35.
Having obtained a scientific validation “which those narrow-gauged bastards in the Pentagon couldn’t back away from,” as Gardner triumphantly told his assistant, Vince Ford, he now set about convincing the authorities in the Air Force and the Department of Defense to launch a crash program to create an ICBM. On February 16, 1954, six days after Simon Ramo had sent him the final draft of the report, the “wild Welshman,” as Ford affectionately referred to his boss, forwarded a copy to Donald Quarles, an engineer and physicist whom Secretary of Defense Wilson had chosen as his assistant secretary for research and development. In his covering memorandum, Gardner told Quarles that the Air Force could build and be ready to launch the first ICBMs within just about four years, by mid-1958. Although the Tea Pot report had specified 1960–61 as the earliest possible goal for operational missiles, Gardner said it was his belief, confirmed by talks with von Neumann, Kistiakowsky, and Jerome Wiesner of MIT, that “a ‘Ph.D. type’ operational capability” was attainable by mid-1958. What he meant by this self-coined term was the ability to deploy and threaten the Soviets with the initial few missiles off the production line, using civilian test-launch crews from the rockets’ manufacturers to form the firing crews. (There would not be enough missiles available this early to train regular Air Force launch crews.) Gardner brought von Neumann, Kistiakowsky, and Wiesner down to the Pentagon to make the rounds of senior officials and talk up the report. He spoke of the scientists as his “influence matrix.” He already had his own superior, Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott, on board.
Talbott instructed him to draw up a detailed plan. The memorandum spelling out the scheme was ready as early as March 11. Stamped top secret, it was addressed to Talbott and to General Nathan Twining, who had taken over as Air Force chief of staff after Hoyt Vandenberg was felled by cancer the previous June. Schriever and Vince Ford pitched in with substantial contributions to help Gardner compose the memorandum, but he was its principal author and the credit must go to him. The document was a masterly example, concise and flexible, of preliminary planning for an enterprise of surpassing scope. After a brief paragraph referencing the Tea Pot report as the practical basis for his plan, Gardner specified two primary objectives. The first was to attain his “Ph.D. type” capability, which he now defined as having “two launching sites and four operational missiles” by June 1958. The second was a full-bore deterrent to a Soviet nuclear attack—the creation of “20 launching sites with a stockpile of 100 missiles” by June 1960. To achieve these goals, Gardner proposed forming what amounted to a separate organization within the Air Research and Development Command. It would be headed by a major general who was ostensibly a vice commander of the ARDC, but whose “sole responsibility” would be leadership of the ICBM program.
The purpose of placing the new organization within the ARDC was to enable it to draw on the larger resources of its parent. The major general was to be “backed up by a brigadier general of unusual competence to work directly with the contractors in supply of top level support and technical supervision.” Gardner named the two generals he had in mind. The first was Major General James McCormack, an Air Force intellectual with a specialty in nuclear weaponry who was already vice commander of the ARDC. The brigadier “of unusual competence” who was to back him up was Brigadier General Bernard Schriever. Both “should be prepared to remain with the program until it is satisfactorily completed.” Attached to their organization would be a “systems management scientific group of the highest competence” to provide the know-how necessary to overcome technological obstacles like reentry. His preference, he said, was “the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation.” He estimated the total cost over the next five fiscal years at $1.545 billion, an enticingly reasonable figure that would prove to be a gross underestimate.
Wasting no time, Gardner took the paper in hand and strode off to a meeting with Secretary Talbott and General Twining the same day the memorandum was completed to brief them on his plan. Both reacted favorably, but Twining could not render a firm decision until, in courtesy to his staff, he had received a recommendation from the Air Force Council. The council was the highest advisory body to the chief of staff. It was chaired by the vice chief, currently Lieutenant General Thomas White. The other members of the council comprised the next tier down, the deputy chiefs who headed the various staff sections at Air Force headquarters. After briefing Talbott and Twining on March 11, Gardner briefed the Air Force Council too, returning for a second session on the 15th. “We’ve just introduced the Air Council to the nuclear missile age,” he announced to Vince Ford.
