Command and Control (32 page)

The intermediate-range missiles that President Eisenhower offered to NATO were also problematic. The Thor missiles sent to Great Britain were stored aboveground, lying horizontally. They had to be erected and then fueled before liftoff.
It would take at least fifteen minutes to launch any of the missiles in a Thor squadron and even longer to get them all off the ground. The missiles' lack of physical protection, lengthy countdown procedures, and close proximity to the Eastern bloc guaranteed that they'd be among the first things destroyed by a Soviet attack. The four-minute warning provided by Great Britain's radar system wouldn't offer much help to the RAF officers in charge of a Thor squadron that might need
as much as two days to complete its mission. They might not have time to launch any Thors. The missiles would, however, be
useful for a surprise attack against the Soviet Union—a fact that gave the Soviets an even greater incentive to strike first and destroy them. Instead of deterring an attack on Great Britain, the Thors seemed to invite one.

The military value of the Jupiter missiles offered to Italy and Turkey was equally dubious. Jupiters were also slow to launch, stored aboveground, and exposed to attack. Unlike the Thors, they stood upright, encircled by launch equipment hidden beneath metal panels. When the panels opened outward before liftoff, a Jupiter looked like the pistil of a huge, white,
sinister flower. Sixty feet high, topped by a 1.4-megaton warhead, and deployed in the countryside, the missiles were especially vulnerable to lightning strikes.

In the days and months following
Sputnik
,
the Atlas missile loomed as America's great hope, its first ICBM, designed to hit Soviet targets from bases in the United States. But producing a missile that could reliably reach the Soviet Union took much longer than expected. An Air Force missile expert later described its propellant system as
a “fire waiting to happen.” Liquid oxygen (LOX), the missile's oxidizer, was dangerously unstable. About twenty thousand gallons of LOX had to be stored in tanks outside the Atlas, at
a temperature of -297 degrees Fahrenheit—and then pumped into the missile during the countdown. The margin for error was slim. During a series of dramatic, well-publicized mishaps at Vandenberg, Atlas missiles exploded on the launchpad, veered wildly off course, or never left the ground. Nevertheless, the first Atlas went on alert in 1959. At a top secret hearing two years later, an Air Force official admitted to Congress that
the odds of an Atlas missile hitting a target in the Soviet Union were no better than fifty-fifty.
General Thomas Power, the head of SAC, who much preferred bombers, thought the odds were closer to zero.

Developed as a backup to Atlas, the Titan missile incorporated a number of new technologies. It had a second stage that ignited in the upper atmosphere, enabling the launch of a heavier payload. Although it relied on the same propellants as the Atlas, the Titan would be based in an underground silo, gaining some protection from a Soviet attack. The missile would be filled with propellants underground, about fifteen minutes before launch, and then would ride an elevator to the surface before ignition. The elevator was immense, capable of lifting more than half a million pounds. But it didn't always work.
During a test run of the first Titan silo, overlooking the Pacific at Vandenberg, a control valve in the elevator's hydraulic system broke. The elevator, the Titan, and
about 170,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and fuel fell all the way to the bottom of the silo. Nobody was hurt by the explosion, though debris from it landed more than a mile away. The silo was destroyed and never rebuilt.

While Atlas and Titan missiles were being prepared for their launch
complexes, the Air Force debated whether to deploy another liquid-fueled, long-range missile: the Titan II. It would be more accurate and reliable, carry a larger warhead, store propellants within its airframe, launch from inside a silo, and lift off in less than a minute. Those were compelling arguments on behalf of the Titan II, and yet critics of the missile asked a good question—did the Air Force really need four different types of ICBM? It had already committed to the development of the Minuteman, a missile that would be small, mass-produced, and inexpensive. The Minuteman's solid fuel would burn slowly from one end, like a big cigar, and didn't pose the same risks as liquid propellants.

