(2 of 8)
Guided missiles powered by rocket motors are not new. Their military importance has been obvious since the German V-25, speeding many times as fast as the sound of their coming, hit London in 1944. If they had carried atomic warheads, they would have reduced much of England to radioactive rubble. No military nation missed this chilling lesson. War had taken on a new dimension; even before the first atomic bomb, it took little imagination to picture dozens of deadly duties that missiles could perform.
But for five years after World War II, the new and terrible birds of war that had been projected did not fly very well in actual fact. The captured V25 brought back from Germany proved hard to understand, let alone improve; yet they were far ahead of anything in the U.S.
Progress in carrying on from the V-2 was agonizingly slow. The missiles that took to the air were inaccurate, skittish.
The accurate, dependable, invulnerable, long-range missiles that had been so freely predicted did not appear. The late Senator Brien MacMahon, then chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, summed up the situation in his famous remark about pushbutton warfare. "All we have now," said the Senator, "are the pushbuttons."
Technological Revolution. Effective missiles call for a technology that did not then exist. The need was for better rocket motors, more sophisticated electronics, more intelligent computers, more sensitive instruments. The demand was for new metals, ceramics, fuels, new physics and mathematics. New production methods were called for—in short, a technological revolution.
This revolution has now happened. In the past ten years the world of electronics has evolved beyond recognition. Computers, the brains of the missiles, have grown in intelligence as fast as the magic unfolding of a child's mind. Rocket motors are lighter, more dependable, enormously more powerful.
New factories have been built, such as the Hughes Aircraft plant that turns out the fierce, intelligent Falcons, the Air Force's air-to-air missiles. The Falcon's tiny gyros, bearings and electronic components must be manufactured with a super-watchmaker's precision. The job is done in a great, windowless factory on the desert outside Tucson, Ariz. No speck of dust can be tolerated. The air is changed by fans and filters every nine minutes, and positive air pressure is maintained inside the building so that any air leakage will be outward, not inward. Engineers in the drafting rooms are forbidden to tear paper or use pencil erasers (both make dust), and all employees must wear nylon smocks. Among the best assembly workers are crippled men and women who are accustomed to sitting long hours without unnecessary motion.
Gestation Phase. Some of this improvement was due to the ever-rising curve of technological progress, but a good part was brought about by the missiles themselves. What they called for they generally got. Their problems were so exciting that top-grade physicists, mathematicians, chemists, even astronomers, were eager to tackle them. Many of the leaders of U.S. science have fashioned feathers and talons for the birds of war.