II. Minuteman is Stood Up and the Titan II Too
In October 1962, two years after the first Atlas D went on alert at F. E. Warren, while I was in my last year of college, the Cuban Missile Crisis happened. It really got the attention of me and my classmates. Everyone seemed to think this might be it. That we’d be having an exchange of missiles that carried nuclear warheads.
At Amherst College, we kept going to classes. Why not? What were we supposed to do about anything? I doubt we learned much in the classes we went to.
At the beginning of the Crisis, on the same day that President Kennedy came on the television and told us about the Russian missiles being installed in Cuba, we activated at a base in Montana the first ten of another and much better ICBM our Boeing Company had been working on since 1958. The Minuteman.
Like the Titan and the Atlas F, the Minuteman missiles would be stored in silos underground, but they had three stages, not just one or two, and, here’s the biggest improvement. They used solid fuel, not liquid fuel like the Atlas and the Titan. That meant we could keep them in those silos always already fueled, ready to be launched and on their way in no time. Five minutes, say, maybe less. After the authenticated order came.
The Minuteman ICBMs had “inertial” guidance systems that were self-contained and not controlled by radio signals meaning they couldn’t be interfered with. The re-entry vehicles for the warheads had been improved too. On the way down they could throw off “penetration aids,” chaff and balloons, to confuse the enemy’s radar.
It was helpful to be able to launch an ICBM in five minutes or less. ICBMs, theirs and ours both, would arrive at their intercontinental destinations thirty minutes or so after they were launched. That wasn’t much time to get a retaliation going.
At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I hadn’t known that it would take only thirty minutes for an ICBM to arrive, or if I had, I had forgotten. I did know that the IRBMs now in Cuba would arrive in less time than an ICBM would. I did know that once one of these missiles was launched, it couldn’t be called back, no matter how much you might want to.
By the summer of 1963, we had activated one-hundred fifty Minuteman missiles at Malmstrom AFB in Montana. That summer we activated the 90th Missile Wing at F. E. Warren and began to build facilities for two-hundred Minuteman ICBMs in an area north and east of the base. Part of the missile field would be in Wyoming. Other parts would be in the southwest corner of Nebraska and the northeast part of Colorado. This missile field was going to be a big one, taking in eight-thousand three-hundred square miles, an area more than three times the size of Delaware.
The Union Pacific railroad tracks and Interstate 80 would be going right through the part of the missile field that was in western Nebraska and southeastern Wyoming. If you were driving on I-80 and didn’t know this, you wouldn’t know you were in a missile field.
By the summer of 1964, two hundred Minuteman ICBMs had been activated in that missile field.
The previous summer, down around my hometown of Tucson, as I was packing to go to Oxford to “read English” for two years, a newer model of the Titan missile was activated, the Titan II. Like the Titan I, it was a two-stage liquid-fueled rocket but it was bigger than the Titan I and for it we had developed “storable propellants.” This allowed us to keep the Titan II already fueled up and ready to be fired off from its underground silos.
Eighteen Titan IIs would eventually be installed in a circle of silos around Tucson. And the same again at two other Titan II sites, one in Kansas, one in Arkansas, with a couple of other Titan II ICBMs available at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, if needed. Each of the warheads on those fifty-plus Titan IIs yielded twice as much as all explosives used by all sides in World War II.
With the Minuteman and the Titan II in operation, the Atlas and the Titan I were obsolete. By 1965, the year I finished reading English at Oxford and started law school at New York University, we’d taken all of our Atlas and Titan I ICBMs out of service, out of military service, that is. We were still using some of those older rockets for scientific projects and to launch astronauts into space. We’d used the Atlas rockets in our Mercury program, for example, to get our first astronauts into orbit. We were now using Titan II rockets to send our astronauts up in pairs in our Gemini program. It was a little bit confusing, which rockets were for ICBMs, which for our astronauts, and which for different scientific experiments we were conducting. President Eisenhower had said our civilian and military rocket programs would be kept separate, but it didn’t look like they always were.
I couldn’t keep track. It didn’t matter whether we did or didn’t, did it?
Next: III. Minuteman III, Becoming Rotten with Perfection
John, brings back old memories- I had 4 years of Minuteman duty a Minot AFB . Lonnie