Donald Quarles was one of the leading skeptics at the Pentagon, eager to cut costs and avoid the unnecessary duplication of weapon systems. No longer secretary of the Air Force, he was the second-highest-ranking official at the Pentagon, rumored to be Eisenhower's choice to become the next secretary of defense. And then Quarles suddenly died of a heart attack, amid the long hours and great stress of his job. Funding of the Titan II was soon approved, largely due to the size of its warhead. General LeMay didn't care much for the Atlas, Titan, or Minuteman—missiles whose only strategic use was the annihilation of cities. But the Titan II, with its 9 megatons, was the kind of weapon he liked. It could destroy the deep underground bunkers where the Soviet leadership might hide, even without a direct hit.

One of the many challenges that the designers of the Titan II faced was
how to bring the warhead close to its target. The Titan II's rocket engines
burned for only the first five minutes of flight. They provided a good, strong push, enough to lift the warhead above the earth's atmosphere. But for the remaining half hour or so of flight, it was propelled by gravity and momentum. Ballistic missiles were extraordinarily complex machines, symbols of the space age featuring thousands of moving parts, and yet their guidance systems were based on seventeenth-century physics and Isaac Newton's laws of motion. The principles that determined the trajectory of a warhead were the same as those that guided a rock thrown at a window. Accuracy depended on the shape of the projectile, the distance to the target, the aim and strength of the toss.

Early versions of the Atlas and Titan missiles had a radio-controlled
guidance system. After liftoff, ground stations received data on the flight path and transmitted commands to the missile. The system eventually proved to be quite accurate, landing
about 80 percent of the warheads within roughly a mile of their targets. But radio interference, deliberate jamming, and the destruction of the ground stations would send the missiles off course.

The Titan II was the first American long-range missile designed, from the outset, to have an inertial guidance system. It didn't require any external signals or data to find a target. It was a completely self-contained system that couldn't be jammed, spoofed, or hacked midflight. The thinking behind it drew upon ancient navigational rules: if you know exactly where you started, how long you've been traveling, the direction you've been heading, and the speed you've been going the whole time, then you can calculate exactly where you are—and how to reach your destination.

“Dead reckoning,” in one form or another, had been used for millennia, especially by captains at sea, and the key to its success was the precision of each measurement. A poor grasp of dead reckoning may have led Christopher Columbus to North America instead of India, a navigational error of about eight thousand miles. On a ship, the essential tools for dead reckoning were a compass, a clock, and a map. On a missile, accelerometers measured speed in three directions. Spinning gyroscopes kept the system aligned with true north, the North Star, as a constant reference point. And a small computer counted the time elapsed since launch, calculated the trajectory, and issued a series of instructions.

The size of the guidance computer had been unimportant in radio-controlled systems, because it was located at the ground station. But size mattered a great deal once the computer was going to be carried by the missile. The Air Force's demand for self-contained, inertial guidance systems played
a leading role in the miniaturization of computers and the development of integrated circuits, the building blocks of the modern electronics industry. By 1962
all of the integrated circuits in the United States were being purchased by the Department of Defense, mainly for use in missile guidance systems. Although the Titan II's onboard computer didn't rely on integrated circuits, at only eight pounds, it was still considered a technological marvel, one of the most powerful small computers ever
built.
It had about 12.5 kilobytes of memory; many smart phones now have
more than five million times that amount.

The short-range V-2 had been
the first missile to employ an inertial guidance system, and
the Nazi scientists who invented it were recruited by the Army's Redstone Arsenal after the Second World War. They later helped to give the Jupiter missile an impressive
Circular Error Probable—the radius of the circle around a target, in which half the missiles aimed at it would land—of less than a mile. But the longer a missile flew, the more precise its inertial guidance system had to be. Small errors would be magnified with each passing minute. The guidance system had to take into account factors like the eastward rotation of the earth. Not only would the target be moving toward the east as the world turned, but so would the point from which the missile was launched. And at different latitudes, the earth rotates at slightly different speeds. All these factors had to be measured precisely. If the missile's velocity were
miscalculated by just 0.05 percent, the warhead could miss its target by about twenty miles.

