Escape of the Boojum

Up from its launching platform at Florida's Patrick Air Force base one day last week swooshed a hot U.S. challenger in the East-West missiles race--the Snark,* a huge (74 ft. long, 7 tons), turbojet-propelled, surface-to-surface guided missile, i.e., a winged pilotless bomber, with speeds up to 600 m.p.h. and intercontinental range (at least 5,000 miles). Radar-checked and ground-controlled, it whizzed southeast down the Caribbean along the 5,000-mile U.S. test range that extends --by agreement with Britain--from Florida to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. Its flight plan: to proceed to a "scheduled turn-around point" on the range, come about and return home.

But at the turning point something went wrong--perhaps a failure in the Snark's guidance system. Ignoring its ground-to-electronic-brain orders, the errant missile veered sharply out of flight pattern and shot westward. When the missile's ground-locked pilots realized it was out of control, they pushed the button that was supposed to blow it up in midair. But the Snark refused to commit suicide. When last seen by radar, it was slipping over the South American horizon. Happily, it carried no warhead.

In Washington, mortified Air Force representatives restricted themselves to saying that no search was being instituted in view of the wide area in which the Snark might have fallen. The State Department, however, was hit hard by the news that it probably had crashed in the Brazilian jungle. For months State's negotiators have been seeking permission for construction of six missile-tracking stations along the Brazilian coast. So far they have been unsuccessful: the Rio government, under pressure from ultranationalists and Communists, has been hard to pin down. Said a department officer bitterly: "That Snark might just as well have landed on our negotiators."

*A portmanteau word, combining snake and shark, invented by Lewis Carroll for the ineluctable prey of his poem, "The Hunting of the Snark." One variety--the Boojum--had the power to make its hunter "softly and suddenly vanish away."

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