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This is the nightmare of the missilemen: It is 1962, and the U.S. is lagging in its development of war's newest weapon, the long-range guided missile. From Moscow to the apprehensive free world comes a terse radio announcement: for the next ten days, a 200-mile-square area in the landless South Pacific is a danger area; shipmasters and airplane pilots traverse it at their peril. The U.S. Navy and Air Force take tip surveillance of the area; radar tracking crews from Alaska to New Guinea stand by their gear. On one of these days, a small, swift object rises steeply from the Kamchatka Peninsula. It soars into space on a curve 500 miles high, curves downward even more swiftly toward the danger area. For a few seconds it glows like a meteor, trailing a bright streak of flame. Then out of the sea rises a dome of fire 20 miles across. The sea boils as if a volcano had poked through the crust of the earth, and a cloud of radioactive death drifts downwind. An earth wave jangles seismographs in San Francisco, St. Louis, New York, Madrid.
Again Moscow speaks: the heads of state of the leading free nations are invited to a new meeting at the summit. They accept. There is nothing else to do. Russia has the whip hand at last.
This climactic event in world politics is not possible now, and even at the impressive rate of missile development in the U.S.S.R., a 5,000-mile guided flight may not be possible in 1962. But the certainty that such a flight is possible—perhaps five years, not more than ten years from now—has made guided missiles the No. 1 crash program of the U.S. armed services. The urgency of development has conjured up technological triumphs that would have seemed unthinkable ten years ago. It has created a giant missile industry (one guess: $5 billion invested) that is breaking its bonds of secrecy in almost every corner of the U.S.
Birds of War. So far, official announcements about the missile program have been brief and vague. Glenn L. Martin Co. revealed recently, for instance, that it will build a $5,000,000 plant, undoubtedly for missiles, near Denver. Shortly after such bits of news are made public, a bolt of industrial lightning strikes the locality mentioned. A cornfield or patch of desert blossoms with bulldozers; roads and railroads unroll; a great, blank-looking building grows like a hard-shelled mushroom; odd and often monstrous machines arrive on flatcars and trailer-trucks. Houses are hammered together in new residential areas, and a new breed of men move into town. They speak a novel language, using words like "parameter," "lox," "apogee" and "servo." They join in the life of the local community, but remain people apart, given to sudden silences.
These are the missile people, high technologists all. Some of them brood with pencil and paper; others contrive tiny instruments of inconceivable delicacy; others work with great rocket motors that shake the earth with their roars. All of them are racing that day when an enemy-made meteor glows like a spark in the sky. Long before that day, the U.S. must have its own deadly "birds" and many other monsters too.