President Truman announced the end of the war in the Pacific on the evening of August 14, 1945. The celebrations were well earned, exuberant, and joyous—but not for all. Over 400,000 American soldiers were dead, almost 700,000 wounded. Fifty million military and civilians were killed worldwide in World War II, 6 million in the Holocaust alone.¹

For those who made it through, the “what now?” question loomed. I did not have a job to return to. Had I gone to Stanford to teach when I finished my doctorate at Cal Tech some four years earlier, I might have worked into a teaching and research job. I had decided strongly against it, to get started on war-related science and technology. Now I could build on a fine physics education and experience and expertise in new technologies gained at a very rapid clip indeed. The London Mission of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) acquainted me with many of the leaders in science and technology. Now was the time to think about where I wanted to live, how I wanted to live, what kinds of institutions I wanted to tie into, and what kind of work I wanted to do at those institutions. Not least, I was almost 29 years old and single, and I wanted to change that.

Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 17, 1945, one month before the war in Europe ended and three months before nuclear weapons were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war in the Pacific. Truman met with Stalin in July and with Churchill from July 17 to August 2 in Potsdam, just outside Berlin. He came armed with the successful test of the new weapon on July 16 at Alamogordo, New Mexico, told Stalin about it, and got seeming indifference in return.² The Soviets of course knew about the program from their spies.

Any hope that the American nuclear monopoly would temper Soviet behavior was short lived. The Soviets tightened their control of Eastern Europe—in Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. They turned North Korea into a satellite, with bloody consequences five years later. They pressured Turkey, Greece, Iran, and other countries for greater influence.³ In early 1946 a young diplomat in our Moscow embassy, George Kennan, sent his famous “Long Telegram,” which launched the policy of containing the Soviets that was to be the heart of U.S. defense policy for 50 years. And two weeks after Kennan’s message, Winston Churchill made the Cold War official. In a speech on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, with President Truman in attendance, he declared:

We possessed nuclear weapons, but the “military weakness” was nevertheless telling. The inevitable decline in military budgets when a war ends was intensified by Truman’s absolute determination to cut the total federal budget. Between 1943 and 1945, between my departure for London and my return to the United States, the federal research and development (R&D) budget grew almost sixfold, from $280 million to $1.59 billion.⁴ That was brutally reversed, beginning in 1946, as Truman drove hard for an austerity budget. Defense spending hit a double black diamond slope, sliding from $81.5 billion in 1945 to $44.7 billion in 1946 to $13.1 billion in 1947. The Army Air Force in 1946 had 28 missile

programs; half of these were cancelled in 1947 while others continued as component development programs.⁵

This paradox of defense budgets coming down with the onset of the Cold War was seasoned by the uncertain state of our military science and technologies at the end of the war. Yes, we possessed the Bomb, and we shared global leadership in radar with the British, but we couldn’t be as sure about our position in jet engines and in missiles and rockets. The first turbojet engines had been tested in Britain and Germany in the late 1930s. A German turbojet fighter flew successfully in August 1939, a few days before the invasion of Poland. In 1941 the British flew a jet.⁶ By the summer of 1944, both Britain and Germany had turbojet fighters in action.⁷ The first American development, a Navy project at Westinghouse, passed its first 100-hour test in July 1943.

The 1920s were a time for rocketry, when technological enthusiasts—Hermann Oberth in Germany, Robert Goddard in the United States, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in the Soviet Union—all published on rockets and their potential for space travel. There was little governmental interest, except for the Soviet Union, where a disciple of Tsiolkovsky got a short audience with a receptive Lenin.⁸ Robert Goddard launched liquid-fueled rockets in 1926, but for various reasons, including Goddard’s secretive nature, the work at the time gained little attention.

In December 1944 the nascent Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) fired a missile at a California test range. It was 92 inches long and had a range of 11 miles.⁹ The work done by JPL and by General Electric, Western Electric, and Bell Laboratories toward the end of the war proved a good base for postwar missile development in the United States.

And not least, the work done through the OSRD set the pattern for postwar science in the United States: federally financed research done privately—that the nation maximizes its gain from research investments by funding but not directing the best work in universities by professors and their students. Vannevar Bush’s great achievement was having the

military see that it needed academic science to win the war, a recognition that was seconded by acceptance that the command and control style of the military would not work with academic science. Rather, Bush somehow persuaded the military that what Merle Tuve called the “democratic principle” was of the essence in successfully harnessing the very best academic science to war needs. The principle according to Tuve meant:

Some donkey! Some stampede! The Germans in contrast “made almost every conceivable blunder.”¹¹ Convinced that they would win the war quickly, they didn’t organize for wartime research, excluded their academic scientists, and gave the military direct control over research and development.

Bush saw to it that the scientists themselves figured out how to do the work to get to a goal and he created the instruments to do that in the form of flexible cost-basis contracts, highly decentralized research, and enormous variation in the types of agreements and research operations put in place, from a university simply providing space and management to that of the Rad Lab, where an institution provided space and management and recruited the scientific personnel. Bush also split procurement from research, telling a congressional committee that “new developments are upsetting to procurement standards and procurement schedules. . . . Research, however, is the exploration of the unknown. It is speculative, uncertain. It cannot be standardized.” Or as a historian of the OSRD put it: “A procurement unit that is also responsible for research tends to think all its geese are swans.”¹²

Yes, the V weapons the Germans fired at London, other English cities, and Antwerp were primitive. But they were also pretty destructive. And now there was portentous technological convergence: the atomic bomb that could make a V-2-type weapon thousands of times more destructive wedded to aeronautical advances in high-speed bombers and fighters and greatly improved rockets that might even gain intercontinental range. Soon the notion and then the reality would emerge that intercontinental guided missiles and nuclear weapons were to be the dominant technology of the Cold War.

That was the setting when on my return to the United States Vannevar Bush asked me to stay on the payroll on assignment to the Committee on Guided Missiles of the Joint Research and Development Board of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). That’s a mouthful for an organization, but it was the focal point for determining the development of guided missiles and their military applications after the war. It was created in May 1942¹³ to set up a direct civilian link to military planning of the war at the highest levels, a crisp expression of Bush’s blunt assertion that “scientists should sit with the heads of the Army and Navy in planning the overall strategy of the war.”¹⁴ Happily, it was right up my alley for I already had so much experience with the German, British, and American guided-missile programs of World War II.

