Behind a black wall of secrecy, the U.S. is climbing slowly toward a new level of warfare. In every U.S. aircraft factory, every technical institute and every electronics laboratory, the military phrase of the day is "guided missiles." What are these missiles? What is the source of their power? What can they do? Herewith a report on the newest weapons of war by TIME'S Science editor, Jonathan Norton Leonard:
THE desert Tularosa Basin in southern New Mexico is a valley without a river. Fierce winds sweep across it, and dust devils whirl in the sun. On most days the valley is quiet, with only a scattered coming & going of military vehicles from White Sands Proving Ground (Army Ordnance) or Holloman Air Force Base. But sometimes a screaming roar echoes among the mountains, and a monstrous bird with a tail of flame flies straight into the sky. Or a slender, dartlike object slips out of the belly of a B-29 and streaks over the horizon at several times the speed of sound.
These "birds" (so the missilemen call them) are the heirs presumptive of war. They fly from New Mexico; from Point Mugu, a pleasant Navy station on the coast of Southern California; from Patrick Air Force Base in Florida; from the deck of the Navy's converted seaplane tender Norton Sound. Few ordinary citizens have ever seen them fly. Few more have heard their roar or seen their soaring sparks of light or puffs of dust on the desert. But in closely guarded factories all over the U.S., the birds are hatching. The head of one U.S. aircraft company predicts that within ten years they will dominate air warfare, and that piloted aircraft will be used only for transport.
Weapon Genetics. The new war birds are direct descendants of the three great inventions of World War II. Only one of the three—radar—came to full use in combat. The German V-2 rocket, a scientific triumph but a military failure, was developed too little; the atom bomb came too late. Both were held over as unfinished business for the next meeting of arms.
But things have changed since then. Radar and its electronic relatives promise exact guidance for the new missiles. The atom bomb makes even the most costly of the birds a sound military investment. From this ancestry have sprung the four principal types of guided missiles now under development.
SURFACE-TO-AIR* missiles, designed to bring down enemy aircraft, are gracefully tapered objects, 10 to 15 ft. long and 1 ft. or less in diameter. They are launched from a kind of gunmount. On their tails they have four fixed fins arranged at right angles to one another. These keep the missile stable in flight, like the feathers of an arrow. The control surfaces are four small, triangular, movable fins one-third of the way back from the missile's nose. They can steer the missile, roll it and even give it lift, like an airplane in flight. All the fins have supersonic shapes; they are made of solid metal, with thin, diamond-shaped cross sections.