The Bird & the Watcher

(See Cover)

In the Convair plant at San Diego one day last December, a mysterious piece of hardware was carefully cantilevered down from a vertical position inside a closely guarded seven-story shed. Draped in a white canvas shroud, lashed to a yellow, tubular steel trailer, the top-secret cargo was hauled out onto U.S. Highway 80 to begin a 2,500-mile trip across the southern U.S. As it rolled over the mountains, across the plains and into the towns, it looked like a wrapped-up oil tank. Nothing betrayed the presence of the most monstrous potential new weapon in the U.S. arsenal--designed to be fired 5,500 miles along a ballistic trajectory reaching 500 miles above the surface of the earth at speeds up to 16,000 m.p.h., to plunge an H-bomb warhead into an enemy target. Under the shroud was Atlas, the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile.

At the end of the journey, at the Air Force Missile Test Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., behind high security fences, the ICBM was stripped of its shroud, its garish yellow, black and red skin exposed to the light of day. Soon more than 300 Air Force and Convair scientists, engineers and technicians were primping and pampering "the Bird," grooming its round and bulbous nose, its disproportionately thick waist, its flared skirt, its unbelievably complex and exotic mechanism. One day soon, perhaps late in April, perhaps early in May, the Bird will make its first flight. From a sickle-shaped launching pad near a sunny vacation shore the Bird will be fired, minus its warhead, on an 1,800-mile test shot southeastward across tropic islands and into an empty sea.

Space Is No Problem. "The part of the flight that doesn't worry me is the flight through space," says the chief watcher of the Bird, Air Force Major General Bernard Adolf Schriever, as he ponders the long-range meanings of the test flight he cannot acknowledge publicly. "The problems occur at both ends."

As the man most concerned with the problems of the ICBM, tall (6 ft. 2 in.), hard-eyed Ben Schriever (rhymes with fever) has the awesome job of developing an ICBM as a practical weapon of war before the Communists do. He lives with the gnawing awareness of what losing the ICBM race might mean. But General Schriever is a man who has always lived for victory rather than defeat. ("I hate to admit defeat in anything," he once remarked, without flamboyance.) Should he win his destiny-sized race for an operational ICBM, he believes, the U.S. will hold in its hands a vital deterrent to attack--a new peacekeeper of unparalleled power and potential.

Three years, probably more, possibly less, must be traversed before General Schriever's mighty missile graduates from test flight to what he calls I.O.C., meaning "Initial Operational Capability." Many more years will be needed to bring it into U.S.'s front-line force-in-being. But already the impact of the ICBM and its supporting family of some 30 Air Force-Navy-Army rockets and ballistic and guided missiles is pressing the U.S., evenly, inevitably, inexorably, into a missile age in which the patterns of U.S. defense, U.S. industry and even U.S. life will be substantially made over.

The National Effort. ICBMs are already moving out of the heady cloisters of laboratory spacemen into the workaday world of production engineers and cost accountants. They will cost about $4,000,000 apiece for the first production run of a few hundred, it is reckoned, and sharply less after that. The first 1,000 ICBMs and the first three launching bases will be had, it is thought, for about the price of 800 6-47 medium jet bombers. And as the ICBM and its family flourish, so does its accompanying technology, e.g., new cameras so sensitive that they can photograph the creases in a newspaper held ten miles away.

Everywhere the signs multiply that U.S. missilery is becoming a national effort. The work force of the missile family has increased recently to several hundred thousand; the work force of the ICBM alone has shot up from 7,000 to 70,000 within the past year. The armed forces will spend $6 billion on missiles next year--about 20% more than last year--and they are already phasing some missiles into the line in place of conventional equipment. In 1954 about 10% of Air Force procurement funds went for missiles; by 1960 the figure will be up to 50%. And the face of U.S. industry is changing as airframe manufacturers slow to develop missile lines are feeling the pinch, while the 17 contractors and 200 subcontractors on the ICBM program are booming to the point where, for example, one twelve-year-old newcomer named Aerojet-General has piled up a backlog of $400 million.*

On the bleak and dust-swept ranges east of Albuquerque, N. Mex., high-school science students with a yen for space travel are designing and firing their own small rockets, and tracking them through the atmosphere. Near Cape Canaveral, Fla., tourists are staying in motels with such names as "The Sea Missile," eating in "Missile Barbecue," holding night parties on a beach where they can watch the distant pink glow of missile night firings; in the mornings, Florida fishermen bring up bits of the missiles in their nets. "Perhaps people sense that something momentous is about to occur," wrote a U.S. missileman in Alamogordo, N. Mex., a missile town whose population has increased since 1950 from 7,000 to 25,000.