It was very stimulating to be in Washington working with people in these emergent and growing fields. Dave Langmuir, my senior colleague on our two-man radar liaison group in London from 1943 to 1945, was also on the staff of the guided-missile panel. And there were many others, both new acquaintances and those I’d worked with at the Rad Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or in Europe.

But in thinking about where to work, it wasn’t going to be for the OSRD.¹⁵ It was going out of business. Bush insisted on it, to the furious resistance of the military, of Roosevelt’s and then Truman’s budget director, of Lee Dubridge, the director of the Rad Lab through the war, and to Bush’s cost in political power.¹⁶ Why was Bush so insistent on closing down the OSRD? Partly, he may have thought that, without the exigent conditions of a war, the organization, which Bush ran with an iron hand, was not sustainable, especially as its best scientists and technologists

returned to their regular jobs in universities and industry. Another speculation is that Bush was pushing the shutdown to force the military, now passionate in its faith in civilian science, to figure out how military research should be done after the war. Whether or not that’s true, that’s what happened: for example, the Navy created the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force created its Scientific Advisory Board.¹⁷

In August 1945 the Committee on Guided Missiles of the JCS Joint Research and Development Board was trying to decipher its own role. There was guided-missile work in all the services. The service rivalries were intense, between the Navy and the Army but also within the Army— between the Army Air Force (AAF) and the rest of the Army, the Army Services Forces (ASF). The Army Air Force regarded missiles as an extension of aircraft technology and therefore within its portfolio, while the Army Services Forces saw missiles as an extension of its artillery. That issue got a solomonic solution, by giving the AAF air-to-surface missiles and the ASF missiles launched from the ground without any aerodynamic lift.¹⁸ All this came to a head in the National Security Act of 1947, which put the services under a National Military Establishment, what became the Department of Defense, established the post of secretary of defense, and in September 1947 established the AAF as a separate service, the U.S. Air Force.

All that was to come. Van Bush argued in 1945 that it was important even before the future fit of nuclear weapons became clear to get started on missile development work, both in the laboratories and on the test ranges. That led to a staff paper for the guided-missile panel that made two points: (1) mesh very closely developments in nuclear weaponry and guided missiles and (2) establish a strong organization with the proper stature and talent to both coordinate and control guided-missile budgets. We also urged that the panel’s report should get to the president before the whole issue of development of a coherent guided-missile program got into the hands of Congress and its committees.

At the end of August 1945, Bradley Dewey, chair of the Guided Missile Committee, asked Dave Langmuir and me to examine issues for the panel to deal with, this in the context of an uncertain future for the panel and indeed the Joint New Weapons Committee. Bush, for one, was skeptical about whether the panel, like the OSRD, had much

of a future in peacetime, observing that “in time of war almost any organization will work because in time of war men will agree; that is what happened. In times of peace, it is a very different thing.”¹⁹ Yet there was certainly no lack of policy issues for the panel, or whatever came after it, for the postwar missile program. For example, the panel was supposed to establish the immediate weapons needs of the three services and where they should emphasize long-term research and development; set out how much of the military research and development budget should be for guided missiles; figure out the technological and institutional means for marrying nuclear weapons and guided missiles; and, not least, examine countermeasures to guided missiles. Tall order.

Dave and I were asked to get more definitive information by the end of August and to report to Dewey before the end of September when he was to meet with Bush. We got busy, arranging meetings and trips. We talked with Theodore von Kármán, then finishing up a report for the Air Force, Toward New Horizons, setting out the technological future for the Air Force. A central recommendation was that over the next decade the Air Force vigorously develop new technologies, including long-range guided missiles, or what the Air Force, which then didn’t much like the missiles title, called “pilotless bombers.”²⁰

We did as thorough a canvass as we could of missile programs at the time. That was no small job. The Army Air Force alone had 11 surface-to-air missile programs going. At the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) of Johns Hopkins University, we met up again with Merle Tuve, who was creating for the Navy a very substantial surface-to-air guided-missile program, Project Bumblebee. We also visited General Electric, working on a surface-to-surface guided missile for the Naval Bureau of Ordnance. There I met Simon Ramo, who had gotten his Cal Tech doctorate just ahead of me and who later became the “R” in TRW. Many of the military officers Dave and I talked with were very well informed about the science and technology underlying the missile programs, and while each understandably defended his service’s interests, each could also be quite statesman-like in his opinions. We visited the JPL, which had been working for sometime on surface-to-surface missiles and which was established by von Kármán as a unit of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Cal Tech in Pasadena.

In 1945 JPL was a fairly small place, with about 300 people, in the Arroyo Seco, a dry canyon wash north of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. It was there that von Kármán’s graduate students fired their first rocket in October 1936.²¹ JPL was moving forward strongly in rocketry. H. S. Tsien, who had been with the Von Kármán mission to Germany, which I accompanied, and who like me was astonished by the enormous German Air Force research establishment at Volkenrode, talked to us on the metallurgical problems of handling extremely high temperatures in rocket combustion chambers and nozzles, the supersonic²² aerodynamics of ramjet ²³ motors, and of missile fuselages and control surfaces. A supersonic wind tunnel was being planned. We also stopped at the Naval Ordnance Test Station in Inyokern, California, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, not too far from Mount Whitney in the High Sierras, where I had done my Ph.D. thesis on cosmic rays. There I had a reunion with Bill McLean, a fellow graduate student at Cal Tech. Bill was emerging as one of the finest guided-missile designers, his great triumph being the Sidewinder, an air-to-air missile with a pioneering heat-seeking homing device, first fired successfully in September 1953.²⁴ We also visited several companies, such as Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. It became evident that the aeronautical industry, heavily concentrated on the West Coast, was easily and quickly moving into the guided-missile business. Dave’s later career would be centered there, and mine would take me there often. We left the coast for Cleveland and the Lewis Laboratories of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.²⁵ This laboratory concentrated heavily on research and development on propulsion and was very experienced in rocketry, turbojets, and ramjets and in developing test facilities such as wind tunnels. It had several supersonic tunnels under design or construction, for testing air-breathing engines and liquid-fuel rockets.

