Fifties (100 page)

Von Braun quickly found that Germany had been far ahead of the Americans in rocket development. The first American rocket they worked with was a WAC Corporal. It was much smaller than the V-2 and much slower. By 1950, the German team was transferred to the Army rocket center at Huntsville, Alabama. By this time it was clear that their new country would welcome them as citizens. At the same time, they continued to make steady progress. Von Braun dreamed of placing a satellite in space, but that demanded multiple-stage rockets—that is, rockets that launched other rockets to gain even higher altitude and greater speed. In 1949, he and his colleagues used a V-2 to boost a WAC to an altitude of 250 miles.

Von Braun was not merely a brilliant rocket scientist, but a kind of space poet who envisioned manned space flights to the moon and Mars. His most practical thoughts always seemed to others like dreams and fantasies. Years later, in July 1969, on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch of a manned trip to the moon, a news conference was held at which several NASA officials answered questions. Reporters repeatedly asked the officials what the true historic significance of the moon landing was. None of the officials had an answer except von Braun. For him the moon shot was one more major step in human evolution. It was comparable, he said, to the moment when life emerged from the sea and established itself on land.

He liked to tell friends of the excitement he had felt when he looked through his first telescope and saw the moon: “It filled me with a romantic urge. Interplanetary travel! Here was a task worth dedicating one’s life to. Not just to stare through a telescope at the moon and the planets, but to soar through the heavens and actually explore the mysterious universe. I knew how Columbus had felt.” Much later in his life, after a successful rocket launch, he walked away from the press center at Cape Canaveral and quoted Jules Verne to a friend, for it was Verne who had originally written in some detail about men flying to the moon: “Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.” His vision of what the moon would be like was very clear. Long before man landed there, he described to his biographer, Erik Bergaus, what it would be like: “Shadows and images in the strange nightly sunshine will seem haunted by a sense of loneliness ...”

There was ambivalence among Americans about men like von Braun, once enemies who now were at the core of our rocket program. At Huntsville there were certain euphemisms with which the German scientists were described: They were called “first-generation Americans” or “former German scientists who are now American citizens.” When people seemed to push the issue, General John
Medaris liked to emphasize that the Germans were here, “of their own volition.” Nonetheless, in the earlier part of the fifties, some of the doubts were still there, and when a movie was made about von Braun’s life,
I Aim at the Stars,
Mort Sahl, the comedian, added the line “But sometimes I hit London.” Von Braun became in time not merely an American citizen but an enthusiastic American—a fan of the barbecue, a delighted deep-sea diver, a believer in the process of democracy—who added his voice to those advancing the cause of integration in the Huntsville, Alabama, schools.

Von Braun would talk about the period of 1945 through 1951 as a time when we lost six years and had no ballistic missile program to speak of. In 1956, he liked to note, we had gone to a crash ballistic missile. Only as the Russians started working on a missile did our program begin to move ahead. But it was no small irony, as Walter McDougall pointed out, that a team of scientists who had chosen America because of its limitless financial resources was almost from the start saddled with limitations that were primarily financial.

There was no delay in the Soviet missile program. At first, the Soviets had planned to base their nuclear strike force on bombers rather than rockets. But it became clear after the war that the U.S. had allies in Europe on whose territory they could base their bombers, but the Soviets had no such base in the Americas. So Stalin moved to develop missiles and Khrushchev continued the program after Stalin’s death in 1953.

In theory at least, the Soviets were not far behind the Germans. They quickly picked up the second tier of German rocket scientists, nuts-and-bolts-men who had the capacity to reproduce the V-2 but lacked theoretical skills. Still the Russians thought space vitally important.

The Russians very soon had their own version of the V-2, though it did not, in the beginning, dramatically change their geopolitical situation. As Georgi Malenkov told Grigory Tokady, a rocket expert and one day a defector, “... the point is that the V-2 is good for 400 kilometers and no more. And after all, we have no intention of making war on Poland. Our vital need is for machines which can fly across oceans!” They were not about to waste time: By 1949 they had the T-1, with a range of about five hundred miles, and by 1952 they were working on the T-2. What they wanted was nothing less than an intercontinental ballistic missile.

