to California. (In 1958, Ramo-Wooldridge merged with Thompson Products to become Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc. The corporation’s name was then abbreviated in 1965 to TRW, Inc. Because much of this narrative occurred before 1958, the firm will usually be referred to as Ramo-Wooldridge.)

  The scene on Thursday in the one-room office on West 92nd Street in Los Angeles, which they had rented as a temporary headquarters (the place was later to be the site of a barbershop), was a kind of bare-bones bedlam. A secretary sat on a folding chair and typed on a rented typewriter at a folding card table. There were two telephones, ringing constantly with calls from scientists and engineers who wanted to join the enterprise. Suddenly, an Air Force major walked in and said he had a message from Secretary Talbott, who had been unable to get through on either of their phones. They were to report to his office at the Pentagon at noon on Friday to meet with him and his special assistant for research and development, Trevor Gardner. That Thursday evening Ramo and Wooldridge were flying through the night back east again toward the dawn.

  Gardner, along with Secretary Talbott, was waiting for them when they arrived. He explained that, with Talbott’s assent, he had decided to form the study committee on intercontinental strategic missiles that Ramo had suggested. He wanted Ramo and Wooldridge, and however much of their new organization as they needed, to act as the committee’s staff. They were to locate specialists in the various fields where the technological obstacles lay, arrange for them to brief the committee members, keep the record of the meetings, and write the final report with the committee’s findings and recommendations. They were also to serve as full members of the committee themselves. Although, at least in the short run, this hardly accorded with their plan to focus their firm on computers and other electronic gear for the civilian market, they felt they had no choice but to accept.

  Bennie Schriever offered to provide the funds for Ramo’s and Wooldridge’s work and the other expenses of the committee out of the $10 million budget he controlled through his Development Planning Office. He had wide discretion in the use of the monies. Gardner accepted and Bennie immediately issued a letter contract to the fledgling firm of Ramo-Wooldridge. He also volunteered to serve as the committee’s military representative and Gardner accepted that as well. Ramo and Wooldridge left for Los Angeles at the end of the afternoon pleased that, while the contract was modest, their enterprise was already in the black. They had no sense, as Ramo was later to write, that Trevor Gardner had a great deal more in mind for them, that the committee assignment was just “the tip of the iceberg.”

  The committee was as blue-ribbon as Ramo had advised Gardner to make it. In addition to von Neumann, its chairman, the eleven members included some of the most respected figures in American science. There was Clark Millikan, son of Robert Millikan and head of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech; Charles Lauritsen, Gardner’s patron; Jerome Wiesner, the electrical engineer who had specialized in the advancement of airborne radar at the Rad Lab during the Second World War, and who would one day serve as science adviser to John Kennedy and later as president of the MIT Corporation; and George Kistiakowsky, who was back on the Harvard chemistry faculty. Gardner chose them after consulting with von Neumann and Ramo. When Vince Ford put the call through to Kistiakowsky, the assembler of the explosive wrapper for the Nagasaki bomb was out blowing up the stumps of some trees he had cleared away near his house in a suburb of Boston. No one refused. The mention of von Neumann’s name was sufficient to overcome any conflict with teaching or research schedules. Enough years had also elapsed since the end of the Second World War to dissipate the guilt many scientists had felt over their community’s role in opening the nuclear Pandora’s box. In the interval, a renewed spirit of patriotic urgency had emerged. Stalin’s brutality, his disastrous foreign policy, and the Korean War had returned the United States to the climate of fear and danger it had known when Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had threatened.

  Ramo pointed out that they needed a code word for the committee, as he and Gardner and the others would inevitably be discussing its progress on the phone. He proposed to honor its instigator with Tea Garden for Trevor Gardner, but Gardner thought that would make it too easy to guess at his identity and thus the subject of the inquiry, because his interests were known. Ramo came back with Tea Pot. The group was later given the dignified title of Strategic Missiles Evaluation Committee, but Tea Pot Committee was how it was to go down in history.