In our travels Dave Langmuir and I had many talks about our own futures, recognizing that our employment at the JCS guided-missile subcommittee was transitional. I thought that my most saleable item for other employment was my knowledge of the total guided-missile program from its technology to its organization, gathered from the British,

the Germans, and now the JCS guided-missile subcommittee. Not long after I returned from the West Coast trip, I was told Dr. Bush wanted to see me. He treated me to a long conversation in which he outlined some of his own plans, which included a strong role in the management of military research and development, including guided missiles. He asked me to join him in this effort as one of his assistants and made a pretty strong case for it. I was overwhelmed by the offer but asked if I could think about it for a couple of days. At the second meeting I said: “Dr. Bush, your offer is the greatest honor I have ever received and I would have liked to take it, but I really want to get on the faculty of a research university and spend my life as a professor.” His face broke into a broad grin and he said: “Well, that’s a straight statement and I certainly will honor it. Let’s see if I can help.” The next morning Julius “Jay” Stratton called me. He was a professor of physics at MIT and the newly appointed head of the Research Laboratory for Electronics (RLE), a phoenix-like rebirth in 1946 of some of the elements of the Rad Lab but with characteristics that would better fit into a research laboratory. Today it is MIT’s oldest interdisciplinary research laboratory. Stratton was RLE head in its start-up years from 1946 until 1949 when he became provost of MIT and later its president.

Jay Stratton asked me to become executive officer of a new guided-missile program that MIT was negotiating with the Navy. The Navy Bureau of Ordnance wanted at least two major guided-missile contractors on the East Coast. One was already in place, Project Bumblebee at the Applied Physics Laboratory; APL had arrangements with some 20 subcontractors in industry, academia, and federal laboratories.²⁶ MIT was to fit into the Ordnance Bureau programs to the tune of about one-quarter of the financing. The Navy was very firm that MIT and APL shouldn’t compete for the same contractors and that we needed to coordinate with Army missile programs at Cal Tech; Project Hermes at General Electric, developing a series of missiles starting with V-2 technology; and Bell Laboratories, developing the Nike, a surface-to-air missile.

I leaped at the chance, mostly so I could reenter the academic world and get closer to becoming a real professor. I was to report December 1, 1945, and spent the intervening three months with Dave Langmuir and other colleagues writing a comprehensive review of U.S. guided-missile

programs based on our visits and interviews. Bradley Dewey had his meeting with Vannevar Bush, who used the information in constructing a picture of the rapidly changing military research and development effort. Those three months were the first time since January 1943 that I could actually relax, have free weekends, attend the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia as the guest of our military colleagues on the guided-missiles staff, and even take a vacation in New England’s White Mountains.

In December I began two decades of the happiest, most productive, most rewarding part of my life. The most important reason for that was that I finally put down roots and established a strong and lasting family life. From the summer of 1934 when I left for Colgate University, the Depression, the deaths of my parents and grandparents, my doctoral studies, and the war had torn up my life. I had lived at Colgate, summered twice in Detroit and once back in Corning, then on to Cal Tech for three years, to MIT’s Rad Lab for a little over a year, and then three years in London and Washington in many apartments and hotels. The latter 12 years of my 29 were without a home—exciting and enjoyable but nomadic. All my possessions were in a steamer trunk and a couple of large suitcases. I had few possessions, except for a few thousand dollars I had saved. No debt, no property, no house, no land, no car, no wife.

I resisted temptations to marry, although I had dated girls from Corning to California, from Boston to Washington to London, and very much enjoyed my social life. That was about to change.

One of my more fortunate acquaintances was Bradley Dewey, chair of the guided-missile subcommittee David Langmuir and I had worked on. The Deweys had four children, none then married, and they had a tradition of parties for the friends of their children. In December, shortly after I arrived in Cambridge, I was invited to a white-tie dinner at the Deweys, to precede one of the popular waltz evenings at the Copley Plaza Hotel. Not long after I arrived I wandered over to talk to Mr. Dewey who was sitting with a very attractive young woman, dark haired, wearing a blue gown to match her blue eyes. Mr. Dewey introduced us, and I immediately fell in love. We didn’t get a chance to talk or dance that evening,

but I made inquiries afterwards. She was Adelaide Louise Risley Floyd, born in Cambridge, nicknamed Bunny. She had married a Bostonian, Cleaveland Floyd, a Harvard graduate, shortly after he joined the Army Air Force at the beginning of the war. Captain Floyd was killed when the airplane he was piloting crashed over the Himalayan “Hump” from India to Burma to China. After his death she entered Simmons College for a graduate degree in medical social work, her undergraduate work having been at Smith College.

But I soon learned there were at least three other suitors. I worried a lot, especially on a couple of extended trips when I thought of her all the time. My courting of Bunny continued apace in early 1946. We skied in New Hampshire, went to Boston Symphony concerts with Serge Koussevitsky conducting, and spent the Easter weekend in 1946 at the Dewey vacation home on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire. We talked seriously on the drive home, and I asked her to marry me. She hesitated, but the answer was yes! I didn’t crash the car but stopped and kissed her. I went home in a fog, and it was only when I got an early call from her the next morning in which she said “darling” that matters became clear and bright. We were married on June 29, 1946, at the Episcopal church in Newton Center. We honeymooned in Canada and soon moved into Bunny’s apartment on Beacon Hill. When we learned that Bunny was expecting our first child in August 1947, we looked for larger quarters and established a home in Belmont, not far from Cambridge. It was there where all four of our children were born and started school and Sunday school. And it was there that we established lifelong friendships.

