Ace in the Hole

U.S. defense planning rests on the assumption that all-out war, if it comes, will begin with a Soviet nuclear attack against U.S. missile and bomber bases. To deter the Russians from launching such an attack, the U.S. needs a tough, reliable, intercontinental ballistic missile that can be mass produced, buried in the ground, and fired within 15 minutes of the instant that enemy rockets first flash onto the radar screens of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System in Alaska and Greenland. It is now convincingly clear that the Air Force has developed just such a missile: the Minuteman.

Last week, seconds after its engines spouted orange flame, a Minuteman rose out of the inferno of its underground "silo" at Cape Canaveral, passed through the preceding smoke ring caused by the shock waves of its blast, and roared out into the South Atlantic on a test run that was considered perfect.

Experimenting with new equipment on the Minuteman, the Air Force can reasonably expect some test failures in weeks to come. But Minuteman's progress to date is so encouraging that final-phase preparations are under way for the moment when it will become an operational part of the U.S. arsenal. Last week airmen and officers at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base were being trained to fire Minutemen. Slogging through knee-deep snow, workmen in Montana were well along on the project of digging 150 silo missile sites that will be scattered like giant gopher holes across 20,000 sq. mi. By late next fall, a full year ahead of the original schedule, the first 50 Minutemen will go operational in Montana. And by 1965, the Air Force will have between 750 and 900 Minutemen on the picket line in Montana, Missouri, North and South Dakota, and other states still to be chosen.

"The real purpose of Minuteman is to get a true numerical superiority in ICBMs," says Brigadier General Samuel Phillips, project boss of the missile and, at 40, the youngest officer of star rank in the three services. ''To achieve that we must keep actual production costs as low as possible, and we must keep operating costs equally low.''

Cheap Bird. Known in the Air Force as the "poor man's missile." the Minuteman is a bird of a different feather from the familiar Titan and Atlas intercontinental missiles. As "first generation" weapons, both the Titan and Atlas burn highly volatile liquid fuels that require a trouble-plagued network of pumps and pipes. Fueling and firing the Titan and Atlas is an intricate business--many experts doubt that they would ever get off the pad with just 15 minutes' warning. In contrast, the Minuteman burns a solid, rubberlike fuel developed by Thiokol Chemical Corp. Once the Minuteman is fueled, it needs little maintenance, can be stored indefinitely and can be fired, from command to blastoff, in just 30 seconds.

Simple, compact and rugged, the Minuteman is 54 ft. tall, weighs 60,000 Ibs., which makes it about half the size of the Titan II. Liquid-fueled missiles are largely crafted by hand, but Boeing, prime contractor for the Minuteman, will treat the weapon much like a production-line item. Says Boeing's Chief Engineer Ernest ("Tex") Boullioun: "It will take us a year to install the first 150 in their silos, nine months for the next 150, six months for the next 150, and after that we expect to put 150 in every three months."

Each Atlas missile requires a five-man operating crew. But a three-man crew, working from a concrete bunker 60 ft. below the surface, can fire up to ten Minutemen. Such savings make the Minuteman the nation's cheapest intercontinental missile by far. At an estimated $3,000,000 per missile (counting costs of installation and ground equipment), the Minuteman costs less than half as much as the Navy's Polaris, a solid-fueled, second-generation missile that can be fired by a submarine from beneath the sea's surface. Originally, the Air Force planned to load Minutemen on specially built railroad cars and send the missiles around the U.S. so that no enemy could zero in on them. But it turned out that the rail-riding Minuteman would increase costs by 60%; and last fortnight, after spending $108 million on the project, the Defense Department canceled the railroad scheme, decided to tuck all Minutemen underground.

Silent Silo. Cushioned in their air-conditioned concrete silos, the Minutemen will be able to withstand all but direct nuclear hits; the Air Force estimates that the U.S.S.R. would have to fire some 20 missiles at a single Minuteman site to have a 90% chance of a kill. Even the commodes in the control center will be mounted on rubber to withstand nuclear shock. A door weighing 45 tons will close off each silo to the sky. If an attack heaps earth and other debris over the door, it can be blasted open.

As the Minuteman waits in its silo, its guidance system will stare fixedly at the North Star, its silent gyroscope will spin ceaselessly. Cranked into its memory drums will be the data to guide the missile to any one of several targets. The guidance system itself cannot be jammed by electronics once it is set in motion.

If the signal ever comes, each Minuteman will blast out of its silo and, carrying a hydrogen warhead with over 50 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb, set out for a target up to 6,300 miles away. That prospect should make any potential aggressor think twice before launching an attack against the U.S.

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