9. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 207-228

Book IV: Starting a Race, 34. The Tea Pot Committee; 35. Getting Started; 36. "Okay, Bennie, It's a Deal"

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Gardner and Ramo had lived in the same apartment house in Schenectady in 1937 when Gardner was a student engineer at GE, and he knew about Ramo and Wooldridge because his company, Hycon Manufacturing, had been located nearby in Pasadena. So they came to mind when Gardner was looking for companies to work on the ICBM. Ramo suggested that Gardner needed a committee of top scientists to study the project and confirm to the brass that it was do-able. Von Neumann agreed to head the committee.

Meanwhile, Ramo and Wooldridge were looking to break away from Howard Hughes, who although he didn't interfere with their operation of Hughes Aircraft, had the potential to give them trouble. He refused to be fingerprinted, for one thing, which meant that he couldn't get a security clearance. So Ramo and Wooldridge left Hughes in September 1953 to start a computer and electronics firm called the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation. They secured financial backing from Thompson Products, which made automotive and aircraft products, and secured their financial backing. In 1958, Ramo-Wooldridge merged with Thompson and became Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, which was abbreviated to TRW Inc. in 1965. Initially aiming at the civilian rather than the military market, Ramo and Wooldridge were persuaded by Gardner to take on the ICBM project, which Schriever agreed to fund from his budget at the Development Planning Office.

Von Neumann's committee, which also included Clark Millikan, Charles Lauritsen, Jerome Wiesner and George Kistiakowsky, became known as the Tea Pot Committee -- a code name for use on the telephone. They examined the three long-range strategic missile projects the Air Force had under development and settled on the Atlas project, an intercontinental ballistic missile project based on improving the German V-2 that was directed by engineer Charlie Bossart. In February 1954 the committee issued a report certifying the feasibility of the ICBM and suggesting that one could be produced by 1960-61 and enough to be a deterrent threat to the Soviet Union could be in the field by 1962-63. They also suggested that current work on the Atlas by Convair be stopped and a new development group be put in charge of the entire project.

The report also played on the fear that the Soviet Union would be the first to develop an ICBM, although there was no evidence at all on what the Soviets were up to where missile work was concerned. The fear of a "missile gap" became a political football that Kennedy used to win the election in 1960. In fact, the Politburo in 1953 had decided on a strategy based on long-range missiles rather than the long-range bombers of SAC. And the first medium-range ballistic missile, with an 800-mile range, had been tested in March 1953. "The United States was indeed caught in a missile race, a strategic competition of profound importance of which it was quite unaware, and in which it was behind." Von Neumann's Russophobia had served him well.

But the task was now to convince what Gardner called "those narrow-gauged bastards in the Pentagon" that they needed a crash program to develop an ICBM. With the help of Schriever and Vince Ford, Gardner drafted a memo outlining a plan to have two launching sites and four missiles ready by June 1958 and 20 sites stockpiled with 100 missiles by June 1960. He proposed forming a division within the Air Research and Development Command to achieve this task. He also specified that Ramo-Wooldridge be hired to provide the scientific and technological expertise, and estimated that the five-year cost would be $1.545 billion -- "an enticingly reasonable figure that would prove to be a gross underestimate."

Interservice rivalry still needed to be dealt with. The Army had its own team of rocket men, headed by Wernher von Braun, at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama. And there was intraservice rivalry too: Curtis LeMay, who opposed any project that would threaten to take money away from his bombers. Gardner formed a new Scientific Advisory Committee with many of the Tea Pot Committee members remaining, still under the leadership of von Neumann, with additions such as Norris Bradbury, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, and Charles Lindbergh. Final approval for Gardner's proposal came in June 1954, one month after Gardner had asked Schriever to direct the project.

"I'll take the job," Schriever said, speaking slowly so that each word came through distinctly, "provided I can run it -- completely run it -- without any interference from those nitpicking sons of bitches in the Pentagon."

8. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 177-207

Book IV: Starting a Race, 29. Seeking Scientific Validation; 30. When Hungary Was Mars; 31. A Fascination With Explosions; 32. Finding an Ally; 33. Marshaling the Expertise

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Rescued from exile in South Korea by powerful friends, Schriever continued to try to advance American air supremacy, now turning his full focus on the intercontinental ballistic missile "in the opening years of the the sinister arms competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, a rivalry that would help to bankrupt and dissolve the immense Soviet empire and bequeath America a national debt of colossal proportions." At a meeting of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama in March 1953, he met two men who would be key figures in this competition: mathematician John von Neumann and physicist Edward Teller. They told him that it was theoretically possible to build a nuclear warhead light enough and a rocket powerful enough to blast any target within the Soviet Union. In May 1953, Schriever went to see von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. While waiting for his appointment with von Neumann, Schriever met and introduced himself to Albert Einstein, who had become a vocal opponent of the postwar arms race.

One wonders what [Einstein] might have said had he known he was shaking the hand of a man who was making it his mission to put not a mere atomic bomb, but rather a hydrogen bomb of eighty Hiroshimas, on the tip of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Von Neumann had none of Einstein's reservations about the nuclear age. He was an ultrahawk whose advocacy of "preventive war" -- a first strike against the Soviet Union -- exceeded even Curtis LeMay's. "If you say bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" He once told Robert Oppenheimer, "I don't think any weapon can be too large." He was also a pioneer in the use of digital electronic computers, making possible computer simulations of proposed weaponry.