With all these wonderful changes in my life, I was also embarking on my MIT career. One of the first things I did was to establish a strong link between Project Bumblebee at the Applied Physics Laboratory and our Project Meteor. Both were navy projects, although Bumblebee was a surface-to-air program and ours was air-to-air. Next we recruited MIT faculty. We had a real enticement: equipment, supplies, and the salaries of research assistants—preferably graduate students for any proposing faculty member whose project fitted the needs of Project Meteor—would be paid for. We got immediate and excellent returns because graduate education required both course work and a research project, and graduate enrollments were growing in all departments. And MIT was in the

catbird seat in electronics because many of its Rad Lab members either came from the MIT faculty or joined it immediately after the war. Lan Jen Chu from the Research Laboratory for Electronics soon proposed an ingenious radar guidance component. Albert Hall from electrical engineering was developing a large platform for marrying guidance and control apparatus with the simulated dynamics of a missile in flight. Hoyt Hottel and Glenn Williams from chemical engineering worked on combustion for air-breathing ramjets and rockets. Eddie Taylor from aeronautical engineering and head of the Gas Turbine Laboratory was constructing a wind tunnel.

The new programs weren’t universally loved. A combustion facility is much like a stripped-down jet engine. It burns a lot of fuel, has awfully hot gases roaring out the end, and is very loud. It turned out that the combustion facility set up by Hottel and Williams created a stir in the neighborhood, particularly with the physics department. The combustion facility was across Albany Street from the main MIT campus, where there were other MIT facilities, including an accelerator used by Professor Robley Evans to accelerate nuclear particles to extremely high energy. Robley Evans told the top brass at MIT that, if they didn’t do something about the combustion facility noise, he would point the beam of his accelerator at it. We cut the noise.

MIT’s aeronautical engineering department was strong in the subsonic range, below the speed of sound. Not so in the transonic and supersonic ranges emerging for both aircraft and missiles. The MIT top brass tried to lure Theodore von Kármán. Failing that, we did recruit as a full professor his colleague, H. S. Tsien, who as a graduate student and participant in the missile program at the JPL, had marched hand in hand with von Kármán into the transonic and supersonic era. Some of his best papers were on the supersonic aerodynamics of cones, cylinders, and flat plates, all key elements of supersonic craft. In that hyperactive era, a university could not claim first rank without high-speed wind tunnels for aerodynamic research and design testing. Using Project Meteor’s needs and pulling out all stops, MIT obtained Navy support for a super-

sonic wind tunnel. Designed by John Markham, head of MIT’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, it was started in 1947 and finished in 1949. It was operated very successfully in the Mach 2 to 4 ranges²⁷ and proved a valuable instrument not only for Project Meteor but also for many other programs around the country.

We needed test vehicles to try out our components, given that, as von Kármán put it, “supersonics is one branch of aviation where theory and speculation preceded practice.”²⁸ With Navy urging, we contracted with the United Aircraft Corporation, more particularly its Pratt and Whitney Engine Company, then converting from piston to jet engines. For rocket development we worked with the Bell Aircraft Company in Niagara Falls. We were hassled incessantly by any number of military officers and civilian officials checking up on this or that. They were in part reflecting the intense jockeying by the services facing an emergent Department of Defense, declining budgets, and uncertain roles in missile warfare. And the new Research and Development Board, under Vannevar Bush, was taking a hard look at the missile programs of all the services. At each budget cycle the Navy asked for new programs, new write-ups, new cost estimates, and new schedules.

By the end of 1946 we were doing pretty well. I even progressed toward my real goal of becoming an MIT professor. I was made assistant professor of aeronautical engineering in spring 1946, went to departmental meetings and the like, was asked to teach an advanced course on gas kinetics for mechanical engineering students, and lectured on jet propulsion. Still, for most of my first two years at MIT, I had my nose to the Project Meteor grindstone. I did a lot of traveling as a consequence. Bunny got used to it. And I worked hard to minimize time away from home, especially weekends. That started a pattern of business travel that lasted my entire life, of being home on the weekend and multitasking, so I could take care of several tasks on one trip.

In 1947 I got a chance to repay Vannevar Bush for the help he gave me starting my career, although I’m sure he would not have looked at it that way. I was asked to join an ad hoc study of the current status of all the guided-missile programs and to predict if and when they might become operational.²⁹ Our group of “planning consultants” reported to the Research and Development Board, an agency that, like the National

Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, was created by the National Security Act of 1947.

To this point in my life I had viewed Vannevar Bush through the rosiest of rosy glasses. And why not! He had assigned me to the London Mission of OSRD for radar liaison; he had increased my portfolio to include guided-missiles technologies; he had temporarily assigned me to the staff of the JCS guided-missiles panel; and he had secured me a job on the MIT faculty. Working easily with President Roosevelt, he had brilliantly organized and led civilian science, particularly from academe, in World War II. His report, Science, the Endless Frontier, had secured the principle of government support of basic research. For all these contributions, Vannevar Bush is revered. With the end of the war new pressures on the organization of government-supported research emerged. Many leading scientists had thrived under his wartime arrangements, although many thought them autocratic, almost dictatorial, and they now wanted more influence. Bush wanted our committee to look at several interrelated questions. First were the technical feasibilities of all the different types of guided missiles : air-to-air and surface-to-air antiaircraft missiles; rocket-propelled, surface-to-surface bombardment missiles, long-range artillery in effect; pilotless aircraft, an extension of manned bombers; and longer-range intercontinental missiles being talked about at the time. For each type and for each contractor, Bush wanted to know the feasibility and the problems. He even asked us to estimate when each missile type would be operational.

We finished our report in about nine months. It said this: “It seems highly unlikely that it will be possible before the following dates to make detailed and reliable predictions of the extent to which high-speed (supersonic) guided missiles will meet the military characteristics that have been established for them: Air-to-Air, 1952; Surface-to-Air, 1950; Air-to-Surface, 1951; Surface-to-Surface, range up to 1000 miles, 1952, range greater than 1000 miles, 1952–1954.” The report went on to estimate that operational uses would not be possible in less than three to four years beyond those dates. That meant the operational date for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) would be about 1960, a date we hit on the nose. We thought air-to-air missiles would be operational ahead of surface-to-air missiles, both in the early 1950s. But the order

was reversed, air-to-air missiles having proven to be more difficult than we thought, given added problems of smaller size, lighter weight, and harder targeting. The problems were solved spectacularly by the Sidewinder. We set the mid-1950s for operational cruise missiles— that is, air-breathing subsonic weapons, with a lineage back to the V-1s. The big problem was their guidance, with three options: celestial navigation, radar map matching, or inertial guidance, an idea we picked up from the Germans. Inertial guidance would win out, but we didn’t know that in 1948. And the Air Force was demanding in its targeting, requiring that a cruise missile land within 5,000 feet of its target.³⁰ The comparable accuracy for the V-1 was 4 miles.