If the Americans had von Braun, then the Russians had their own great rocket scientist: Sergei Korolev. Korolev was considered by other rocket experts a brilliant designer. He had been born in the
Ukraine, and was three years older than von Braun. He had eventually turned to designing, first as an airplane designer in the thirties, when the Soviets seemed to have little interest in space. Gradually, he moved toward missiles and shifted from winged rockets to pure ballistic missiles. He was a protégé of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was the leader in Soviet airplane and rocket design. Korolev was arrested in 1937 by Stalin, who was ambivalent about modern weaponry: He was in awe of it, and yet he feared the political ambitions of these unpredictable geniuses who were its architects. With that, Korolev vanished from view. But not from work. He was in a gulag, but a work gulag, a
sharashka.

There he worked first on airplanes; only later was he transferred to another
sharashka,
where he could work on space. To a Westerner the anomaly of this—a man under a life sentence for treason working in a prison on the most secret scientific developments—is almost too much to comprehend. In the Soviet Union it was an accepted practice. Korolev was immensely valuable, but because he was so valuable, he was also dangerous. He consented to work because this way, at least, he got some rations, he was with his colleagues, and he was doing what he loved most of all. After the war Korolev, still technically a prisoner, was placed in charge of the shipment of what little remained in Peenemünde of the V-2 back to the Soviet Union. He supervised the interviews with the German rocket scientists the Americans had left behind. In 1953, after Stalin’s death, he was allowed to join the Party, which he did in order to expedite his work.

If Korolev had to have a title, it would be “chief designer”; if he had to publish, it would be under the pseudonym of Sergeyev. If there were international conferences on space, he was never allowed to attend. By the time he was finally acknowledged as the towering figure of Soviet space, as James Oberg noted, in one of those endless ironies of Russian life, all achievements under Khrushchev were deleted from the history books. He was, not surprisingly, something of a cynical and pessimistic man. His motto, Oberg noted, was, “We will all vanish without a trace.”

His vision had dazzled his political superiors. Khrushchev later wrote, “I don’t want to exaggerate, but I’d say we gawked at what he showed us as if we were sheep seeing a new gate for the first time. When he showed us one of his rockets, we thought it looked like nothing but a cigar-shaped tube, and we didn’t believe it would fly. Korolev took us on a tour of the launching pad and tried to explain how a rocket worked. We were like peasants in a marketplace ...”

By the mid-fifties the Russians were far advanced on what was
their basic rocket of the decade, the R-7. There was nothing very stylish about the R-7. It was, by the standards of rockets, short and fat. Because the Soviet metallurgists had had considerable difficulty developing a metal that could withstand the heat from a giant rocket engine, the R-7 was made up of clusters of smaller engines. There were twenty separate engines in the central cone and four great skirts, but they could bring together a total thrust of 1.1 million pounds. It would be able to carry a primitive atomic weapon of the period all the way to the United States. By 1955, the work toward completing the R-7 was going well enough that Soviet officials began to talk openly about launching an earth satellite during the International Geophysical Year, in 1957–58.

In America our rocket scientists were still working on what was effectively the back burner. It was indicative of how little weight missiles carried in the minds of the policymakers of the Truman administration that K. T. Keller, the president of Chrysler, was appointed Truman’s special adviser on missiles; as Walter McDougall points out, he held the job for eleven months, never gave up his job at Chrysler, and never briefed the President on missiles. In the early budget struggles, the B-36 bomber won out over long-range-missile development, and money was poured into the strategic A-Command (SAC).

