"Since 1959, U.S. Air Force strategic nuclear-armed missiles and the airmen who operate and maintain them have been on constant alert, on duty 24 hours a day. The gallery features the service’s missiles that helped maintain peace between Cold War superpowers and have shaped the world's strategic balance for more than half a century.
"You will see Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles such as Jupiter or Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, commonly known as ICBMs, such as Titan and Peacekeeper. Today, with significant reductions in nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War, the modernized Minuteman III remains the U.S.'s only land-based ICBM." (National Museum of the U. S. Air Force, virtual tour)
I played with rockets. Made 'em. Shot 'em off. Showed 'em off. Taught preadolescent friends and relatives how to make 'em and shoot 'em off--just like my much older brother showed me. Mom warned me, caught me, scolded me, punished me, forbade me, but I still made 'em. They were the most fascinating, dramatic, and easily available entertainment in those years before cable, video games, and down-loadable popular music.
And did I say cheap? In the '50s everybody smoked so even if you couldn't scrape together the few quarters for a box of Ohio Blue Tips you could always cop a book of matches from a fish fry Friday bar. A single paper match, a little foil wrapped around the head, a pin under the foil to shape a nozzle, and, voila! good enough for a six-foot flight if you angled it properly.
OK, so I'm still teaching the young to maim themselves with fire. Those single-match rockets were the easiest and cheapest for a brief thrill. Once you really got into it you made larger tubes by wrapping mailing tape around bolts or rods, sealing the head with strips of tape, filling the tube with match heads packed together--trimmed from paper matches--lower power but cheaper fuel, or if you had just received your allowance, of even more carefully razored blue tips from costlier wooden matches and one and only one match head emerging from the nozzle for ignition. Wire eyelets wrapped around the body and nozzle, a straight portion of coat hanger, and Cape Canaveral had moved to your backyard.
The aunts and uncles were upstairs in the kitchen playing pinochle and jawing about things pointless and uninteresting. Funny, though, how they quickly switched to Polish if we burst in on them unexpected. Below in the basement we were safe from prying eyes, forbidding tongues.
It was that last match head. My younger cousins were visiting. I had supplies. I broke out one of my prized homemade tubes about three inches long which I had already filled with choice blue tips. I held the cylinder in my hands and deftly pushed the last head into the nozzle--my three protoges wideyed as they watched, hanging on my every word. "You gotta be really careful here," I cautioned dead seriously--their jaws now dangling open with astonishment. I used a chemistry set pick to insert the ignitor when the needle slipped and scratched across the head.
Fortunately by this time in my boyhood I had already been bespectacled for extreme nearsightedness. The resulting billows of flame and smoke enveloped my face and head. The heat in my hands seared the tape folds to my unprotected palms and fingertips. The pyrotechnics lasted about three hour-long seconds. No explosion--pure thrust--it would have been a great flight, I thought later, once the pain in my hands and face had subsided to medium agony. To this day I have no idea what became of my cousins.
It was no time to fret about misbehavior, guilt, and flagrant transgression of parental edicts--time to check in with mom, the comforter of last resort. I ran upstairs scared and screaming and asked if I still had a face. "What the hell were you doing down there?" my father exclaimed. The rocket's exhaust had deposited a gray acrid powder over my neck, face, and hands, and I stank of burnt flesh and smoke. Once the sooted glasses slipped away I could tell my eyes still worked. My hearing was fine but my future bode ill as they got over the shock of my appearance and started talking about whether I had finally "learned a lesson."
I'm really glad my mom (who was not a nurse) never went into Burn Unit Care because the first thing she suggested was washing my face and hands. When I complained the match heads embedded in my skin were still hot to the touch, she moved into ointment mode. The dreaded Unguentine remained smeared across my kisser and under my mittened hands for close to a week of sixth grade.
Reputations are built one adventure at a time.
Along came Sputnik
Not more than two years after my adventure above the Soviet Union (always ominously referred to as the Russkies) pulled a fast one on the good ol' U-S-A by rocket launching a smidgeon of a satellite into orbit whose path wouncha know crossed overhead. At night an observer could easily see it traverse the sky shortly after sunset or shortly before sunrise. Or during the day one could detect its periodic beeping on short wave radio.