  Ramo and Wooldridge proved as adept as Gardner had suspected they would be at rounding up specialists to brief the committee members on the technological problems that would have to be overcome. Von Neumann thrust himself into the task as an enthusiastic chairman, probing and insightful in his questions at the meetings. The rest of this distinguished group were hardly bashful at asking their own. The Air Force currently had three long-range
strategic missile projects. Two were cruise missiles designed to fly within the earth’s atmosphere. One, the Snark, was to head for its target at an altitude of ten miles on a turbojet engine. The other, Navaho, was to have a large rocket booster to lift it fifteen miles in altitude, where its twin ramjet engines were to take over. Snark went into production and was deployed in 1959 in small numbers before being withdrawn from service. Navaho was subsequently canceled. The Tea Pot Committee report examined both of these programs, but it focused on the third, the Air Force’s only intercontinental ballistic missile project—Atlas.

  Atlas was another example of futuristic weaponry that owed its origin to the farsightedness of Hap Arnold. It was one of the twenty-eight pilot projects in guided missiles he had ordered the Army Air Forces to initiate in the spring of 1946 with the $34 million he had earlier skimmed off the bountiful stream of Second World War funds and set aside for this purpose. As a result, in April 1946, the laboratories at Wright Field awarded the leading California aircraft firm that was to build the B-36 for SAC, Convair, a $1.4 million study contract for two missiles capable of 5,750 miles. One, a subsonic cruise type, was dropped, but work went forward on the other, a ballistic missile that was to soar into space. In June 1946, Wright Field added another $493,000 to bring the contract close to $2 million and agreed to let Convair fabricate ten smaller, scaled-down test missiles so that knowledge could be gleaned from actual firings.

  A Belgian-born engineer named Karel J. Bossart was put in charge of the project, code-designated MX-774 (the initials stand for “Missile Experimental”). “Charlie” Bossart had graduated from the University of Brussels in 1925 as a mining engineer and then decided that the upper atmosphere interested him more than the subterranean. He won a fellowship to study aeronautical engineering at MIT and stayed on this side of the Atlantic. His specialty was aeronautical structures, which turned out to be a blessing, but he had virtually no experience with missiles, other than a brief acquaintanceship with an early Navy antiaircraft missile called the Lark. This too turned out to be a blessing, as he was sufficiently detached not to begin by using the wonder of the day, the German V-2, as a model on which to improve. Instead, he set himself and his team the task of creating a distinctly different and better missile.

  The V-2 was a sturdy missile. It had double walls of sheet metal welded and riveted into place and supported by internal braces. The casing of the warhead was steel plate. The whole weighed 27,376 pounds when fueled with its alcohol and liquid-oxygen rocket propellants. Wernher von Braun and the other originators of the V-2 conceived this design because it did not occur to them to have the warhead separate itself from the rest of the missile at some point in flight. Instead, the V-2 flew up into space and then the entire missile—warhead filled with 1,650 pounds of high explosive, the by now empty fuel tanks, the guidance system, rocket engine, and all—came back down through the earth’s atmosphere to its target. The V-2’s rocket engine, which generated only 56,000 pounds of thrust, limited the missile to an average range of 180 miles. (A maximum of 220 miles could be attained by lightening the warhead.) Bossart and his team confronted a challenge of far greater magnitude. They had to propel a warhead thirty-two times farther than the V-2’s. And it would probably be thousands of pounds heavier. In these years before the thermonuclear breakthrough in the Mike test of 1952, the assumption was that the warhead would be the atomic, or fission, type, which exploded with considerably less force than a hydrogen, or fusion, bomb. To make the missile as potent as possible, the fission bomb constituting the warhead would therefore have to be a big one weighing well beyond 2,000 pounds. The weight of the missile thus became a critical factor. If Bossart followed the V-2 design pattern, he would end up with a missile so huge and so heavy that it was difficult to imagine any rocket engine or cluster of rocket engines powerful enough to lift it off and send the warhead 5,750 miles.

