The slow pace at which Convair was moving the ICBM program particularly concerned an aeronautical engineer in the RAND missiles division named Bruno Augenstein. In early 1948, Augenstein had come to RAND as a subcontractor for the North American aircraft company, doing analyses of satellites and preliminary design work on what in the late 1950s would become the Navaho cruise missile. After a brief respite teaching in the Aeronautics Department at Purdue University, he joined RAND full-time in 1949.
On August 8, 1953, the Soviets set off their first hydrogen bomb. One of Augenstein’s friends in the intelligence community contacted him to talk about some of its details. It seemed that this Soviet bomb bore little resemblance to the American H-bomb. For one thing it was less powerful, something of a relief. But there was also something ominous. The H-bomb that the United States had set off was not really a practical bomb; it was more like a “device.” It required a huge refrigeration system to keep it cool, something that could not be sent up on a rocket, or even, very easily, on a bomber. Yet analysis of fallout samples from the Soviet explosion indicated the presence of lithium, a chemical that made refrigeration unnecessary.
The implication was sensational. It meant that the Soviets could conceivably build an ICBM with an H-bomb on board much earlier than the United States. Like most weapons scientists of the day, Augenstein thought that if the Soviet Union beat the United States in a race for the ICBM, the consequences would be catastrophic. The Atlas project had to be pushed along at a much faster clip.
The Convair requirements for Atlas were certainly extreme. The trick was to find some technically feasible way of relaxing them without degrading the missile’s capabilities. Using the same evidence about lighter and smaller warheads that Plesset, Griggs and others had obtained from Los Alamos scientists, Augenstein figured that the Atlas warhead could be made half as heavy as the 3,000 pounds that Convair was requiring, with no reduction in its explosive punch. On the requirement that the warhead re-enter the atmosphere and head toward the target at six times the speed of sound, Augenstein’s own research suggested that an object moving at merely the speed of sound would be difficult enough for Russian air defenses to track and shoot down; therefore, such high speeds were, for the time being, unnecessary. Given that, the problem of re-entering the atmosphere without burning up the warhead became simpler to solve.
His most critical discovery, however, concerned the missile’s accuracy, its CEP (“circular error probable”), indicating the distance from a given point within which a weapon lands 50 percent of the time. Convair wanted the Atlas CEP to be somewhere between one-quarter and one-half mile—which would require highly sophisticated inertial guidance systems that nobody had as yet come close to inventing.
Augenstein examined some mathematical models of bomb destruction that others at RAND had devised. Extrapolating from these models, Augenstein calculated how many 500-kiloton warheads would be needed to attack the industrial target complexes in the 20 largest Soviet cities (containing 55 percent of the U.S.S.R.’s industrial capital), the next 50 top cities (another 32 percent) and the next 110 urban areas (an additional 17 percent)—assuming different CEPs ranging from one to five miles.
Compared with missiles having a one-mile CEP, it turned out that the United States would need only 1.6 times as many missiles with three-mile CEPs to destroy the 20 largest Soviet cities, twice as many to attack the 70 largest and 2.5 times as many to target the 180 largest cities. Since fissile materials were now quite plentiful, getting the additional weapons would be no problem. In fact, with the bigger bangs that the H-bomb could produce—blasts in the megaton range—CEPs as high as five miles would still be adequate for destroying all the urban targets one might want to hit in a retaliatory strike. Therefore, Convair could relax its absurdly difficult CEP requirements to as high as three or five miles, and Atlas could still perform its essential retaliatory mission.
The upshot of Augenstein’s analysis was that with accessible technology, and only more money and a higher priority given to the Atlas project by the Defense Department, the United States could have an operational ICBM by 1960—five years sooner than the Convair planners were shooting for.
Augenstein finished his report late in November of 1953. His boss, Jimmy Lipp, head of RAND’s missiles division, who had been working with Augenstein as the study had progressed, was tantalized. Lipp had been appalled by the death and destruction wreaked by a twenty-megaton bomb during the brief period when he was working with Ernie Plesset, Bernard Brodie and Charlie Hitch on the H-bomb study. But as efficient as weapons technology may have been by 1953, it was not yet so developed as to allow a bomb anywhere near twenty megatons to fit onto the tip of an ICBM. More than that, there was something so technically challenging and politically grand about a workable ICBM—and arriving at it before the Russians—that an attempt to achieve it was cause for excitement.
On December 11, Lipp took the results of Augenstein’s study to Frank Collbohm, who was enthralled with the analysis. This study that Lipp was laying out before him could put RAND way out in front of the competition from other groups and ad hoc panels also working on the ICBM.
Collbohm went to Washington the next day to brief the study to senior Air Staff officers, indeed telling virtually every general he found roaming the Pentagon’s hallways that the ICBM was now a practical goal, that RAND had discovered the solution.
His audiences were intrigued, but many were skeptical. The Air Force still meant, by and large, the big-bomber force. Even the more interested officers preferred to reserve judgment until hearing from other quarters—the most distinguished of which was the Strategic Missile Evaluation Committee, code named the Teapot Committee, chaired by John von Neumann. In June of 1953, von Neumann and Edward Teller told the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board that it was possible to manufacture a one- or two-megaton thermonuclear warhead that weighed a mere 3,000 pounds or less. The Teller-von Neumann presentation had been lined up by Colonel Bernard Schriever of the Development Planning Office in the Air Force. The DPO was also the specific office that monitored the RAND contract. Ernie Plesset and David Griggs knew that von Neumann and Teller had done some calculations suggesting the feasibility of a small thermonuclear warhead—indeed, von Neumann and Teller, both frequent visitors to RAND, were the ones from whom Plesset and Griggs first heard of such news. Plesset convinced Schriever, who was also quite keen on accelerating an ICBM program, to journey to Princeton and try to get von Neumann to be chairman of an ad hoc panel of the Scientific Advisory Board that would evaluate the issue.
On June 16, with this knowledge in hand, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson ordered a review of the guided-missile program to identify and eliminate duplication. He assigned responsibility for the project to his assistant secretary for research and development, Trevor Gardner. Gardner, in turn, placed a special panel to look at strategic missiles under the administrative authority of General Schriever. Von Neumann had recently been diagnosed as having terminal cancer, but he accepted Schriever’s request that he head the Teapot Committee. Others on the committee included Herbert York of Livermore Lab; George Kistiakowsky and Jerome Wiesner, who would later serve as Presidential science advisers; Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge, who would form the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, manager of the first ICBM project; Clark Millikan of Cal Tech—in short, some of the nation’s most brilliant weapons scientists.
On December 12, Frank Collbohm briefed Air Staff officers on the Augenstein report demonstrating the feasibility of the ICBM. Around this same time, the Teapot Committee was meeting in Los Angeles. Sometime between December 17 and 19, Bruno Augenstein briefed the committee, telling its members—with the same charts that Collbohm had used as illustration—that the Atlas missile could have a 1,500-pound warhead and that its accuracy could be as poor as three or five miles and still perform its mission. Von Neumann had heard a similar analysis two months earlier, when Ernie Plesset briefed the committee in Colorado Springs. Plesset had given them the H-bomb briefing that he had developed with Charlie Hitch and Bernard Brodie—which also made the case, though Augenstein did not know about the H-bomb briefing, that the fantastic explosive power of the hydrogen bomb made the question of CEP far less relevant than many believed.