While I think we did something quite useful for the Research and Development Board—the operational dates we gave for the guided-missile programs and their pros and cons were used in planning further work—the reality was chaotic. “Complex and confusing,” we said. On the other hand, some of the briefings and discussions were eye opening. For example, one of my Cal Tech teachers, Fritz Zwicky, presented his proposal to eject some material into the earth’s orbit or possibly to escape the earth. His proposal was to mount a shaped charge on the nose of a rocket fired vertically and to fire the charge at the peak of the trajectory. The very high speed of the ejected material would add enough energy for it to escape. Another example was the discussion of possible uses of orbital vehicles, many of which came to pass within a few years. Still another example was the briefing on rocket-propelled manned aircraft to break the sound barrier and go supersonic. This material would provide enrichment to a rocket course I was soon to assume responsibility for. Once again, government studies strengthened my subject bank for teaching.

However, Truman’s severe postwar budget cuts were amplified for the missile programs, as they matured from relatively inexpensive research to much more costly development. That, together with the budget crunch, forced some very sharp decisions. We pointed out in our report that, of the 16 missile contracts of the Army Air Force, only one was more than a year old and that as these went into development their costs would rise substantially, to not less than $3 million to $5 million

annually. With a budget then of $20 million, only five projects could be supported.³¹

And the Research and Development Board was failing. For Bush “the RDB post was like a slow-motion automobile wreck. Bush saw the wreck coming but was powerless to stop it.”³² The root problem was that he was determined to coordinate the research programs of military services that were fighting bitterly with each other for dwindling dollars. And to Bush “coordinate” also meant the right to approve budgets. That was denied. He got approval to attend all JCS meetings dealing with the interests of the Research and Development Board. He was never asked.³³ And Bush—ironically, for someone who chaired the Research and Development Board from 1946 to October 1948, when he resigned—ridiculed the notion of long-range ballistic missiles and military satellites, doing so in words and style that made plain his contempt for many of his military colleagues:

I was never sure whether Bush’s dismissal of the notion of intercontinental missiles was an emotional one, denying that warfare with intercontinental missiles tipped with nuclear weapons was possible. He was normally bullish on the future of technologies. I think he was growing tired of the Research and Development Board job. Perhaps, he was also sharing some of the guilt that affected the lives and judgments of many involved in making the bomb. And his contempt for the military’s sophistication in science was quickly becoming dated. He did not recognize changes in the services, particularly in the younger officers who

were rapidly taking over from some of Bush’s enemies, such as Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations during World War II. Many of these younger officers had gotten or were getting advanced degrees in the sciences and engineering, often from Bush’s own Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT.

To be fair, the Air Force at the time wasn’t a big fan of ICBMs either, preferring to put its chips on bombers.³⁵ That was understandable. In their lifetime its current leaders saw the biplane turn into huge jet bombers, as strategic bombing became a major part of World War II. The linchpin of the argument for creating a separate Air Force was that no missile in the works could carry the very heavy and large nuclear weapons then available and that no missile could approach the accuracy of bombers. It wasn’t until 1953 that the Air Force became a believer in ICBMs, for several reasons: the Soviets had an ICBM program going, the hydrogen bomb was a reality, the much greater destructive power of a missile was recognized, and inertial guidance, an old technology,³⁶ was looking more promising for long-range missile guidance.

The year 1947 was very busy for me. I was occupied with the intense work for the Research and Development Board, some beginning work for the new Air Force Scientific Advisory Board,³⁷ and Project Meteor, the latter spiced by pressures to get a missile designed, built, and flying. But I was frustrated. I had not gotten any closer to becoming a genuine university professor, doing research, personally working with undergraduate and graduate students, teaching, and participating in university life instead of in a special project. I went to see Jay Stratton and told him that I wanted to change, even though I recognized that Project Meteor was becoming more intense with respect to organizing the contractors. Jay asked me if I knew “the difficulties of being a real professor. You’ll have to find support for graduate students, for their and your own research, never mind teaching and supervising theses.” I replied: “That’s exactly what I’m interested in doing. I don’t think I can become a real professor until I do it.” Jay then said and I realized later that this was great wisdom: “Well, you’ve got to recognize that you’ve not really done this kind of research and academic work since you left graduate school in 1941. And you’ve made a good name for yourself in a field where experts respect you. You’ll now have to prove that you can do a professorial job.”

I still wanted to do it. A successor for the Project Meteor executive directorship was appointed, Ed Schneider, a former Rad Lab staff member. I agreed to part-time consulting, especially to use my outside connections. Later Ed returned to industry, and Bob Seamans took over as the program was readying its first test vehicle firings, but the tightening missile budget closed the project down except for remaining component work.

Early in 1948 I was free to move on to my new life as a professor. I moved out of Temporary Building 20³⁸ to the Department of Aeronautical Engineering in the Daniel Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory. And I was appointed chair of the Athletic Board of the faculty, which meant modest overseeing of MIT’s athletic activities. MIT was continuing to build a fine intramural athletic program, was competitive in most extramural sports except football, and excelled in some sports such as crew. There was a boathouse right in front of MIT and the beautiful Charles River to row in the fall and spring. There were no athletic scholarships. There was a joke that I loved to tell: that MIT was the only university in the country that could afford to have the director of athletics and the director of admissions next door to one another.

