Actually, the vital ingredients of a medium-range ballistic missile were mostly within reach by 1947, excepting a nuclear warhead and proven means of warhead reentry, but few realized it, and in any case the delayed consequences of the postwar budget cutbacks caused the Air Force to drop all plans for ballistic missile development in July 1947. Of the 28 missile projects established a year earlier, the two chief survivors with nominal application to the strategic mission were what later became Snark and Navaho [i.e., sub- and supersonic cruise missiles].
… The logic of the decision to drop ballistic missile development has been derided in later years, but mostly for the wrong reasons. American decision makers chose what they thought to be the safe assumption that evolutionary development along familiar lines would surely lead to the availability of a strategic missile. The “safer” lines? Application of turbine engine improvements, aerodynamic advances, and perfected autopilots to early cruise missiles, with ramjet propulsion and stellar-inertial guidance following along at some later date, was a preferred policy.
Too few appreciated that a highly accurate 5000-mile ramjet-powered cruise missile—and particularly one that was boosted to 70,000 feet by a rocket and thereafter flew at sustained supersonic speeds—was perhaps a more ambitious undertaking than the atomic bomb, much less the B-29. Fifteen years and several hundreds of millions of dollars later, that appreciation still was not widespread.
That was the excellent Robert Perry’s 1967 paper, The Ballistic Missile Decision. Indeed, the United States still doesn’t have such a supersonic cruise missile of the kind envisioned in the 1940s. The Navaho was aiming for speeds around Mach 3, a bit lower than “hypersonic” which tends to be around Mach 5.
I wonder whether that capability could have succeeded in the 1960s had the programs not been cancelled. Dr. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and catalyst to the Polaris program, was enflamed when SecDef McNamara cancelled a promising engine for a supersonic cruise missile after $200 million had been spent. “I believe this is the biggest mistake we have made since the years following World War II when we failed to develop the I.C.B.M.”
Perhaps super or hypersonic cruise missiles was just out of their grasp in the 1960s and cancellation was the right choice. But I wager that the bigger factor is McNamara’s changes to the acquisition system which made deep-tech experimentation very difficult. It’s impossible to know what weapons tech was delayed or never developed due to the stifling of creativity from centralized planning.
So the mundane lesson here is that diversity of opinions and actions are crucial to exploring the relevant alternatives, because experts are often those best at explaining the past rather than seeing the future.
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