Tomorrow's Men. As the man who leads the U.S. race to beat the Russians to a workable ICBM, and who sparks the U.S. surge toward space, General Schriever has what has been called "the most important job in the country." But the measure of the coming missile age is that today's dedicated, visionary missilemen are no longer considered unique or eccentric or extreme.

With the right kind of clearance to a U.S. missile base, the visitor will find there, maneuvering amid weird lunar landscapes and weirder towers, blockhouses and cables, perhaps an ebullient scientist in an aloha shirt, or a fresh-faced lieutenant from M.I.T. handling millions of dollars worth of rocketry, or a gentle German in tweeds who helped Hitler build his V2, or even a space-fiction writer, intense and bespectacled, nosing about the U.S. military establishment for ideas. These are tomorrow's men.

As the missilemen contemplate Ben Schriever, a tomorrow's man who often runs his command post in a grey flannel suit or tweed sports coat and slacks, who decorates his command post with an impressionistic oil painting of the U.S.'s first liquid-fuel rocket superimposed upon a plumed Chinese war rocket supposedly used by the Kin Tartars at the seige of Kaifeng (12321,* they recognize him as tomorrow's man. "Discerning, thinking leader . . . outstanding and extremely tenacious manager ... he has a big project concept" they say, adding that they "have great regard for his motivations." For Ben Schriever is a tireless, able, dedicated, imaginative officer who is respected both as an executive and as an engineer. He has learned in the wind tunnel of the America of the '30s, '40s and '50s the best concepts and best context of his community. "Action," "dynamic" and "capability" are among his favorite words, and all three have come to a knot in Missileman Schriever at a critical point in time. "We simply must maintain the deterrent capability," he repeats insistently. "It's our main objective in life."

Believe It or Not. Born in Bremen, Germany just 46 years ago, Ben Schriever came to the U.S. at the age of six, bringing with him a severe earache ("The ocean, I remember, was very rough coming over"), the memory of Zeppelins passing thunderously at night above his family's apartment in Bremerhaven, and a fluency only in his native tongue. It was 1917, and the U.S. had interned his father Adolf, an engineer for the North German Lloyd line; Engineer Schriever sent for his wife and sons Bernard and Gerhard, and they soon moved to the German-American community of New Braunfels, Texas. A few days before Ben's eighth birthday, his father was killed in an industrial accident in San Antonio. The boy shouldered his new responsibilities as male head of the family with what would become a lifelong seriousness and intensity.

Several times the Schrievers moved, eking out a meager living, until in 1923 Mrs. Schriever got a job as housekeeper to a wealthy San Antonian who set the Schriever family up on a bit of his property beside the twelfth green of the Brackenridge Park golf course. Here the family developed a profitable sideline by opening a refreshment stand, selling home-cured ham sandwiches, Bavarian cheeses and soft drinks to the passing golfers. Ben hurled himself at his schoolwork, was a bear at mathematics, graduated from high school at 16 in the National Honor Society. In his spare time, he used Brackenridge Park so studiously that he became a below-par golfer, once making Ripley's Believe It or Not when he drove 300 yds. plus on to one green three times, sinking the putt on each occasion for an eagle deuce.

"He'd play 18 holes and come in under par," brother Gary, now an Air Force colonel, recalls, "but that wouldn't satisfy him. One or two of the strokes hadn't gone right, and he'd practice them for an hour, then go back and play 18 more holes. He did everything this way."

