(3 of 8)
Key figure in the gestation phase of the missile industry was K. T. (for Kaufman Thuma) Keller, then president of Chrysler Corp., whom President Truman put in charge of the program in 1950. Production Man Keller had little patience with visionary plans; he wanted hardware, both in the factories and in the skies, and he got it. The missiles now in operational use—the Matador, Nike, Corporal, Terrier—are the result of Keller's drive. Since most of them are soon to be replaced, Keller has been criticized for loading the inventory with so-so weapons. But this was inevitable in the rapid metabolism of modern war; Keller's program created the knowledge, experience, test facilities and plants for the coming generations of missiles.*
When the early missiles were planned, it hardly seemed worthwhile to try for very long ranges. And so the most glamorous missile, the 5,000 mile ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile), got a low priority. An early contract with Convair was canceled, and work would have stopped entirely if Convair had not continued with its own money. Emphasis was put on defensive missiles—the ground-to-air Nike and the air-to-air Falcon—and on short-range offensive missiles for use near enemy lines.
The first thermonuclear tests in the Pacific in 1951 had only a distant bearing on missiles. The early hydrogen devices were not bombs. Later models became droppable bombs, but they were still much too heavy. Convair, nevertheless, was given a contract for a limited amount of work on an intercontinental missile—just in case.
In late 1953, Trevor Gardner, Assistant Air Secretary for Research and Development and onetime electronics manufacturer, was assigned to study the whole situation. He gathered a topflight military staff, and consulted civilian scientists of the highest caliber, one of whom was Mathematician John Von Neumann, now an Atomic Energy Commissioner.
Thermonuclear Breakthrough. Gardner's survey, completed in early 1954, covered the missile front, but dominating its conclusions was a carefully reasoned forecast by the nuclear physicists. In a relatively few years, predicted Von Neumann and his associates after long sessions with their calculating machines, thermonuclear explosives would be light and handy enough to be carried by long-range missiles of reasonable size.
This was a breakthrough. It changed all the equations of scientific war, and it forced on the Department of Defense a grave decision: to concentrate intensively on the ICBM. No longer did the intercontinental ballistic missile need to hit a one-mile "pickle barrel" to be effective. A T-N (thermonuclear) warhead in the megaton range (equivalent to millions of tons of TNT) would blot out a large city even if it exploded well outside the city's limits, and its radioactive fallout would have a killing effect a long way downwind. So the ICBM, besides being fairly small, might be fairly inaccurate and still do its job. For it, a C.E.P. (circular error of probability) of five miles would be good enough. And the cataclysmic effect of the great warhead made almost any cost of the missile well worth spending.