I said smidgeon because by today's standards it wouldn't be considered more than space junk. Back then it was compared to "the shot heard 'round the world." TV and newspapers announced nothing would ever be the same again. We of the younger set were enthralled that what had only the day before been foolishly romantic science fiction had become an undeniable reality of space adventure and exploration. We had seen farther than our fathers, and I wasn't the only kid who said, "I told you, Pop."
Perhaps because our immaturity (and our natural inclination to idealistic romance adventure) we did not see at first what the elders saw. The world had changed overnight. Early on October 4, 1957, we might have ducked and covered under our desks at school to protect ourselves from an atomic blast delivered by Russkie bombers. Or maybe not. Some of us had visited our local Nike (missile not shoe) sites, which were reputedly able to destroy oncoming bombers. They showed only films of successful interceptions.
How does it feel now that the shoe is on the other foot?
But on October 5, 1957, the elders began as a nation to worry in earnest that the bombs we feared in the bombers might one day come much more quickly via missiles, and we had nothing to intercept them--missiles like the one that sent Sputnik up to shake us in our boots. Our own satellite program, the Vanguard (which was designed to put a grapefruit-sized satellite into orbit compared to the medicine-ball Sputnik), just kept reliably blowing up on the launch pad.Worse, as if Sputnik were not enough of a shock, a month and a day later, those conniving Russkies successfully launched Sputnik II--better than eleven hundred pounds of instrumentation with a dog as doomed test pilot. Now this was getting close to nuclear weapon size. We, who had so long been so superior to the Russkies, might easily soon become victims like the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who knew better than we, that if a nation had the bombs and the way to deliver them, it might just go ahead and use them?
After all, our country did not offer to demonstrate the power of the weapon on some worthless island so that no actual Japanese were vaporized, fried, or irradiated in the process. While I'm certain a demonstration would have terrorized them sufficiently to surrender I'm speculating. Such a "harmless" demo of the bomb, military advisors argued, wouldn't have given us the credibility actual use on people would have. We'll never know, will we? Besides, the dead would be their dead, not our dead. Gotta do what's politically feasible.
We weren't trying for the Nobel Peace Prize anyway. We'd become accustomed to firebombing cities in Germany and Japan and killed non-combatants in the hundreds of thousands with conventional weapons. With the atomic bomb we could accomplish the same numbers with just one bomber.
Actually two other specially constructed B-29s accompanied the Enola Gay on its hellish mission. One, which had no name on the crucial flight but was later called Necessary Evil, did the filming (never say die, Hollywood), while the other ironically called The Great Artiste, was equipped with scientific measuring instruments. If nothing else it showed Americans could be as macho and efficient in killing as the Germans, could be as scientifically accurate and technically involved with their weapons as the Germans, and could kill with as keen an eye to future heroic and horror filled propaganda as, well, the Germans. They and the Japanese were the heartless, soulless enemy, so what's your worry?
"I aim for the stars," (Wehrner von Braun); "but often hit London," (Mort Sahl)
So we, the idealistic, Peace Corps enthusiastic, space travel romantics, grew up watching the adventure unroll before our eyes. Late in 1958 in response to the Sputnik crisis President Eisenhower renamed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and indicated that we were going a lot farther up than when the decade started.Then the charismatic young President Kennedy, who had campaigned about a missile "gap" between us and the Russkies (a believable enough fear in the shadow of Sputnik which is not supported by post-Soviet revelations), pulled out all the stops economically and set a goal of getting men (presumably American men) on the moon before 1970.
Ever since Sputnik all the educational folks swung open every door for science students. Industrialists clamored for new engineers. The generation responded. Actually it wasn't NASA who was soaking up all this talent. It was the usual suspects in the military-industrial complex who were funneling a lot of dollars their way while the public was watching the NASA budget. Glamorous test pilots with "the right stuff" became the nation's new heroes.
