Deadly Flying Cigars

The rival cruise missiles vie for a lucrative contract

Several thousand feet above a bleak patch of western Utah, a 20-ft. long, cigar-shaped drone dropped from a B-52 bomber, spread its stubby wings and began whipping around an oval course 100 miles long and 30 miles wide at speeds up to 500 m.p.h. So last Tuesday began the great flyoff to pick the first U.S. air-launched cruise missile (ALCM), a weapon capable of carrying a nuclear warhead some 1,350 nautical miles and delivering it on target with near pinpoint accuracy. The weapon is designed to boost the nation's atomic punch in the mid-1980s.

General Dynamics Corp. built last week's contestant; its competition, constructed by Boeing Corp., is scheduled to have its turn this week. Each model will be given ten tests strapped to a B-52 to enable the missile's guidance system to fly the bomber. Each model will also have ten freeflight tests. Some will be like last week's exercise, while others will follow a zigzag course from the Pacific back to the Utah range. Should an ALCM go astray, an F-4 Phantom jet flying along would take over its guidance system.

The tests compare the two models in such categories as navigation, targeting and range. Even more crucial is the ability to survive projected Soviet countermeasures. Explained William Perry, chief of Pentagon Research and Engineering: "We will put these missiles on our radar measurement range and make very detailed measurements of their radar cross sections. The data will be fed into a computer for simulations that predict what kind of performance we will get against different sorts of air defenses."

For Boeing and General Dynamics, the flyoffs payoff is huge. Each ALCM is estimated to cost only $1 million (vs. $5.8 million for a submarine's Trident I ICBM). However, the Pentagon plans to order 3,000, making the prime contractor's share about $2 billion. By early next year, the contest results are to be announced and the first ALCM-armed B-52 could enter the bomber fleet by December 1981.

Well along the development cycle also is the submarine-launched cruise missile (SLCM). A General Dynamics Tomahawk had its sixth successful underwater firing last week off California. Planned mainly as an antiship weapon, the SLCM can carry a conventional or nuclear warhead about 300 nautical miles. By 1982, the first of these weapons are to be deployed on U.S. warships.

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