You Might Want to Know: ICBMs Arriving - I. Atlas Goes on Alert with Titan Close Behind
I. Atlas Goes on Alert with Titan Close Behind
By 1959, the year I graduated from Tucson High School, we had two Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles—the Thor and the Jupiter—on alert and within reach of Moscow. We’d set them up in England, Italy, and Turkey, the countries that would let us. Russia didn’t have any IRBMs anywhere that could reach us.
We weren’t the first to get an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The Russians had had one since 1957, which was also the year they put the first satellite—Sputnik—into orbit. They said they had an ICBM anyway. We believed it. An ICBM could reach us from Russia.
We’d been trying on and off to get our own ICBM working, the Atlas, since right after World War II. Our Convair and later our Ramo-Woolridge Companies just weren’t getting the job done. In 1957, the Pentagon had gotten nervous and signed a contract with the Martin Company to start work on a second ICBM, the Titan.
The one that was ready to go first, it turned out, was the Atlas. The D model. Models A, B, and C hadn’t been up to snuff. In 1959, the year I started college at Amherst, we put the first three Atlas D’s on alert at Vandenberg Air Force Base north of Los Angeles where most of the testing for the Atlas had been done.
The first squadron of Atlases was deployed at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming in September 1960, at the beginning of my sophomore year of college.
The Atlas D was an “Intercontinental Ballistic Missile,” which meant it could fly with its payload to targets that were more than six thousand miles away. How far is that? The distance across the United States from Portland, Maine to San Diego, California is…guess. It’s two-thousand six-hundred miles. Diagonally across the whole United States.
The distance from Cheyenne to Moscow, by air, is five thousand and some miles if you fly over the North Pole. If we flew the Atlas D over the North Pole, which was the plan, the Atlas would be able to reach Moscow and many other cities in Russia easily. Russia and other parts of Asia where there were communists were the “continents” we were thinking about here now, not, say, Africa or South America. For now.
By 1961, only a year after we got that first ICBM squadron up and running at F. E. Warren, we had several other Atlas ICBM bases in operation—one in Nebraska, one in Kansas, one in the state of Washington, with a few more Atlases still available at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the coast north of Los Angeles.
By now, we also had just about gotten that second ICBM, the Titan, ready to go. The Titan was the first ICBM that used a rocket with two stages and the first one that could be stored in a silo underground. We’d be digging out silos for the Titans in Nebraska, Washington state, and California, where we already had some Atlases, and in some new states, Colorado, South Dakota, and Idaho. None at F. E. Warren. You couldn’t put Titans just everywhere. Those silos were really expensive. Quite a bit more expensive than the missiles themselves.
The two stages gave the Titan a longer range than the Atlas D and allowed it to carry twice the payload. But soon we had developed better models of the Atlas, the E and the F. They had a longer range than the Atlas D and could carry twice the payload, and had better guidance too so we could expect them to hit closer to their targets.
Both the Titan and the Atlas could carry a W49 warhead. The W49 was a hundred times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
The Atlas D was stored on the surface lying down in a concrete structure called a “coffin” where it was, of course, vulnerable. We thought the above-ground concrete coffins could withstand being hit with five pounds per square inch of pressure. Five pounds per square inch doesn’t sound like much but it was an amount of blast that we knew would flatten most buildings that weren’t reinforced and cause lots of fatalities. Ten pounds per square inch would flatten pretty much everything on the surface and kill everybody.
For the Atlas E, we sank the coffins into the earth and left only their concrete roofs showing. The coffins that were below ground could withstand twenty-five psi, we hoped.
If we wanted to launch either the Atlas D or E missiles, we would have to open their coffins, lift the the missiles upright and load fuel in them. We couldn’t keep fuel in them because part of the fuel was liquid oxygen that would quickly boil off. The Atlas F would be stored not in a coffin but upright in an underground silo, where, like the Titan, it would be able to withstand even more blast pressure, maybe one hundred pounds per square inch. We still would have to put fuel in it and bring it to the surface before we could launch it.
We installed the new Atlas E’s at F. E. Warren in the Fall of 1961 but didn’t install any Atlas F’s there. For the Atlas F’s we dug and built out new silos in Kansas and Nebraska and in some states that hadn’t yet been given any ICBMs--Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and even in Plattsburgh, NY. The Atlases at Plattsburgh were the only ICBMs we would ever deploy east of the Mississippi River. The West was ICBM country.
F. E. Warren ended up with twenty-four Atlas D’s and E’s spread over an area of sixty square miles outside Cheyenne, lying out there in their coffins.
Next: II. Minuteman is Stood Up and the Titan II Too