The accuracy of a Titan II launch would be determined early in the flight. The sequence of events left no room for error. Fifty-nine seconds after the commander and the deputy commander turned their keys, the Titan II would rise from the silo, slowly at first, almost pausing for a moment above the open door, before shooting upward, trailed by flames. About two and a half minutes after liftoff, at an altitude of roughly 47 miles, the thrust chamber pressure switch would sense that most of the oxidizer in the stage 1 tank had been used. It would shut off the main engine, fire the staging nuts, send stage 1 of the missile plummeting to earth, and ignite the stage 2 engine. About three minutes later, at an altitude of roughly 217 miles, the guidance system would detect that the missile had reached the correct velocity. The computer would shut off the stage 2 engine and fire small vernier engines to make any last-minute changes in speed or direction. The vernier engines would fire for about fifteen seconds. And then the computer would blow the nozzles off them and detonate an explosive squib to free the nose cone from stage 2. The nose cone, holding the warhead, would continue to rise into the sky, as the rest of the missile drifted away.

About fourteen minutes later, the nose cone would reach its apogee, its maximum height, about eight hundred miles above the earth. Then it would start to fall, rapidly gaining speed. It would fall for another sixteen minutes. It would reach a velocity of
about twenty-three thousand feet per second, faster than a speeding bullet—a lot faster, as much as ten to twenty times faster. And if everything had occurred in the right order, at the right time, precisely, the warhead would detonate within a mile of its target.

In addition to creating an accurate guidance system, missile designers had to make sure that a warhead wouldn't incinerate as it reentered the atmosphere. The friction created by a falling body of that size, at those speeds, would produce
surface temperatures of about 15,000 degrees Fahrenheit,
hotter than the melting point of any metal. In early versions of the Atlas missile, the nose cone—also called the “reentry vehicle” (RV)—contained a large block of copper that served as a heat sink. The copper absorbed heat and kept it away from the warhead. But the copper also added a lot of weight to the missile. The Titan II employed a different technique. A thick coating of plastic was added to the nose cone, and during reentry, layers of the plastic ablated—they charred, melted, vaporized, and absorbed some of the heat. The cloud of gases released by ablation became a buffer in front of the nose cone, a form of insulation, reducing its temperature even further.

The nose cone not only protected the warhead from heat, it also contained the weapon's arming and fuzing system.
On the way up, a barometric switch closed when it reached a specific altitude, allowing electricity to flow from the thermal batteries to the warhead. On the way down, an accelerometer ignited the thermal batteries and armed the warhead. If the warhead had been
set for an airburst, it exploded at an altitude of fourteen thousand feet when a barometric switch closed. If the warhead had been set for a groundburst—or if, for some reason, the barometric switch malfunctioned—it exploded when the piezoelectric crystals in the nose cone were crushed upon impact with the target. Instead of being vaporized by reentry, the warhead was kept cool and intact long enough to vaporize everything for miles around it.

Three strategic missile wings were formed to deploy the Titan II, each
with eighteen missiles, located in Arkansas, Kansas, and Arizona. The Air Force felt confident that the Titan II would be more reliable than its predecessors.
At first, perhaps 70 to 75 percent of the missiles were expected to hit their targets, and as crews gained experience,
that proportion would rise to 90 percent. Newspapers across the country heralded the arrival of the Titan II, America's superweapon, “
the biggest guns in the western world.” The missile would play a dual, patriotic role in the rivalry with the Soviet Union. It would carry SAC's deadliest warhead—and also serve, in a slightly modified form, as the launch vehicle to send NASA's Gemini astronauts into space. At Little Rock Air Force Base, the introduction of the Titan II was greeted with a nervous enthusiasm.
The first launch crews had to train with cardboard mock-ups of equipment, and the number of operational launch complexes in Arkansas soon exceeded the number of crews qualified to run them. Vital checklists were still being written and revised as the missiles were placed on alert.

Ben Scallorn became a site maintenance officer for the 308th Strategic Missile Wing, eventually overseeing half a dozen Titan II launch complexes. He liked the new job and didn't hesitate to wear a RFHCO and work long hours beside his men. Launch Complex 373-4 in Searcy was one of his sites. After the fire killed fifty-three workers there, he was part of the team that pulled the missile from the silo. It was a sobering experience. Thick black soot covered almost everything. But handprints could still be seen on the rungs of ladders, and the bodies of fallen workers had left clear outlines on the floor. Scallorn could make out the shapes of their arms and legs, the positions of their bodies as they died, surrounded by black soot. All that remained of them were these pale, ghostly silhouettes.