A fiery peace in a cold war: bernard schriever and the ultimate weapon by Neil Sheehan

Author:Neil Sheehan [Neil Sheehan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Histoire
ISBN: 9780679422846
Published: 2009-10-06T08:30:31+00:00

41.

AN ASSAULT FROM AN UNEXPECTED QUARTER

Having bested McNarney and Lanphier, Bennie was astonished in mid-February to find himself suddenly involved in a totally unexpected fracas with Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott. He had been looking forward to Talbott’s scheduled visit to the Schoolhouse on February 16 as a “Happy to Have You” occasion, as he had written at the top of the outline for his briefing on the progress they were making. Instead, he subsequently recorded in his diary, “It was indeed a painful meeting.” Schriever and Ramo had, with the concurrence of Gardner and von Neumann and the other scientists on his committee, decided on a management strategy that was a dual approach. One side was called concurrency. On this side, work on every part of the missile—airframe, engines, long-range guidance, nose cone or reentry vehicle—was to go forward simultaneously. The objective was to gain time. They assumed that if each of these parts was adequately tested beforehand and Ramo and his colleagues did their job of systems engineering competently to make certain that everything would fit together, they would have a ready-to-fly ICBM much sooner than if they developed each part in sequence.

The other aspect of the strategy was fail-safe redundancy. They were going to build not one, but two different ICBMs. And they were going to create a complete second set of the subsystems that went into an ICBM. If the Atlas or any of its components proved a failure, they would always have a fallback. Schriever already had his staff sizing up which other aircraft companies were the best candidates to design and manufacture the airframe for the second ICBM. He intended to launch a competition as soon as possible. And, on Hall’s advice, he had also just negotiated a contract for the rocket engines that were to power this alternate ICBM. The firm was Aerojet General, a full-grown descendent of a seedling company started in 1942 by von Kármán and a number of his students with Hap Arnold’s assistance to build small rockets that would give heavily laden aircraft an extra boost to take off. Aerojet had agreed to develop the new engines in collaboration with a less well-known firm called Reaction Motors, Inc., another pioneer in the rocket business.

Bennie cheerfully recounted all of this good news to Talbott and got a reaction he least expected. As with his unnerving session with Power the previous July, he was so upset by it that he again wrote a long memorandum, this time eight pages, for his diary. Talbott paid no attention to what had been accomplished. Instead, he was solely concerned with stopping any additional work on the project in California. To render military industries less vulnerable to attack, President Eisenhower wanted to start dispersing them inland, rather than leaving them concentrated, as they were, on both coasts. He was also particularly concerned about the extent to which California’s economy was based on military industry. The state’s dependence on the military made California, he felt, highly vulnerable to future cutbacks.

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