Another threat nearly as dire as the Russians in Air Force eyes was also now prompting construction of the ICBM—the Army. Interservice rivalry was particularly acute during the late 1940s and the 1950s. Among other disputes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had never been able to agree on which service was entitled to build what missiles. Furthermore, the Army had “the Germans,” as Wernher von Braun, Nazi Germany’s chief scientist on the V-2, and his team of rocketeers were referred to wryly within the Pentagon. They were currently working at the Army Ordnance Department’s Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. Twining and White were being warned by the handful of officers who sided with Gardner and Schriever that if the Air Force did not build the ICBM, the Army, claiming superior expertise in von Braun’s group, would snatch the mission from it. With this threat in mind, the council accepted Gardner’s plan and on March 23 recommended directing the Air Research and Development Command to obtain an operational ICBM as early as possible, “limited only by technical progress.” Twining quickly signed off on the recommendation.
In the meantime, the ever impatient Gardner had moved to preempt the decision making. He persuaded Talbott to order Twining on March 19 to speed up immediately the process of putting his plan into effect. Talbott also appointed Gardner his “direct representative in all aspects of the program.” But Gardner’s blowtorch methods had their limits. He could not build the missile by himself. He had to get the Air Force to do that for him and so he chafed and fretted while the struggle resolved itself within the service bureaucracy. LeMay was vociferously opposed because the ICBM would divert funds from aircraft production, and his allies among the bomber generals on the Air Staff were with him. He predicted that the Atlas would turn out to be an extravagant boondoggle. It would never perform as anticipated.
April went by and nothing much got done by the Air Staff. Gardner, however, did not let the month pass entirely idle. He wanted a means to overcome future naysayers by continuing to provide the program with the prestigious scientific imprimatur he had achieved through the Tea Pot Committee. At his suggestion, von Neumann volunteered to chair a permanent Atlas (later ICBM) Scientific Advisory Committee. Seven of the original Tea Pot members, including Kistiakowsky and Wiesner, agreed to stay on and nine new members were added. One was Norris Bradbury, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, which would be designing the warhead. Another, apparently chosen for fame rather than his scientific knowledge, was Charles “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh, the hero of the first transatlantic flight to Paris in 1927. Lindbergh had been declared a pariah by President Roosevelt for his isolationist and anti-Semitic agitation on the eve of the Second World War. Talbott, who was prepared to forget all of this in remembrance of Lindbergh’s transatlantic exploit, had resurrected him, awarding him a reserve rank of brigadier general.
In mid-May, General White, with the assent of Twining and Defense Secretary Wilson, who had been brought into the discussion, assigned Project Atlas the Air Force’s highest priority and ordered its acceleration “to the maximum extent that technology would allow.” In White, Gardner and Schriever had won an advocate for the ICBM within the hierarchy. White was an urbane man, thoughtful and open-minded, and his route to the top was an unusual one for the time. He was an intellectual and linguist who had spent four years studying Chinese in Beijing in the 1920s and served in intelligence posts as air attaché in Stalin’s Russia and Mussolini’s Italy during the 1930s, rising to become assistant chief of staff for intelligence in 1944. Hap Arnold had then recognized his all-round talents and given him senior command posts in the Pacific during the last year of the war. Schriever had known him slightly after White had been designated deputy commander of the Thirteenth Air Force in September 1944 for the New Guinea campaign and then promoted to chief of the Seventh Air Force in the Marianas not long before the surrender of Japan. Colonel Ray Soper, who subsequently served as an ally for Schriever in a pivotal position on the Air Staff, remembered White lecturing the assembled deputy chiefs in the Air Force Council. Ballistic missiles were here to stay, he told them, and the Air Staff had better realize this fact and get on with it. Nevertheless, the opposition had not yet exhausted stalling tactics. It was not until June 21, 1954, three months after Twining had said go, that Lieutenant General Thomas Power, who had just completed his six years as LeMay’s vice commander at SAC and taken charge of the Air Research and Development Command at Baltimore in mid-April, received a directive from Air Force headquarters. It ordered him to get things moving by establishing “a field office on the West Coast with a general officer in command having authority and control over all aspects of the program.”