Like Teller and von Kármán, he was a product of the "golden age of Jewish secular life in Central Europe" that flourished from 1867, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was formed, to the end of the First World War. Hungary had encouraged the participation of Jews in public and professional life after the unification with Austria as a way of seeing to it that its interests were on a par with Austria's.

Although a mere 5 percent of the population as a whole, by 1910 Jews comprised approximately half of Hungary's lawyers, journalists, and commercial businessmen, nearly 60 percent of its doctors, and 80 percent of its financiers.

The von Neumanns were secularists and John von Neumann was educated at the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest, where he was recognized as a mathematical prodigy. "As Mozart could hear the music in his head while he composed his scores, so von Neumann could see in his mind the steps leading to the solution of the mathematical challenge."

The first threat to Hungary's Jews came with the defeat of the Germans and their Austro-Hungarian allies in 1918, leading to the dissolution of the empire. In 1919, Béla Kun, a Hungarian socialist, led a revolution that lasted 133 days and was suppressed by the forces of Admiral Miklós Horthy, a right-winger who became dictator of Hungary and executed many of the supporters of Kun's revolution. Because many of these supporters were Jewish, there was a resurgence of anti-Semitism when Horthy took over. Von Neumann's family had been opponents of Kun's revolution, which was modeled on the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and John von Neumann retained his antipathy to Russia and to communism, describing himself as "violently anti-Communist." But the Horthy regime resurrected many of the anti-Jewish laws that had been suspended since 1867, reducing the chances that John could get a position as a university professor of mathematics at the University of Budapest. So he went first to Berlin to study chemistry and then to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich where he got a degree in chemical engineering in 1925. He returned to Budapest for his doctorate, which he earned in just one year, getting his Ph.D. in mathematics at the age of 22. He went back to the University of Berlin as an assistant professor of mathematics, but left in 1929 when Princeton offered him a visiting lectureship, followed by a professorship in mathematics and mathematical physics. He gave up his idea of returning to Europe when Hitler took power in 1933. Like Schriever, Sheehan comments, von Neumann had "the patriotism of the immigrant who is deeply grateful to a land that has been good to him."

Von Neumann became fascinated by the mathematics and physics of explosions, which caused Robert Oppenheimer to ask him to Los Alamos in 1943. Together with Stanislaw Ulam, he worked out the mathematics of the implosion method of detonating an atomic bomb. Despite his ultrahawkishness, he would later testify in defense of Oppenheimer at the hearing that took away Oppenheimer's security clearance because of his opposition to the hydrogen bomb. But it was von Neumann's hawkishness, as well as his scientific achievements and expertise, that made him such a valuable ally for Schriever in his quest to persuade the Air Force to support his vision of the ICBM.

Another ally was Trevor Gardner, special assistant to the secretary of the air force for research and development. He, too, was an immigrant, born in Wales in 1915. Gardner had a bachelor's degree in engineering and an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California, and had run the developmental engineering section of Caltech during the war. He then started Hycon Manufacturing, which produced electronic components for the military. Horace Talbott, the secretary of the air force under Eisenhower, brought him to Washington. Gardner's executive assistant was Col. Vince Ford, whom Schriever had hired as an assistant in 1948. Gardner's bluntness, as well as a drinking problem, had made him some enemies among the Air Force brass, but Schriever, who was introduced to Gardner by Ford, saw his potential for getting the ICBM project under way. And when Talbott was ordered by Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson to sort out the various missile projects being studied by the Pentagon, he put Gardner in charge of the task, Gardner saw it as an opportunity to advance Schriever's ICBM project.

One major problem was finding an American industry that could take on the project -- "the United States had an aircraft industry, but the nation was yet to acquire an aerospace industry. To get the ICBM built, Gardner would have to find the genesis of one." He found it at Hughes Aircraft Company, owned by Howard Hughes, who paid no attention to the company, letting it be run by Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge. Ramo was tapped to be the chief technical director and engineer of Schriever's ICBM project. It would launch the company co-founded by Ramo and Wooldridge, TRW Inc., into one of the country's major aerospace firms and make them "immensely wealthy princes of the American military-industrial complex."

Ramo had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics from Caltech and had gone to work for General Electric in Schenectady in research and development in the electronics division. But he found GE's managers "unimaginative bureaucrats," so at the end of World War II he looked for a job that would take him back to California. He saw Hughes Aircraft as a place that was likely to be less hidebound than GE and ready to meet the postwar challenge of the atomic age. He went to work there as general manager in 1946, and brought on Wooldridge, a classmate and friend from Caltech, as partner that summer. Wooldridge took over the administrative side and Ramo the research and engineering. He hired young engineers interested in military innovation. "In these immediate postwar years, long before the Vietnam conflict, there was no stigma attached to employment in military industry." Hughes Aircraft soon established itself as a major provider for air defense equipment for the U.S. Air Force. And they developed the Falcon, the Air Force's first air-to-air guided missile, which led Schriever to them.