The Challenge of the Missile Age
A Canadian diplomat reports on the launch of an Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
Today’s post draws on the account of a Canadian diplomat who toured Cape Canaveral in 1960 and witnessed the launch of an Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
His original account is long, about 3500 words across nine pages of single-spaced typed text. If you have the time and interest, I highly recommend you skip this post and simply read the original document at Canada Declassified, here.
***
During the Second World War, Jim Nutt flew Bolingbroke maritime patrol aircraft on anti-submarine patrols. After the war, he joined the Department of External Affairs and had a long and accomplished career as a diplomat. In retirement, he chaired the Retired Heads of Mission Association.
In 1960, Nutt was posted to the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. In June of that year he was one of a group of diplomats from NATO embassies in Washington invited to tour Cape Canaveral.
The trip was arranged by the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department. The goal was plainly to build support for American plans to equip NATO with medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs), and especially the Polaris missile.
While on “The Cape” — a 15,000 acre area with over 20,000 employees — Nutt climbed a gantry crane to look down upon a Jupiter missile. His group visited an assembly hangar, and looked inside missile bodies. They explored the block-houses: “monstrous bowl-shaped concrete structure[s] — forty feet thick at the base and scaling down to a four foot thickness at the top.” All designed to withstand a “direct hit” from an out-of-control missile. Nutt and his colleagues were piped aboard the USS Observation Island (a Polaris missile test ship), and then toured the Central Control Building, including the “room in which the progress of various planned launchings is recorded and followed by arrays of IBM machines.”
The highlight of the trip was the launching of an Atlas missile on the first evening the group arrived. I’ve included an excerpt of this part of the memorandum, below.
The Launching of an Atlas Missile:
We arrived at the Cape at approximately 9:15 p.m. at which time it was virtually dark. In the distance we had already seen steadfast search-light beams piercing the darkness. (This is the signal to the local population outside the base area that a launching is imminent.) As we drove toward the Central Control Building we could see in the direction of the launching pads what appeared to be a tower of searchlights; in fact this was the eighty foot 200,000 pound white Atlas missile reflecting the search-light beams directed upon it from the periphery of the pad enclosure.
…
The launching we were to witness was a routine test during which the missile was intended to fly down range five thousand miles. It was the sixtieth odd launching of an Atlas missile.
The lengthy time involved in preparing a launching for test purposes was explained as being desirable to ensure that everything is in order so that the maximum advantage might be had from the test; it was also necessary to ensure that the line of tracking stations running through the West Indies and on down to Ascension Island were ready to play their part. It was explained that if the missile went awry on launching it would be destroyed by the Range Safety Officer. This control was available until the firing of the second stage, approximately four and one-half minutes after launching. Thereafter the missile would be truly ballistic and it would be on its way and beyond the control of the Range Safety Officer. We were assured that our exposed position was safe, about two and one-half miles from the pad.
As the minutes were announced and the number of tests mounted, the excitement also grew among the assemblage. Missile launchings are not yet so common place even at Cape Canaveral that old hands do not pause to watch. (A reception at the Officers' Club at Patrick Air Force Base was interrupted so that those in attendance might witness the launching.) At the one minute mark all chatter ceased; all eyes were intent on the gleaming missile — 50 seconds, 40, 30, 20, 15 and then,"12 and holding"!
Time to breathe! If you were pessimistic this undoubtedly meant you would be waiting all night as many before had done. If your extrasensory perception was operating you knew this was but a short temporary delay. Sure enough in about five seconds came the voice of the “counter-down”, “11 seconds and counting, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 (eyes rooted on the incandescent missile and tightly gripping the handrail) zero" and whoosh!
Great sheets of flame shoot out horizontally from the base of the missile followed momentarily by a roar like a dozen steam locomotives blowing steam at close quarters. The whole countryside is alight with an unnatural copperish glow.
Slowly the Atlas rises — ever so slowly — but also surely, for what seems to be an age but is probably no more than a couple of seconds. Gradually it picks up momentum. The roar and glare are still there.
Seemingly all of a sudden it is shooting up and up like a giant meteorite in reverse, the roar receding as it goes. It is no longer ascending vertically but is beginning to tip in the direction of Ascension Island. It pierces the lower cloud cover leaving an exhaust cloud jet black against the illuminated cloud. Now at fifteen or twenty seconds after launching it is clearly moving at a terrific pace, streaking like a "falling star", the noise no more than that of a single jet plane far off. A second light layer of cloud soon helps to blot out the tiny streaking glow.
Then come the "All's well" sighs.
At four minutes and a half the second stage fires successfully. The missile is now travelling at a rate of about sixteen thousand miles per hour at a censored altitude, later divulged as being about one hundred and sixty-five miles high.
The Range Safety Officer can relax; there is nothing more he can do.
Now it is up to the tracking stations down range to follow the flight. Later will come the post mortem on the basis of which lessons will have been learned for the future.
The Layman’s Memorandum
Saul Rae of the Embassy sent Nutt’s memorandum on to Ottawa, attached to a personal and confidential note to Norman Robertson. Rae noted it was “a layman’s view” and not “of much interest to others than the initiated.”
But in Ottawa the memo was copied, passed around, and distributed. I’ve found a few copies of it in various files. See the marginalia at the top of the covering letter:
For those who study this era, there are many familiar names: A. E. Ritchie, Barton, Tovell, Basil Robinson, and Ross Campbell. Copies of the memorandum were sent to Defence Liaison Division (DL(1)), the High Commission in London, to “our boys in Paris” - that is, the NATO mission, and even to DRB (the Defence Research Board, who were not laymen).
The Challenge
Nutt acknowledged the awe and wonder inspired by the facilities and tests he saw in Florida. But there was also clearly something gnawing at him.
Sure, his sense of human achievement in science and technology was “greatly enhanced.” And yet he could not help but wonder whether these achieves were “bringing us closer to the stage where the machine man has invented may well prove to be his undoing.”
“I could not help but think as I watched the Atlas ICBM lifting itself outward bound into space that man had indeed confronted himself with a challenge. That challenge in essence was not so much the ability to conquer space or the ability to refine the missile for numerous peaceful purposes. The real challenge rather was to ensure that I and my fellow witnesses and the millions of human beings on this earth would never be confronted with ICBM's inward bound.
***
The files above are available at Canada Declassified. Their original archival provenance is RG25-A-3-b, vol 5958, file 50219-AL-2-40, part 1-2, Library and Archives Canada (LAC). The apostrophe in “ICBM’s” is in Nutt’s original, and I left it there.