Into the Air. In 1923 Ben became a U.S. citizen, went on to Texas A. & M., got his B.S. in engineering, an R.O.T.C. commission, and a yen to be an architect. But Depression-time was rough for fledgling architects, and besides, Ben had got a lot of fun walking miles out to the dirt fields near San Antonio to watch the U.S.'s flying cadets putting their de Havillands through their paces. So he applied for and was accepted in the Air Corps flying school, survived the school's average of one crash landing for every 30 hours of flight training, and its 60% washout rate to win his wings. "I was certainly not in the H.P. [Hot Pilot] category," he said. "The bombardment group specialized in slow thinkers, and that's where they put me."

During the Air Corps' lean years, Reserve Officer Schriever built up a many-sided experience both on active and inactive duty. He flew lumbering B-3 Keystone bombers, ferried the mails, made a parachute jump (with proper military permission) just for the experience, worked as a copilot for Northwest Airlines on the Seattle-Billings run, served as aide in Panama to Brigadier General George H. Brett, and courted and won the general's 20-year-old blonde daughter Dora. On inactive duty one year, Ben ran a CCC camp of 200 truculent boys near Lordsburg, N. Mex. "I learned a lot about command that year," he said. "I learned never to put out a rule that is unenforceable. I learned that it's important to get the staff on my side, and if you earned their loyalty, they were on your side. And I learned to show an interest in everything that was going on."

Into Research. After 1938, when he won a Regular Army commission as a second lieutenant, Schriever headed like a self-guided missile into the heart of the growing field of aviation research and development. On the basis of his flying experience and his engineering background, he got a coveted job as test pilot at Ohio's Wright Field; there he flew anything that came along, frequently five or six new and unproven planes a day, all the way up to the B-17 which was then in modest production. He moved on to Wright Field's Air Corps Engineering School (mornings devoted to intricate work in the classrooms; afternoons to project work in the wind tunnel, propeller and engine test labs), and made a place and a future and a lot of friends for himself in the vanguard of the Air Corps' technological frontier force.

At Schriever's request, the Air Corps sent him on from Wright Field to Stanford University for graduate work, whence he emerged a year later with an essential emblem of the missileman-to-be--a master's degree in mechanical engineering. Already he was looking ahead, piecing together his pictures of the future, systematically qualifying himself to take part.

During World War II Officer Schriever rose from captain to colonel, flew 63 missions chiefly as a B-17 pilot in the Pacific, rose through varied air-logistics jobs to command the advanced echelon of Far East Air Service Command. He saw less than an ambitious airman would want to of the shooting match, but he continued to qualify himself for research and development. He learned something of the shoestring tragedies of R and D when a B-17 fitted with a new flare-dropping rack that he had designed caught fire mysteriously over Cairns, Australia and crashed, killing its crew. The investigation did not establish conclusively that his rack was responsible, but thereafter the device was regarded with open suspicion; no one but Ben and a co-designer felt nervy enough to fly with it.

As the postwar armed forces began to explore new ways of war, the Air Force installed Schriever in the Pentagon to help plan a vague new development program. Month after month thereafter, he moved unobtrusively about the fringes of the chaos of the U.S.'s first moves into missilery. As early as 1950 he was one of the very few--and very unpopular--airmen who did not like the Air Force's cherished B-52. Schriever argued obstinately for a lighter, faster bomber that could fire air-to-ground missiles.

Schriever lost that battle, and some others. Of an early ICBM project, he said: "It had a questionable military value based on the then state of the art, so we sort of put it on the back burner." But interest in missiles was picking up, and one of the reasons was Schriever's visionary enthusiasm. Everywhere he debated and discoursed upon the values and virtues of missiles, missiles, missiles with such fervor that, according to one friendly scientist, "they thought Ben was insane."

In mid-1953 Colonel Schriever, in charge of development planning for Air Force headquarters, was one of the R and D officers who felt--and he proclaimed what he felt insistently--that a full survey of future nuclear warhead design ought to be made so as to shrink the cumbersome new hydrogen bomb into an ICBM. The H-bomb had a higher range of destruction than the Abomb, the argument went, and the need for pinpoint accuracy was therefore reduced.

