The Moby Dick Project: Reconnaissance Balloons over Russia by Curtis Peebles

Abstract

Technology and culture Book Reviews 833 other words, the book could have benefited from going substantially farther. Barton C. Hacker Dr. Hacker is historian at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Moby Dick Project: Reconnaissance Balloons over Russia. By Curtis Peebles. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Pp. ix + 250; illustrations, notes. $40.00. Rapid demobilization in the wake of World War II left the United States intelligence community fragmented and diminished at a time when the threat posed by the Soviet Union was becoming increasingly apparent. The reorganization and expansion of intelligence in the late 1940s was largely a response to the pressing need to learn more about Soviet capabilities and intentions. It was soon realized that the creation of effective espionage networks within the Soviet Union would be a time-consuming task. The use of technical means of gathering information promised more immediate results, hence the development of such methods became characteristic of the burgeon­ ing U.S. intelligence effort. Curtis Peebles alludes to this background when he states, “In the early years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was a blank threatening void,” and he goes on to describe his book as “a history of the first attempt to light that darkness: reconnaissance balloons” (p. 1). Actu­ ally, the balloons were not the first U.S. attempt to reconnoiter the Soviet Union. Airplanes had been used to obtain photographic and electronic intelligence by flying along the Soviet perimeter and brief flights over Soviet territory had been carried out. But these forays into Soviet airspace had revealed that the defenses were too formidable to allow conventional military airplanes to make the repetitive overflights ofareas deep within the Soviet Union that were needed by intelligence analysts. The balloon program represented the first deployment of a reconnaissance vehicle specifically designed to achieve this objective. The balloons were only marginally successful and were soon superseded by other vehicles—first by special airplanes and later by satellites. Nevertheless, the balloon program was significant because its qualified success validated the development of the more suitable vehicles that followed and because the advances in balloon design and construction achieved by the program greatly enhanced the utility of balloons as platforms for scientific research. This book, therefore, deals with an important and little-known aspect of the history of balloon technology. Moreover, the book delivers more than the title suggests. Peebles not only presents a thorough account of the MOBY DICK reconnais­ sance balloon project but, as background, devotes nearly as many 834 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE pages to a history of balloons both as reconnaissance and attack vehicles. The modern use of attack balloons is a facet of balloon history even less well known than the role of balloons in reconnoitering the Soviet Union. The public is generally unaware that the United States developed a balloon “bomber” in World War I; that the Japanese deployed transpacific balloons to bomb the United States in World War II (project FUGO); that the British used balloons to drop incendiary bombs on occupied Europe during much of World War II (OUTWARD); and that the United States developed an attack balloon in the 1950s to deliver chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction (FLYING CLOUD). Peebles describes these projects as well as those in which balloons were employed for reconnaissance and other tasks (e.g., bombing Venice in 1849, dropping propaganda leaflets in World War I, and monitoring Soviet atomic tests during the Cold War) as part of a history of the military uses of balloons from 1794 to 1958. He also briefly describes the political context in which advances in balloon technology occurred. The book thus forms a valuable addition to the literature on ballooning that, for the most part, deals with their nonmilitary applications. The book has a few shortcomings: Peebles has failed to provide an index, he relies too heavily on secondary sources, and his technical descriptions lack detail. These are relatively minor flaws, however, in a wide-ranging and well-written account of an underreported seg­ ment of technology. Charles A. Ziegler Dr. Ziegler, lecturer in cultural anthropology at Brandeis University, holds advanced degrees in anthropology and physics and has a special...