In early February 1948, Walt Whitman, head of the chemical engineering department, asked to see me. I knew that when a department head asks to come see you instead of vice versa, it probably means he’s going to ask you to do something. It did. MIT had been approached by the Atomic Energy Commission³⁹ (AEC) to look at the feasibility of nuclear-powered aircraft, particularly its nuclear reactor, being pursued under major contracts from the Air Force. Although I was quite interested in learning about another new technology, I was somewhat dismayed by the timing of the task. I asked if I could think about it. I talked with James Killian, soon to be MIT’s president, and Jerome Hunsaker, my department head, and both encouraged me to join in.⁴⁰ The highly classified project was going to be done mainly in the summer of 1948, but some preparatory work had to be done. The study was to be housed in a windowless bunker, an abandoned antiaircraft gun site, on a hill over-

looking the town of Lexington, hence the name for our task, Project Lexington. I helped Walt Whitman organize it, choose its members,⁴¹ arrange clearances, and visit the AEC’s major laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I remember my astonishment at the size of the diffusion pumps for separating uranium isotopes.

As with missiles, we were operating in a chaotic time, technically and politically. The AEC and the Air Force saw the project from different, often-conflicting perspectives and priorities. As the Cold War intensified, the Air Force saw a critical need for long-range bombers, given the uncertainty and risks of basing nuclear weapons on foreign ground. The AEC was intent on developing peacetime uses for atomic power, especially the generation of electricity, but was also given control of the design and production of nuclear weapons. The Air Force launched its feasibility study on Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) in May 1946 with a budget of $1.3 million that grew to $8.3 million in 1951.⁴² At first only Air Force funds were used, but by 1949 the AEC was financially involved.⁴³ The Air Force wanted to develop nuclear-powered aircraft quickly and chose “concurrency” as the way to get there. That meant tackling all parts of a weapons system at the same time, hoping for a quicker result. Many felt that was a more costly approach; the response was that development would be done more quickly and one could get on to other things. The AEC felt strongly that reactor development had to come first; no new reactors for producing fissionable uranium and plutonium had been built since the Manhattan Project.

The technical problems were formidable. The idea behind the plane was simple enough; air for jet propulsion was heated not by chemical burning—gasoline or kerosene with air—but by a nuclear reaction. The heat from a nuclear reactor can heat the air directly, direct cycle, or through a heat transfer agent, such as liquid sodium, an indirect cycle. Direct cycle was the route taken for the nuclear-powered airplane. The problem was that at the time of our study, 1948, the materials to do this in a reactor flying in a manned airplane weren’t available—that is, materials that “would (1) stand up to the high-intensity nuclear radiation which necessarily existed throughout the interior of the reactor, (2) resist corrosion by the very hot air which passed through the reactor at great speed, and (3) not leak any of the highly radioactive fission products

into the exhaust airstream.”⁴⁴ Shielding was also a formidable issue. It had to be heavy enough to protect the crew but light enough to fly. And the whole thing had to be porous enough to be air cooled without radiation leakage.

And on the airplane side of things, we were moving from the well-known regime of subsonic flight to transonic flight, where the control issues were much less well known. We talked a great deal about the sound barrier. A few rocket planes had penetrated it so fast that control problems were ignored. And rockets, of course, were one-way trips. We wanted the nuclear-powered airplane to come back. Yes, a nuclear-powered airplane would fly for a very, very long time for a limitless range. How to keep it together that long was the problem. Turbojet technology was in its infancy; it was a long time before we could get to 1,000 hours, then 10,000, a rough equivalent of a year. Today’s jet engines are very reliable and last as long as the airplane flies.

We had our first major meeting with the NEPA leadership in May 1948. Air Force representatives reminded us how important the nuclear-powered airplane was to them. At the time the Air Force was developing aerial refueling and setting up bases around the world for planes equipped with nuclear weapons. And, very tentatively, the Air Force was beginning to explore long-range ballistic missiles. A few days later we met with AEC representatives, including Robert Bacher, a physicist, head of one of the Manhattan Project divisions at Los Alamos and an AEC commissioner; Robert Oppenheimer, chairman of the AEC General Advisory Committee; and several others. Bob Bacher gave a general review of NEPA but pointed out that it was not well tied to the other problems the AEC had a primary interest in. And he noted differing opinions in the commission on the feasibility of a nuclear-powered airplane and that the short timescale the Air Force talked about was not feasible. Furthermore, he said that attempts to coordinate between AEC and NEPA had not been particularly successful, which was why Project Lexington was set up. Oppenheimer chimed in by saying that he couldn’t get a straight “no” when he asked if nuclear propulsion was worthwhile. Oppy enlarged on his question by pointing out that the style of attack on the problem hadn’t yet developed. Between 1942 and 1945, 10 reactors were built and none in the three years since. There were no laboratories that really understood

the art of reactor development; reactor talent was much too spread out and one had to ask whether it was worth investing limited manpower in the nuclear-powered airplane.

Jerrold Zacharias asked what the difference was between the nuclear-powered airplane and the nuclear submarine. Oppy jumped on that. He said the sub could use a much more conventional pile than the plane and that both the requirements and the feasibility for the sub are much clearer. Bacher added that the sub had more options for a reactor type, while the plane had to use a gas-cooled reactor.

We plowed on, punctuating our technical discussions with meetings with other high-level groups. We met with Franklin Collbohm, the boss of RAND,⁴⁵ a think tank set up by the Air Force, who widened our understanding of alternative ways of delivering payloads at long distances. RAND thought that in the long run rockets were going to have great advantages over turbojets, ramjets, or anything else. They were already exploring the “skip” principle to quadruple a rocket’s range. A winged rocket, like a stone skipping across water, would rise in a normal trajectory, descend, then skip again, doing that several times before descending to the earth. The first skip generated too much heat, but the temperatures were OK if the rocket didn’t skip but glided. Of course, these alternatives weren’t a direct part of the charge to Project Lexington, except to show another technique for delivering long-range payloads besides nuclear propulsion or using normal aircraft supported by aerial refueling and bases at the Soviet perimeter. It was something I would return to later in life.

