Viewing page 63 of 109

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

10-Mon.,July 15, 1957 The Chicago American

Biggest U.S. Mystery: Missiles

Continued from page 1.
Thomas Island, from picket boats stretched out in a southeasterly d i r e c t i o n from Cape Canaveral. They will watch. They will compute.
10...9...8...7. The cost of this ICBM is $4,000,000. The nose cone is built to hold a bomb with the explosive power of 10,000,000 tons of TNT. The total of all bombs dropped on Germany in the last war was 2,900,000 tons. The one bomb in Atlas will totally destroy everything in a 24-mile circle.

[[subsection]] [[underlined]]
No Bomb Now

It carries no bomb this time, but it carries the weight equivalent, and it carries a lot of other things including a thinking IBM machine, a guidance system, a big tank of liquid oxygen, a tank of fuel, three big rocket engines, and a means of committing suicide.
4...3...2...1...zero. The Atlas sits deaf. Except for the surf, the sandpit is silent. The breeze spins the sand in little pirouettes. A roar assails the brain. It is as though someone turned on a hundred thousand oil burners simultaneously. Atlas shivers. Yellow and pink flame smash downward against the pad and a giant chrysanthemum of steam lays upside down.
Atlas begins to move. It is slow. The bird moves five feet in the first two seconds. The hollow roaring sound of its engines fills the air for miles. Inside the concrete block house, an engineer keeps a finger on the suicide button. If Atlas wavers, or moves in any direction except straight up, the button will be pressed and Atlas will blow into little fragments.

[[subsection]] [[underlined]]
Really Moves

Now the bird begins to move. Really move. By the fifth second of time, observers in the block house see a speck of pink fire in the sky. Two more seconds, and Atlas has disappeared. ON radar and on infra-red machines, it is a round dot hurling itself to heaven.
The sound is gone from the base. In the sudden silence, the sand falls in beige rain across the concrete strips. Inside the block house, all of the automatic pens are moving on the graph charts. A man stands in front of each one. Atlas is sending back information about speed and heat and fuel consumption and guidance and pressures and altitude and two dozen other things faster than any human brain could read them.
At the 15th second, Atlas is 300 miles straight up. It begins to turn southeast, still climbing. It left the air ocean above the earth at the 120th mile. Now the world around Atlas is deep blue. The stars above are bright. Blow, the earth is a large steamy ball. Sunlight reflects from it although, up here, the sun is a dark fire.
When Atlas is 500 miles up, it turns to the curve of the earth. To hit its target accurately, it must fly through a small imaginary hoop in the sky. The scientists and Air Force officers below track it closely. One minute and 20 seconds later it has left the pad, the engines stop. The bird is now in free space.
The engines drop off. They fall free and, on their way down they will hit the air ocean. For a moment, they will be as incandescent as a falling star. Then they will burn up and fall in tiny fragments, like a meteor. Atlas is moving at 16,000 miles per hour.

[[subsection]][[underline]]
Frame Drops Off
The air frame drops off. The nose cone, which, in war, will carry the bomb, continues on its way. But, because there is so little drag in outer space, the long tube called the air frame follows closely behind. Before the target area is reached, the frame will slow down; gravity will assert itself and it will tumble back into the air ocean, burning brightly and breaking into little grains.
The nose starts downward in a long parabola. From the earth, it can be seen by instruments as a faint violet blush over the South Atlantic Ocean. It comes down, down, down, falling faster and faster, honing in on its target like a hound sniffing at a hole in the ground. As it reaches the air ocean, the nose cone slows up. It must, or it too will be burned to fragments by friction before it reached the earth.
It has been moving at mach 24 -- 24 times the speed of sound. Now it puts on the brakes by a means mysterious to all but the scientists, and it moves through air at mach 3. It is loafing at about 2,000 miles per hour as it hits the ocean in a plume of spume. 
It has landed 300 miles west of the island of St. Helena, about 14 degrees south latitude, 14 degrees west longitude. It is now 32 minutes since it left Cape Canaveral, Fla. Distance: 5,500 miles. 
Atlas isn't quite ready to make the trip, as described. It is almost ready and it has been test fired for shorter flights. When it is reliable, it will move exactly as described and it will move inexorably on any target anywhere. There is no defense against it. There is nothing known or projected that can catch it, or stop it. 
From the SAC base on Okinawa, every part of the Soviet Union is within 5,500 miles. Atlas asks no more. The same applies to the new bases in Spain. And the United States bases in North Africa, and Great Britain. And in Greenland. This leads Air Force officers to feel that Atlas has a greater potentiality as a war deterreant than as a weapon. 
If two nations have an Atlas, and with it the power to destroy each other beyond repair, plus the fact that as many as 80,000,000 people can be exterminated in an opening attack lasting 30 minutes--only the insane can afford to be belligerent.
Should the race for intercontinental missiles end in a tie, or something close to a tie, it is almost a certainty that the Soviet Union and the United States will begin to talk in terms of "You dismantle one missile base, and we will dismantle one. Then we will dismantle a second one, and you do likewise." Inch by inch, both nations will be forced, by the terrifying specter of almost total destruction, off the offensive perch.
This leads to an ironic conclusion. The people of the United States must spend billions for missiles which, in turn, will probably never be fired in anger. Still, if we do not spend the money, we can easily become enslaved by a nation which doesn't mind the extra expense.
In the intercontinental matter, the Air Force has not placed all of its bets on Atlas. Atlas is the daddy of the big ballistics--or outer space--missiles. Although it is less than three years of age, it has spawned a son named Titan. 
Titan is being built near Denver. It will do the same work that daddy does, but it will do it better. It is, the Air Force officers say, "a more sophisticated weapon." Like Atlas, it can be steered in flight by gimboling the engines. This consists of moving the exhaust chamber at the rear of the weapon so that the thrust from it alters the flight path. 
Another intercontinental missile is Snark. This is an air breather which will not leave the atmosphere of the earth. 
Snark is a subsonic pilotless plane. Rockets will lift it off a launching platform. A huge jet engine will take over after that.
It will go 5,500 miles at an altitude of about 60,000 feet and it will move at, say, 650 Mph. Snark will take nine hours to do what Atlas does in 32 minutes. 
Snark is a sleek red plane which carries an H-bomb. It is slow in comparison to others, but it has the admiration of Air Force officers because it is the first intercontinental missile in being.
Like others, Snark has a brain. Should the brain be told the exact latitude and longitude of the target, it will take off, fly high, do its own navigation on two fixed stars, work out its problems of fuel, and then, when it nears the target, it will take evasive action, twisting, turning, dodging, and smash itself within a few miles of exactly where it was told to go. With an H-bomb in the nose, it doesn't have to be closer than that. 

TOMORROW: Who'll get there first?