The Atlas, Thor, and Titan

Abstract

ALTHOUGH AN intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was among the several basic new weapons urgently recommended during the first postwar analysis of United States military needs, several factors combined to delay the start of actual development until 1954. Perhaps the chief of these was a compound of complacency and self delusion arising from the popular notion that possession of the atomic bomb and the means of its delivery conferred near invincibility on the United States, the only victorious power to emerge unscarred from World War II. That attitude was complicated by the conviction, expressed by some of the nation's most respected scientists and echoed by some of its most prominent military spokesmen, that the V-2 rocket missile was inherently an inaccurate, range-limited weapon, prohibitively expensive, and of slight military effectiveness, which Germany would have done well to forego in favor of improved conventional weapons-such as jet aircraft. General of the Armies Henry H. Arnold, certainly the most farsighted of all World War II allied leaders, was the first important military spokesman to endorse the need for an ICBM. For his pains he was subjected to the derision of leading civilian scientists, most of whom seemed content that logical extensions of existing weapons should remain the objectives of realistic military planning. There seemed slight cause for concern that a genuine need for an ICBM would develop within the predictable future. Two or three decades hence would be time enough.' By 1947 it was a precept of American folklore