  Bossart’s first conclusion was that it was a foolish waste of rocket engine power to propel the entire missile all the way to the target. He could gain range relative to thrust if he built a missile with a warhead that broke free of the main body. The moment of separation would occur when the rocket was at the correct angle and speed so that its momentum would, in effect, hurl the warhead through space in a trajectory that would carry the bomb to its target. He then turned to the body of the missile. The lighter the missile body, the potentially heavier the warhead could be, because more of the thrusting power of the rocket engines could be devoted to lifting the bomb rather than spent getting its delivery vehicle into the air. His answer was to create a missile body that was simply a tank for the rocket propellants. The tank was made of thinly rolled aluminum alloy. (Later stainless steel rolled as thin as a wafer would be employed.) In a further saving of weight, there were no internal supports to prevent this balloon tank from collapsing. Instead, the tank was filled with inert nitrogen gas to keep it pressurized to full extension until the time came to pump in the propellants. The bottom of the tank was attached to a bulkhead strong enough to hold the rocket engines.

  The fourth and extremely important contribution Bossart and his teammates made to American rocketry was to invent an effective technique to steer the missile in flight. The Germans had been able to steer the V-2 after a fashion by installing movable vanes in the thrust opening at the base of the rocket engine, fabricated from graphite so that they would not melt in the furnace of the rocket’s flame. These did not work that well and reduced the engine’s power. The Bossart group’s approach to the steering problem was to mount the four rocket engines in the cluster that would power their test missile on swivels. The swivels were connected by rods to an autopilot and gyroscope mechanism, which could be programmed to guide the missile on a given course. There was a limitation. The swivels could swing each of the four engines in the cluster in only one preselected direction. Nevertheless, this was a marked improvement over the vanes in the V-2 and pointed the way toward the later mounting of rocket engines on gimbals, which could swing in any direction.

  By 1947, the armed services were strapped by peacetime money rationing. That July 1, just as the first test missile was almost finished, Project MX-774 was canceled. The newly independent U.S. Air Force did, however, allow Convair to use the funds in the contract still unspent to construct two additional research rockets and to test-fire all three at the Army’s White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. They were trim rockets, shimmering in the New Mexico sun, thirty-one feet tall from the fins at the base to the pencil point tip at the top of the nose cone. The four-engine cluster provided 8,000 pounds of thrust. The hope was that the missiles would reach an altitude of about one hundred miles so that Bossart and his fellow engineers could fully test all their ideas. None did, however, because of engine burnout. The third and last MX-774, launched in December 1948, reached an altitude of thirty miles before it too failed and started down to destruction on the desert floor. Nevertheless, enough was learned, from earlier static tests of the swiveling system for the engines as well as from these live firings, to conclude that the innovations would work.

  Convair invested its own funds in further research directed by Bossart and on January 23, 1951, after the scare provoked by the war in Korea had replenished its coffers, the Air Force revived the project by giving Convair a new study contract. The specifications were outlandish. They reflected the abiding dilemma of the weight inherent in a fission bomb warhead and a consequent accuracy requirement precise enough to ensure massive destruction of the target by a weapon with far less bang than a hydrogen bomb. The Air Force wanted a missile that would throw an 8,000-pound warhead 5,750 miles and strike its target with an average accuracy (CEP) of just 1,500 feet. Convair responded with equally outlandish specifications for the ballistic missile that would loft this mammoth warhead. Code-named Atlas by Convair, the rocket was to measure 160 feet in height and twelve feet in diameter. By October 1953, new specifications had been worked out that were supposed to be a compromise. They were still outlandish
. The warhead weight had been reduced to 3,000 pounds, but the wishing-well accuracy requirement of 1,500 feet lingered. And the missile itself remained a monster. It was to be 110, rather than 160, feet in height, but still twelve feet in diameter, would weigh 440,000 pounds fully loaded with fuel, and needed a cluster of five rocket engines putting out a combined thrust of 656,100 pounds to lift it. This was where the project stood when the Tea Pot Committee, organized in late September and early October 1953, took it up.