The theory developed, and solutions suggested themselves. Breakthroughs followed in what now seems an extraordinarily short space of time. Early in 1954 a Strategic Missiles Evaluation Committee headed by the late great Mathematician John von Neumann developed and extended these breakthroughs. Von Neumann and his associates came out with a feasible technique for designing a lightweight hydrogen device which would indeed fit into the nose cone of an ICBM.

At once a committee named by Trevor Gardner, then the Air Force's Assistant Secretary for Research and Development, called in North American Aviation propulsion experts. Yes, they agreed, their rocket engines could power such a miniature hydrogen warhead. Convair aerodynamics experts reported that the thin steel envelope of an ICBM could easily carry the new warhead and the rocket engines. Excitedly Gardner reported to his superiors that an ICBM was now scientifically and mechanically feasible. Gardner brought in such names as Jimmy Doolittle, Charles A. Lindbergh and Von Neumann himself to confirm his point; Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson bulled the ICBM project through the National Security Council.

Then the Air Force's forward-looking Air Research and Development Command looked for the right kind of missile-minded man to manage-develop an ICBM program like a billion-dollar corporation. "Actually we didn't appoint him--Benny was born for this job," a Pentagon general said. "There wasn't another soul we knew who could handle it, so we just sort of nodded and said 'O.K., now,' and Benny walked in and took over." The day he got the job, Brigadier General Ben Schriever was 43 years old.

Sleep Standing Up. Only one Los Angeles newspaper spotted Schriever as he slipped into town in August 1954 to set up a mysterious Western Development Division--a streamlined ARDC complex of Air Force boffins and a bright new firm of civilian guided-missile and electronics experts named Ramo-Wooldridge. "I expect that first year he got more sleep standing up than lying down," said one admiring aide of Schriever's subsequent 16-hour days. "We could cut the military budget," said another officer, "by firing Benny and saving the light bills he runs up."

In the summer of 1955 President Eisenhower lifted Ben Schriever's project from top Air Force priority to top Defense Department priority. A couple of committees were set up to review decisions and to provide more high-level support. Orders soon hummed around the Pentagon that any document pertaining to Ben Schriever's project was to be pink-and-red tabbed and delivered by hand, as the Air Force cut the red tape and stepped up the pressure. "We get programs approved by mail, and the "contractor gets his money in weeks," said Schriever admiringly in his headquarters in Inglewood, Calif. "If you compare our facilities program with any other, short of wartime, it's just fantastic in terms of scope, magnitude and speed."

The Family of Birds. The U.S. is betting high not only on Ben Schriever's ICBM but on all kinds of missilery--in dollars, time and doctrine. The aim is to phase in missiles and phase out obsolete conventional weapons with no blind spots. The Air Force's Falcon missile is replacing the unguided rocket and the .50 cal. and 20 mm. gun. The Navy will order no more 16-in. guns or other large guns; the Navy is developing its missiles Terrier, Sidewinder and Sparrow, and Regulus. The Army has missiles like Little John and Honest John, Corporal, Redstone, Lacrosse, Dart and the ack-ack Nike-Ajax, which are comparatively blunt and unsophisticated weapons. But Nike-Ajax is much more efficient than conventional ack-ack, and the more advanced Nike-Hercules can carry a nuclear warhead.

Then there are developing the Air Force's "cruise" missiles, the Northrop Snark and perhaps the North American Navaho, in effect advanced unmanned airplanes of 5,000 miles range which, unlike the ICBM, can be controlled by their mechanism on their infinitely slower way all the way to the target. The Air Force is also developing Rascal, a promising supersonic air-to-surface missile; Thor, a 1,500-mile ballistic missile; and Titan, a second design for an ICBM. The Navy has a costly but promising project to develop Polaris, a 1,500-mile ballistic missile which will carry a nuclear warhead; Navy has the concept of firing it in event of war from nuclear submarines, maybe underwater, posted off the coasts of enemy lands. The Army is developing a 1,500-mile missile of its own called Jupiter.

