An Untaken Road: Strategy, Technology and the Hidden History of America's Mobile ICBMs by Steven A. Pomeroy

Abstract

Reviewed by: An Untaken Road: Strategy, Technology and the Hidden History of America's Mobile ICBMs by Steven A. Pomeroy Christopher Gainor (bio) An Untaken Road: Strategy, Technology and the Hidden History of America's Mobile ICBMs. By Steven A. Pomeroy. Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2016. Pp. 304. Hardcover $44.95. Some of the biggest and most expensive engineering works on earth are the hundreds of silos designed to protect intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in the United States, Russia, and China. These huge silos are designed to ensure that nuclear-armed missiles are protected against a surprise first strike in a nuclear war. Submarine launched ballistic missiles [End Page 485] (SLBMs) are also widely used because their constant movement underwater makes it difficult for adversaries to target or even locate them. Not surprisingly, the U.S. Air Force, which operates America's landbased ICBM force, has also given serious consideration to making ICBMs portable as a means of safeguarding America's nuclear deterrent against a first strike. The USAF has also been motivated by its desire to retain its hold on the U.S. ICBM force against the inroads made by the U.S. Navy and its SLBMs. Many people will recall that as the Soviet Union's advances in the field of ICBMs became a major concern to American policymakers, President Jimmy Carter proposed in 1979 that 200 of a newly developed ICBM known as MX be based in 4,600 underground shelters linked by roads known as "racetracks." The idea was that each missile could be hidden under any of a number of shelters, making it very difficult for Soviet ICBMs to hit every ICBM during a first strike. In the face of growing controversy over the idea, particularly among landowners in Utah and Nevada, President Ronald Reagan cancelled the shelter system in 1981. Reagan renamed the MX missile Peacekeeper, and it was later deployed until 2005 in refurbished silos originally built for Minuteman ICBMs. Less well known is the fact that the USAF began studying similar mobile ICBM schemes even before its first ICBM was deployed and continued through to the end of the Cold War. In its efforts to protect ICBMs, the air force considered basing them on trains, trucks running on public highways and purpose-built tracks, aircraft, ships, and even submarines renamed "manned underwater launch platforms" in a doomed attempt to avoid the navy's notice. In spite of all the studies and proposals for mobile ICBMs, the USAF has never deployed them. Author Steven A. Pomeroy's book asks why this technological route was never taken. He concludes that the U.S. Navy's successful creation of its SLBM force that would survive a first strike, along with the success of Minuteman missiles in silos, especially in comparison to the ponderous Atlas and Titan ICBMs that preceded them, undermined the USAF's case for portable ICBMs in the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1970s and 1980s, American decision makers were divided over the degree of the vulnerability of ICBMs. Pomeroy, whose scholarship is informed but not limited by experience as a launch officer in the USAF, has written a rare and badly needed history of the deployment of America's ICBMs during the Cold War while telling the story of the USAF's quest for mobile ICBMs. In explaining why he emphasized the road not taken in this history, Pomeroy argued that too great an emphasis on adopted technologies fosters determinist narratives in the history of technology. Reading this well paced account of the USAF's many schemes to move missiles before [End Page 486] launch, this reviewer is struck by the prodigious work and expenditure that went into developing these schemes before they were rejected. Many books have been written about nuclear weapons and bomber aircraft, but comparatively little attention has been given to ICBMs, and much of that relates to the first generation ICBMs that were also used as space launch vehicles. Works like An Untaken Road and Gretchen Heefner's The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2012), are valuable histories of this expensive military technology. More historical work needs to...