We encountered severe skepticism on nuclear propulsion. Chauncey Starr of North American Aviation made it clear that we wouldn’t be able to solve the problem any better than anyone else who had been studying it—namely, North American and RAND. We were after all depending on the same expertise. And Captain Hyman Rickover, leading the Navy’s development of nuclear submarines, visited us in Lexington. I vividly remember sitting at lunch on a pleasant day in front of our bunker in the woods with a few of our people and Captain Rickover. He pointed out that the Bureau of Ships in which his program was lodged was neutral on nuclear-powered aircraft. He added that the Bureau of Aeronautics officially accepted the nuclear aircraft project, would follow its development,

but would not put any money into it. Then he cut loose and told us in forceful language that he thought it was nonsense. Later, he did help us probe technical issues, such as closed versus open cycles and shielding, noting that while the AEC had the facilities to probe these issues, it didn’t have the motivation. He also asked for help from NEPA in deciding what coolant to use for the nuclear submarine—water, helium, or liquid metal. It was clear to us that his program was well organized, with wide backing from industry, the AEC, and the Research and Development Board. The NEPA project also had its own industrial backing, but, as I remember, for both the nuclear sub and plane projects the industries backing them were mostly potential contractors.

That was followed by a large meeting in Washington with senior Air Force, Navy, and AEC officials in which we asked about the required military characteristics of bombers delivering 10,000 pounds of atomic warhead anywhere and how those requirements would change in 5 to 10 years. They described the planned development of the B-52,⁴⁶ plans for 5 to 15 years beyond the B-52 going into the supersonic range, and supersonic air-to-surface missiles as an adjunct to the B-52. We probed hard on aircraft vulnerability, especially since enemy supersonic fighters could in five years give us a hard time. Bombers flying at tran- or supersonic speed afforded some protection, although the real asset for a nuclear-powered aircraft was long flights at very high altitudes.

Air Force officials backed by the Navy again argued for concurrency—that reactor development should not be separated from other components of a nuclear-powered airplane. The AEC continued to disagree. That position was supported by our visit to General Electric, which was heavily into reactor development but whose people felt nevertheless that reactor development in the United States was in sad shape. They argued that reactor development ought to be done in several places, that the AEC concentrating the work in one of its centers was just plain wrong, that they didn’t want a monopoly, and that they weren’t going to get involved in NEPA until reactors were much further along. When we put this to the NEPA people, they stuck to their guns—it had to be an integral, meaning concurrent, program, and it had to be run by a group that really wanted it, and that was the Air Force. They were direct when we asked what improvements were needed in NEPA: “realistic, active, joint

sponsorship and joint interest.” They also gave us a schedule: in about 10 years for $500 million to $1 billion, they would be ready to test nuclear propulsion in a complete airplane.

We had more meetings in which we went over the problems raised by various people, such as possible poisoning of the reaction by fission products; the metallurgical problems; whether a chemically fueled aircraft wouldn’t serve the purpose; the need for life-cycle testing of components shielding; and not least the weight of the reactor plant forced by the required shielding. We had looked at all caveats. Some were easy to knock down; others such as metals that could stand up to heat and fission products were not. In all, we couldn’t provide Robert Oppenheimer’s plea for a firm “no.” We couldn’t find anything pointing to that. We did lean toward concurrency but with a twist: the main effort at the beginning should be on reactor development, then building an airplane. I think we cleared the air. We got people together so that they understood one another. Technical people on both sides saw the problems that needed to be faced and ways to get at them. Administrators realized they had a serious problem in the relationships between the AEC and the Air Force.

Overall, we concluded that a nuclear-powered airplane was technically feasible but that it might take 15 years to fly it. And with my first experience inside the umbrella of AEC security clearance, I began to worry about relatively naked nuclear reactors launched into the air, especially on a series of test aircraft. Therefore, I was not at all disturbed when President Kennedy 13 years and $900 million later killed the program. ⁴⁶

I was pleased that I took part but glad it was over for two reasons. I’d tired of spending a lot of the summer in a windowless bunker, not ideal for a New England summer when Bunny and I should have spent more outdoor time together with our firstborn, Guy, Jr., a pleasure left more to her except weekends when I could join. The second reason was that I’d still not settled down to becoming a professor.

Jimmy Doolittle,⁴⁸ who was later to become a mentor and friend, once told me that as a young lieutenant in the Army Air Force in the 1920s, he sat down to list his assets and debits. He put together many items under

each and started crossing them off one by one. He finally got down to one asset: “Brave as hell.” And he also wound up with only one debit: “Dumb as hell.” So he decided to go to graduate school at MIT in the aeronautical engineering department. He did that, got his doctorate, and then returned to his Air Force career as a better-informed, wiser, and more intelligent air racer, test pilot, and leader of men in World War II.

I did a “doolittle” in late summer 1948, toting up my assets and debits. I had been an assistant professor in the Department of Aeronautical Engineering (later the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics). My assets were that I had a very good introduction to guided missiles and pilotless aircraft and also some aeronautical engineering, especially from Project Lexington, where we studied aircraft performance at sub-, tran-, and supersonic speeds. Moreover, I was appointed about that time to a committee of the new Air Force Scientific Advisory Board to look at the total wind tunnel picture in the United States, especially its gaps. My debits were that I did not have as much strength in the deeper engineering sciences of aerodynamics and fluid flows, aircraft structures and control, and the like. I needed to teach some courses in aeronautics dealing with the basics, and I needed to get a research program going for graduate students.

On the teaching side I soon got a big break, though it was a setback to the department, when Tsien returned to Cal Tech. Tsien was a brilliant mathematician, engineer, and scientist. He was von Kármán’s best student and joined him as a principal contributor to Toward New Horizons, setting out the postwar technological blueprint for the U.S. Air Force. He was a member of the SAB for its first four years from 1946 through 1949. He knew as much about the science and technology of air power as anyone in the world. I was an acquaintance, not a friend; he was selective about that. When Tsien returned to Cal Tech in 1949, Mao Tse Tung had just established the Peoples’ Republic of China. I did not notice that coincidence but some in government did because when Tsien moved to return to China, his native land, by ship from Canada, he was removed and held in house arrest in Pasadena for three years. There was a rather lame reason given that he had in his possession some classified reports of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, not very strong stuff. The strong stuff was in his head. He disappeared in China, apparently to work on their nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

Tsien’s story is emblematic of the security environment in which science and technology operated with the onset of the Cold War. The revelation that atomic and hydrogen bomb secrets were given to the USSR by insider scientists affected all of the science and technology community. Security became much tighter, even oppressive—for example the “witch hunts” by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Joseph McCarthy, and others.⁴⁹Some scientists who had been members of communist discussion groups, of which there were several, especially in university surroundings, and even those who rubbed shoulders with them, lost their clearances, sometimes in a very visible trial, as happened to Robert Oppenheimer, who was stripped of his security clearances.⁵⁰ That trial⁵¹ was sad for I had friends on both sides.