Unlike the history of the aircraft carrier, the long-range bomber, the hydrogen bomb, the nuclear-powered submarine--all of which met service opposition before acceptance--the history of the missile has little record of military unwillingness to accept it as the weapon that must be developed at top speed. Another point is that the armed forces are not phasing in the missiles prematurely. "It is just as dangerous to have a weapon too early," said one SAC officer, "as it is to have it too late."

Black Friday. The U.S.'s payoff bet is Ben Schriever's ICBM, and Schriever knows how to play for high stakes. One Friday a month, a day his staff calls Black Friday, he summons his key men into his project control room in WDD headquarters in Inglewood. This room is a massive vault whose walls, floors and ceilings are built of 6-in. concrete reinforced by steel; its treasures are guarded when the room is empty by two opaque glass hemispheres embedded in the ceiling, so sensitive that they will register an intruder's breath and sound the alarm. In this room Schriever arrays his men before a "Master Milestone Chart" which lists the key achievement dates and key target dates in the progress of the ICBM. Eight thousand channels lead from all elements of the program to the master chart, and they reveal clearly, and often painfully, where the program is lagging. "The successes and failures of all departments get a good airing," Schriever says. "We try to take lessons from the success or failure of one department and apply it to another. This goes on all the time."

From outside as well as inside, the problems crowd in. One day recently Schriever's intermediate-range ballistic missile Thor misfired in Florida, rose 100 ft. and settled gently to its launching pad, where it cracked as it toppled over. The Army, which had test-fired a version of its Jupiter IRBM, was soon crowing bitterly that Thor was nothing but a no-good IPBM--interpad ballistic missile--and won a point in the bitter new interservice war (TIME, June 4).

Another day Schriever was told at the White House that his budget in fiscal 1958 was going to be cut by some 15%. Said a senior official: "I'm going to ask you to get along on this without retarding the program in any way--but if you run into trouble, come back and see me." Schriever tightened up his cost accounting, and said: "We have not been shorted. I know of no decision that we're going to get less money than is necessary."

X-Day & Beyond. Theoretically, highly responsible U.S. scientists and military officers believe that man is ready to fire an unmanned missile through space to the moon. Rocket motors, guidance systems and air frames needed for such a shot can almost be picked up off the shelf for assembly. ARDC has considered setting up an eleventh division for space and space technology. "We have the know-how to hit the moon right now," Schriever says flatly. "The ballistic missile program has established the resources to move into space. Man is inquisitive. He's going to keep pushing at the frontiers."

An unmanned earth-to-moon missile would take a year or 18 months to set up, some hardheaded and senior Air Force scientists say. The deterring factors, say other hardheaded and senior scientists, are that an ambitious moon project would cost the U.S. about $2 billion and would have no immediate and visible military value. But the missilemen do not leave the argument there. "It would be like the Sixth Fleet," said one Air Force general, "a deterrent and therefore a peacekeeper. I'm all for it." Ben Schriever adds: "Several decades from now the important battles may not be sea battles or air battles but space battles, and we should be spending a certain fraction of our national resources to ensure that we do not lag in obtaining space supremacy."

But even as his cold eyes range far into space, Ben Schriever, missileman extraordinary, keeps his feet on the earth. His job is to find out how to move an H-bomb 5,500 miles from Point A to Point B in 20 minutes before the Russians find out how, and to produce the hardware that can do it. "The mission is to maintain the peace." he says. "The ballistic missile will improve our deterrent capability. This will make any aggressor think twice."

This will be the real and immediate meaning of the fateful X-day that will occur at the Air Force Missile Test Center in Florida a few weeks hence when Ben Schriever's first Model-T ICBM is lifted vertically for its first test blastoff. And while this will be a great moment in military history, what will 1987 think of it? Or 1997? The missile stands just about where the airplane stood after World War I--when military planes had to compete for the taxpayer dollar with the cavalry horse. How primitive will tomorrow's men and tomorrow's missiles seem the day after tomorrow?

*And toy missiles and missile launchers are racking up a business of $10 million a year. *Where Kin Tartars, defending the city against the rampaging Mongols, used both fire-powder bombs and "flying fire spears" which "burst forward with a sudden flame to a distance of ten paces and upward so that no one durst approach them."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.