Years later, when Ike gave his farewell speech warning against the power of a military-industrial complex, he was much heralded; but the truth was that such views were always the bedrock of his philosophy. He was the second President who had to make difficult choices about complex and expensive weapons systems. He worried about the potential drain on the economy, and he believed that the Joint Chiefs cared little or nothing about the dangers of inflation. He spoke often in private about the danger of spending so much on weaponry and defense and in the process destroying the economy and thus weakening the country these weapons were going to protect. The federal budget, he liked to say, had risen from $4 billion a year in 1932 to $85.5 billion in 1952—with some 57 percent of that increase going to the Pentagon. “This country,” he once noted, “can choke itself to death piling up expenditures just as surely as it can defeat itself by not spending enough for protection.” Defense spending, he believed quite passionately, was dead weight; it was inflationary and subtracted from the nation’s vitality rather than added to it.

The great American fear in the fifties was of Soviet intentions and capabilities. As Michael Beschloss pointed out, even the Moscow
phone book was classified. Hitler’s military build-up in the thirties had, because of the nature of armaments and of Germany’s physical location, been self-evident, but the Soviet Union was something else. It was both secretive and vast; much of its territory had no possibility of being inspected; it was a veritable black hole for the new uncertain world power across the Atlantic that felt so threatened. We had made our great investment in SAC, the bomber attack fleet that was on constant alert, but the men around Eisenhower still feared a surprise Soviet attack.

Early photo-reconnaissance attempts to penetrate Soviet airspace with balloons were ineffective. The CIA became particularly worried about missile testing at Kapustin Yar, seventy-five miles east of Stalingrad, far out of the range of aerial surveillance. The need became obvious for some kind of new reconnaissance plane, one that would fly above Soviet air defenses. The photographic technology was already available; by the summer of 1955, the Air Force had the capacity to take a picture from 55,000 feet of Ike’s golf ball on a putting green. The great American photographic genius Ed Land, who had invented the Polaroid camera, was absolutely sure the technology was there. In 1954 Philip Strong, a retired Marine general, went out to Burbank, California, to talk with America’s most talented airplane designer, Kelly Johnson. “Kelly,” he asked. “What would you do if all you were trying to do was get up as high as you could—get moderate speed but not great speed and just sit above their air defense?”

Johnson immediately responded to the challenge. “Jesus,” he answered. “I’ve got just the thing for you—I’d take a Lockheed F-104. I’d give it wings like a tent. It’s a cinch!” Johnson drew up plans that called for the plane to fly at an altitude of seventy thousand feet and have a range of some four thousand miles. James Killian, the president of MIT and a principal scientific adviser to the President, and Land went to see the President to convince him of the project’s importance. The great question in Eisenhower’s mind was whether the intelligence benefits of the flights outweighed the risks of violating Soviet airspace. Otherwise, Eisenhower was interested: Photo reconnaissance had been vital in World War Two, and he had been readily convinced of its tactical value. He was immensely frustrated by how Soviet secrecy fed anxiety in America, causing ever greater pressure on him to spend more and more on potentially useless weapons. To Killian’s and Land’s surprise, Ike gave tentative approval at the first meeting. His one restriction was that he did not
want uniformed Air Force fliers violating Soviet airspace. That meant it would be the CIA’s project.

That December Johnson flew to Washington for one more session, to go over cover stories and security. Richard Bissell, deputy director of the CIA, told Johnson that he did not care what the plane looked like as long as they could produce it quickly. That made things easier, for the Air Force traditionally cared about the cosmetic lines of its planes. What we want, said Bissell, is function. “Good,” said Johnson. “That will save you a good deal of money. On the other hand I’m going to put my top force on it, and that’s going to cost you money.” So they bartered with each other, this man of the secret government and this brilliant designer, and in the end they struck a deal—$22 million for twenty planes, with Lockheed permitted to come back for more money if needed.

Each plane was built by hand at the Skunk Works, a secret area of the Lockheed grounds, named after the place in the comic strip “L’il Abner,” where Kickapoo Joy Juice was brewed. This particular project was so secret that no janitors were cleared to enter the huge hangar with blacked-out windows where the planes were being built, and therefore the men in charge had to clean up after themselves and worked in constant litter. The code name was Aquatone, although the members of the team generally referred to it as Kelly’s plane. Others called it simply The Angel.