But if you watched at all closely, every time they got into a vehicle headed for orbit, the vehicles looked a lot like Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles hotrodded with a capsule to carry human pilots who, if the truth be told, piloted damn little. Our first astronaut, Scott Carpenter, basically rode an American version of the German V-2. The Germans could have had one of their own fly to London during the war had they figured how to get him out with a parachute and survive as it came crashing back to earth. Our first orbiting astronaut, John Glenn, rode an early ICBM Atlas modified to bear the capsule Carpenter had tried suborbitally on the Redstone, originally designed to deliver a tactical nuclear weapon over the Soviet borders from NATO states. Gemini used the Titan ICBM.
What's the complaint? Only the military had the rockets. Use 'em, that's efficiency. And it was true that's all we had at the time. To get to the moon one needed rockets even larger than earthbound weapons. That's when the real space romance began. Although one easily guessed that as NASA developed new technical information it was promply shared with the military, and who knew how much of the military prowess still developing in the background wasn't shared with NASA.
Videos recording early launches had terrible optics. In short order the tracking cameras improved vastly. Could it have been that the U-2 cameras which read Russian license plates magically found a new home? Yeah, just don't talk about it.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, The Moon Landing, etc.
Jump forward to the present. We diplomatically got our ass out of WWIII by saving Russian face and our own and by agreeing to step back from the brink and retire some obsolete missiles in Turkey. We got to the moon with computers that haven't a millionth of the computing power in an average PC. The Soviet Union dissolved from causes having nothing to do with President Reagan's blustering. We got in a bunch of wars and won none of them unless you count Grenada. And we took a horrible punch in the snoot from some guys wearing turbans and worshipping some other God.
Now if we fear anything from Russian missiles it is that these new enemies will get enough fissile material to make a "bomb in a suitcase" or a shipping container and treat us to a taste of what we did to the Japanese.
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. Just as I've confessed to my love affair with rockets, I'll confess I have a similar one with airplanes. And not the commercial ones. No, as a peace advocate I'm somewhat embarassed to admit my fascination with warplanes, even though now I look at them very differently than I did as a child. It's one thing to be a pilot and another to be a target. Now I identify more with the target.
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to visit the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. Just as I've confessed to my love affair with rockets, I'll confess I have a similar one with airplanes. And not the commercial ones. No, as a peace advocate I'm somewhat embarassed to admit my fascination with warplanes, even though now I look at them very differently than I did as a child. It's one thing to be a pilot and another to be a target. Now I identify more with the target.
It was a habit formed in our youth. In 1948 after watching serials of cowboys dispatching Indians on early black and white TV, we watched the new knights of our own age acing the Nip and the Hun in gun camera films from WWII fighters. It's really the same stuff you see in the Star Wars series--fighters swooping (motions physically impossible in space) and the sounds of weapons (in space there is no sound). George Lucas will admit his inspiration was the fighter footage. So I'm not alone in this delirium.
Toward the end of my visit I wandered alone into the room described below the photograph. I'll confess another thing. Surprise! I'm wildly imagination driven. The room did seem to me as a real missile silo (like I know a real missile silo from my Aunt Zelda)--dark (from the black paint) solitary (in the real thing the only people you'll meet are in the bunkers pretty far away) and cold and dank (as you might feel in a deep concrete container on a wintry day at an Air Force Base in Minot, North Dakota).
And I know the missiles on display are gutless, weaponless shells, which couldn't hurt anybody unless they broke free of their secure mounts and fell on someone. Only one on display was still in actual readiness--the Minuteman III (one of the relatively smaller missiles painted in white, gold, black, and green). Across the Great Plains states 450 of the Minuteman III are ready in silos to do some high tech killing whenever the word comes down. The sites are "hardened" so as to survive a thermonuclear strike and still pose a realistic threat of retaliation, by actually retaliating.
In my gut it was all too real
Somewhere, out west if not right here before me, was the real killing device so many scientists and engineers had for so many years labored over, tested, written equations I couldn't begin to describe. It wasn't only rocket science, it was nuclear physics too. Another mystery. Then think of the tax dollars enabling all these efforts. What was the goal of all this effort?It wasn't to get to the moon. It wasn't to thrill us on a Fourth of July night. These 450 beasts were to travel to the appropriate spots (how could any spot be appropriate?) on the earth to vaporize, fry, and irradiate as quickly as possible as many people as possible for the fewest dollars.
