Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [72]
A few days ago a super-long-range, intercontinental multistage ballistic missile was launched. The tests of the missile were successful; they fully confirmed the correctness of the calculations and the selected design. The flight of the missile took place at a very great, hereto unattained, altitude. Covering an enormous distance in a short time, the missile hit the assigned region. The results obtained show that there is a possibility of launching missiles into any region of the terrestrial globe. The solution of the problem of creating intercontinental ballistic missiles will make it possible to reach remote regions without resorting to strategic aviation, which at the present time is vulnerable to modern means of anti-aircraft defense.
After the humiliations of the U-2, Khrushchev had been only too happy to rattle his own saber for a change. But even if he had not wanted the Americans and the British to tremble at news of his new superweapon, the United States would have known about it anyway. The new National Security Agency, the sister organization to the CIA for signals intelligence gathering, had encircled the Soviet Union with an electronic moat. Huge dish and phased-array radar networks in Norway, Britain, Greenland, Germany, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Japan, and Alaska intercepted Soviet communications and tracked weapons tests. An American installation in northern Iran, Tacksman 1, had been monitoring the R-7 trials from the beginning and had been able to triangulate the general vicinity of the launchpad at Tyura-Tam.
From its dish network atop a 6,800-foot peak in Iran’s Mashad mountains, the NSA had been able to follow the initial failures at Tyura-Tam on its radar screens, but the success of Korolev’s fourth attempt had caused serious consternation in military circles. The R-7’s maiden flight had coincided, almost to the day, with the fourth consecutive launch failure of the U.S. Air Force’s intermediate-range Thor missile. The American equivalent of the R-7, the three-engine Atlas ICBM, was still a year away from a full flight test. To date, the Atlas had flown only under partial power, with only two of its three engines firing. That left Wernher von Braun’s modified Redstone, a research rocket known as the Jupiter C (though it had nothing to do with the endangered Jupiter IRBM program), as the closest operational American response to the Soviets’ ICBM breakthrough. But the Jupiter C, which had covered a 1,200-mile trajectory several weeks earlier during an August 8, 1957, trial, was not a missile, and hence it was not bound by the 200-mile limit imposed on the army by Charlie Wilson. Medaris had simply chosen its now ill-fated name before Wilson’s “roles and missions” edict, as a way to gain access to overcrowded launch sites, which gave preference to military missiles over research projects, by making the test rocket sound as if it were part of the Jupiter program. In reality, it was solely a test vehicle with no deadly payload, designed to determine whether the new heat-resistant nose cone materials could withstand the pressures of high-speed atmospheric reentry.
Like the Soviets, American rocket scientists were grappling with the problem of warheads being incinerated on reentry, but, unlike Korolev, they had decided to test their thermal nose cone shield before perfecting the missiles that would carry the warhead. The Pentagon did not know that Korolev had put the cart before the horse, and that the Chief Designer did not yet have a working nose cone. The American military planners knew only that the Soviet Union claimed to have an operational ICBM, while the United States was still struggling to get a working IRBM.
This alarming imbalance was why Jones was flying over the Kazakh desert in search of Tyura-Tam. He was following the thin outlines of rail spurs, since the CIA believed that the Soviets