Hunsaker assigned me two of Tsien’s courses, a major one on compressible aerodynamics for transonic and supersonic flight and the other on rockets, which I combined with a guided-missile course that I had originated. I had become fascinated with the problems of hypersonic flight, especially in high Mach numbers—7 and beyond. Wind tunnels in that region are difficult to build because the throat has to be very narrow and both the pressure and temperature of the entering air have to be high so that what comes out has sufficient density, temperature, and pressure. But the air coming out expanded and cooled so rapidly that it was likely to liquefy. So instead of a hypersonic wind tunnel, you’d just have a fancy device for liquefying air. A wind tunnel is a simple device, basically a very large cone that contracts in the middle and that can hold a wing, an airplane, or even a scale model of a building. The heart is where the tube narrows and the entering air picks up velocity, without becoming turbulent. The test section is well instrumented, including cameras using special techniques to visualize the air patterns over a wing at subsonic to super- and hypersonic.

I thought up a scheme for getting high-pressure air and for heating it as it entered the nozzle. My students took on the job designing a Mach 7 throat for the tunnel so that, presumably, it would be a smooth hypersonic flow after it got through. We did get Mach 7 flow, but we also had problems with water vapor condensation. I tried to devise a theory that

would enable hypersonic flow in a supersaturated state without condensation. It didn’t work, in theory or experiment. So “making lemonade,” we wrote a paper on condensation in hypersonic wind tunnels for our supporter, the NACA, and organized several seminars and workshops on the work in both the aeronautical and mechanical engineering departments.

Next we looked at supersonic shock waves with a colleague, Professor Ray Bisplinghoff, who had been asked by the Air Force to study the impact on an aircraft of a large shock from a nuclear explosion. Further, the AEC was planning atomic tests at the Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific and wanted the data for airplanes that would be flying in the test area. I conceived a shock tube large enough to study the flow following on a supersonic shock wave hitting a plane and the like. A shock tube is conceptually simple. It’s a long tube of constant cross-sections with two parts. One is highly pressurized, usually with air, and the other is at low pressure, the two separated by a plastic or metallic diaphragm. When the diaphragm bursts, the high-pressure air rushes into the low-pressure compartment becoming a shock wave, followed, if done right, by a uniform supersonic flow of air. One could then put in the low-pressure zone, say, a model wing and use optical techniques to watch what happened as a supersonic airflow hit the wing.

Other projects joined the work on designing supersonic wind tunnels and shock tubes. One was the measurement of high-speed flows by tracking ions or charged particles. Then I also got involved around 1949 and 1950 in the problems encountered by planes as they moved through the transonic range, from sub- to supersonic speeds. There were horror stories of planes losing control as their aerodynamic surfaces went transonic, the plane becoming unstable, often catastrophically so. No question that transonic aerodynamics—the behavior of a plane at or just below Mach 1—was poorly understood. We created at MIT the Transonic Aircraft Control Project. This project grew a bit more than I expected, went for several years, and was successful both in helping the Air Force better understand transonic phenomena and in training students, many of whom went on to successful careers in academia and elsewhere.

All of these projects related to compressible aerodynamics and the phenomenon of shock waves. In any supersonic wind tunnel the critical

design factor is shaping the nozzle entrance so the air can enter the expansion section to ever-higher velocities without creating shock waves. In a shock tube the object is to create a shock wave to convert still air to supersonic flow. In the transonic aircraft case the object is to delay the formation of shock waves to as high a speed as possible. The formation of shock waves requires much energy, and their onset effectively increases the drag of the aircraft enormously, requiring much more powerful engines. Additionally, it changes the pressure distribution on the control surfaces, making control of the aircraft much different.

At this time in the late 1940s and the 1950s the state of development of turbojets for fighter aircraft had not produced enough power to penetrate the high drag of the sonic region, so there was a period where proper aerodynamic design helped. Later there was enough power to push right through Mach 1 into the supersonic area, which also required clever aerodynamic design.

It was a rewarding time to be in education at MIT or in any of our research universities. We were getting extremely well motivated and therefore very good students. Many of them were older, having served in the armed forces, were serious and determined in their work, and had the support of that remarkable legislation, the 1944 GI Bill of Rights. Many of them became enamored of airplanes during the war, not only as fighting machines but also as superb examples of high technology. Winston Churchill once again captured the spirit of the time and the pride of MIT in its wartime work in his talk to the MIT mid-century convocation in March 1949 in the Boston Garden:

This “darkling hour” was of course the Cold War, which Churchill formalized in his “Iron Curtain” speech three years earlier in Fulton, Missouri. And the Berlin airlift was still on, a magnificent response to the

Soviet attempt to starve West Berlin into submission and force the Allies out.⁵² In his peroration Churchill emboldened us:

We were indeed in a “war of nerves.” About a year after this splendid speech, the Soviets exploded an atomic bomb and in August 1953 the hydrogen bomb; they had an active ICBM program; and in almost every part of the world, the tensions between the two postwar superpowers were rising. The reality was “the uniquely difficult and bipolar world that suddenly arose after World War II: two very different societies and cultures found themselves face-to-face in a world of awesome weaponry.”⁵⁴ And in our own country we were becoming very concerned about our ability to defend ourselves against a Soviet attack. And at home where Bunny and I now had a full and joyous life with two children, Guy, Jr., and Sarah, I found my attitude quite different from what it had been in London during the war, when I had no family or possessions to worry about. The “war of nerves” was to occupy me as the 1950s began.