Long time readers will be tired of me bleating about how I was sold a bill of goods in high school about how "we," meaning of course the United States --and, by the way, those Latin American whiners complaining about how "America" has been recently appropriated to mean just the U.S. are 100% correct, to my surprise, but it was the British press that led the pack-- were surprised by the unexpected space technology gap signaled by the shocking surprise of Sputnik. (That was as shocking surprise.) For me, the takeaway point, twenty-four years later, was that it was still necessary for every bright child in a provincial high school to major in the physical sciences if "we" were to have any chance to catch up.
And you will of course heard from me that this is not true, that the satellite launches undertaken for the International Geophysical Year were scheduled years in advance. Sputnik was no more of a surprise than the T-34's appearance on the battlefield, the first Soviet atomic test in 1949, or the defection of Kim Philby, to name three. It turns out that our received history of the Fifties has been sucked of nuance and detail for any number of reasons. In the case of Sputnik, and the missile gap in general, we can even see the explanation. The Eisenhower Administration's attempt to rein in military spending in the 1956-57 fiscal year led to an industry response that was coordinated with congressional Democratic majorities to produce an airpower-centred arms race. (Much to the disappointment of those wanting an infantry-centred arms race.)
But that isn't the limit of my disillusionment. Missile programs might be a silly starting point, but I am, er, beginning to doubt the value of the American experiment.
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| By Leonidl - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=15204907 |
"Ding-Dong"
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| Public Domain |
Better known as the AIR-2 Genie, this was in no way the top-secret project that the Wikipedia article claims it to have been. It was also only a missile by the most generous definition, being an unguided rocket with a Thiokol engine that pushed it up to Mach 3 over a distance of 10km to get a 1.5kT W25 warhead in range of an attacking Tu-4, or, at best, Tu-95. If you get your information from contemporary numbers of Aviation Week or Newsweek, you know that it was supposed to act by neutron-poisoning of the weapons carried by the Soviet bombers, and not directly by blast effects. Again, the received history of anti-nuclear strategic defence gets this too late, suggesting that the idea first took form with the W66 carried by the Sprint ABM. My guess from the very spare discussion of proposals to create a boosted version of the W25, is that that design aspect wasn't taken very seriously and the W25 would, in fact, have only been effective within its blast radius; and that the point in 1956 was that people were strangely worried about atomic warheads going off overhead.
XSM-73 Goose
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| USAF |
Sherman Fairchild is an interesting guy. He founded Fairchild Aviation in 1924, like a number of other early American aviation enthusiasts with family or other investment money to burn and desire to get into the exciting new world of aviation in the Twenties boom. Like many others, he was manoeuvred out of the executive suite by investors who were tired of his act. Unlike many of those other investors, he eventually bought back into the air side of the business. Not only that, he got into semi-conductors, being the first post-Shockley employer of the "Traitorous Eight." And in December of 1955, he won the contract to develop Weapon 123A to USAF GOR 16, which called for a long range decoy missile for SAC.
Okay, no, that's a socialist idea. Anyway, the USAF was going to buy 2400 of them and equip 10 squadrons with them, until testing in December of 1958 indicated that they could not, in fact, "simulate a B-52 on radar." When I commented very sparingly in a picture caption last month, it was to the effect that "it was only money," and Wikipedia gives a number: $137 million. I guess if they'd put a warhead on them, they would have been Army birds. In 1956, anyway, as Charlie Wilson is about to take the Army's strategic bombardment role away from them.
The Radioplane Q-1
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| By Ryan Crierie - https://www.flickr.com/photos/63014123@N02/5763239364/in/set-72157626688627341, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24035407 |
Unlike Fairchild, Radioplane was a Depression baby, started in 1935 to produce radio-controlled model airplanes for the hobbyist market. Per what seems to be an enthusiast's version of history, founder Reginald Denny and General W. S. Thiele invented the radio-controlled target drone all by themselves in a brainstorming session at Fort MacArthur, L.A. in 1936. Denny was not then capable of building a remote control plane that flew, but the Army bought three of them at $11,000 grand after a failed demonstration in 1938 on the promise that the next batch would work. Denny actually achieved thisin March, 1939 (Yay!) and built a factory to produce them best known for employing a teenage Marilyn Monroe. Denny then had the good sense to take the money and run in '48, and by the time the company shopped a rocket-powered target decoy to the Air Force, the company was a division of Northrop, better known as the pioneer aviation company that somehow couldn't get a WWII development contract until the P-61, and still came out the co-winner of the battle royale that is the history of the American airframe history. The Q-1 never demonstrated any particular advantages over its established rival, the Ryan Firebee, so it is just as well that Radioplane/Northrop/the Air Force came up with the idea of an "anti-radiation missile," the GAM-67 Crossbow being the one pictured above, although the effort went on long after its 1957 cancellation. Crossbow had the tiny little problem that it tended to drop behind the launching B-57 in flight due its lack of thrust, and it does not appear to have had any anti-radiation guidance as such.
I could pad this one by revisiting the Thor/Atlas/Vanguard imbroglio, but that, although arguably an unnecessary dispersal of effort, at least had a rational basis, to the extent that we can call the Administration's insistence on having separate military and civil rocket programs rational. Instead, I want to write about the possibly more historically significant peak of this insanity:
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| USAF |
Skybolt: From the co-winner of the American aviation Battle Royale comes the "weapon system" that grounded the RAF. (It's okay: The Navy has tradition.) The Wikipedia article explains that Skybolt was predicated on SAC's vast fleet of strategic bombers being threatened by a Soviet ICBM first strike, leading naturally, at some point in 1957, to the decision to develop a bomber-launched ballistic missile. I guess designing a bomber that could only take off from pads of meters-thick pads of concrete didn't pay off as well as you hoped, right, guys? Anyway, that's all in the past, kind of like Harold Macmillan's career. Skybolt apparently had the additional advantage of being retargetable, which does seem like it would be a valuable capability in a global strategic nuclear conflict, and the additional advantage that it would be much cheaper for Britain than going ahead with BLUE STEEL II and BLUE STREAK. (Which also no-one wanted in their neighbourhoods, silly buggers.) Unfortunately it had the disadvantage of being expensive or something, I dunno. I mean, I'm sure that in practice it was crazy destabilising and not the kind of thing you want to give late-career Curtis LeMay operational control over, but the whole story remains a bit surreal.
In conclusion this is a weird little cul-de-sac of history to emerge from with the conclusion that the United States has never been a serious country, but that's what I've got.
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