In an earlier iteration the Minuteman III was equipped with MIRVs (multiple, independently targetable, re-entry vehicles, as many as three bombs) which could be released early enough in the trajectory to strike a variety of targets (populated cities) within a given range. OK, maybe one would take out a dam, another an air base, and another a DQ. Sure. You need a city-sized nuke to take out all that concrete block and the picnic tables.
Due, however, to the occasional rationality which possesses some human intellects (a SALT Treaty) the US and the Russians agreed to dismantle their MIRV capacities and settled for a new balance which would allow either one now to blow up the world only 50 instead of 100 times.
Further this wasn't all of it. We still had bombers which could be used if needed. Our main force was probably located aboard a fleet of roaming nuclear submarines which could deliver perhaps an even more crushing apocalypse. But the submarines and the bombers were not stone cold real in front of me just beyond my reach.
You know, if you don't use 'em it's just been a horrible waste. Not much of a deterrent if you say you're never going to use 'em. The balance works only if each side poses a credible threat. Truth is Herman Kahn wasted a lot of our money and energy thinking about the unthinkable. So much for trusting the warriors.
I don't believe population bombing ever weakened, much less broke, any nation's will to resist. It certainly had the opposite effect on Great Britain. The strategic bombing of factories, dams, and oil facilities in Europe did have an effect even though the enemy proved remarkably inventive in hiding productive resources and securing alternative energy. But maimed and dead enraged many only to fight harder.
When the new B-29s were shown to be ineffective and imprecise in targeting strategic sites at high levels the generals switched to what they could do--firebomb whole areas--cities just as they had over Germany in Dresden most notably and elswhere. By that time the bloodlust of war had settled in and destruction of cities by fire seemed as natural as napalm on smaller targets. The pilots didn't see anything from their perch just the flames.
And we know many tried not to think what was happening on the ground. If they did they thought again of their comrades who had been shot down or sunk by torpedoes, or if all else failed, Pearl Harbor. They started it. It's what worked on the playground when they were a few years younger. Or they came home and just never talked about it. War is doing evil. You'd rather they do it to us?
The early films of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made as the first American troops entered Japan were deemed so horrific they were not made available for showing to the American public until decades later. No sense in needlessly stirring up moral outrage. The war had ended.
Bomb, bomb, bomb, . . . bomb, bomb Iran . . Oh, Bomb Ira-a-an
In my lifetime there's just been so much crazy talk about how the US is a superpower, how its might is unchallengeable, how its armed forces are the finest and unbeatable, how we are exceptional and lead by example. But the record of military involvement doesn't support the chatter. Except for a couple of banana republic incursions we have not achieved the promise of "peace through strength."The tragically too-soon deceased young comic Bill Hicks based a bit of his routine on some of the military publicity promoting the first Iraq war. After depicting a "smart" bomb being directed precisely into a stairwell in Iraq, he flipped the imagery to our feeding starving people in famine-stricken Africa: "Do ya think they could use that technology to pop a banana into some guy standing in the desert with his mouth open?" He motioned his hand as if it was the incoming banana and dove it directly into his mouth.
As crazy as the notion was it made you think: what could we have done had the war money been spent on the troubles that cause wars instead of the threatening and killing that promote wars? Wouldn't that be an effective military? Wouldn't that be leading by example? Wouldn't that be exceptional?
No, no, no, they'd scream. That would be taking a terrible risk. We're not a nation of gamblers!
We are a nation of gamblers. But we're not paying any attention to the gamble. We've got these very real weapons with very real people trained and dedicated to use them and very real politicians who are gambling with their mouths every day they talk about our military might. The chips are our tax dollars, our lives and those of our children, and the lives of billions over the planet.
You want to keep on gambling on war and death? Personally I favor gambling on peace and life.
[As if in response:http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20747-missile-launching-in-the-dark]
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