An Untaken Road: Strategy, Technology, and the Hidden History of America's Mobile ICBMs

By Steven A Pomeroy

Steven A. Pomeroy has authored the first history of the American mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a technology the United States spent four decades and billions of dollars creating but never deployed. An Untaken Road showcases how the evolution of a technology that ultimately never existed and the politics that surrounded it end up significantly shaping American nuclear strategy and forces for decades. Utilizing recently declassified documents, years of experience, and an unrivaled passion for the history of military technologies, Pomeroy has created a new framework on the nature of strategic weapons technology innovation. This thorough study of a “road not taken” is a must read for those seeking to understand the challenges and constraints on U.S. military weapon programs, especially when inter-organization competition, domestic politics, strategic needs, and new technologies collide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781612519920

Book preview

Titles in the Series

The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security

Transforming War

—Paul J. Springer, editor

To ensure success, the conduct of war requires rapid and effective adaptation to changing circumstances. While every conflict involves a degree of flexibility and innovation, there are certain changes that have occurred throughout history that stand out because they fundamentally altered the conduct of warfare. The most prominent of these changes have been labeled Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs). These so-called revolutions include technological innovations as well as entirely new approaches to strategy. Revolutionary ideas in military theory, doctrine, and operations have also permanently changed the methods, means, and objectives of warfare.

This series examines fundamental transformations that have occurred in warfare. It places particular emphasis upon RMAs to examine how the development of a new idea or device can alter not only the conduct of wars, but their effect upon participants, supporters, and uninvolved parties. The unifying concept of the series is not geographical or temporal; rather, it is the notion of change in conflict and its subsequent impact. This has allowed the incorporation of a wide variety of scholars, approaches, disciplines, and conclusions to be brought under the umbrella of the series. The works include biographies, examinations of transformative events, and analyses of key technological innovations that provide a greater understanding of how and why modern conflict is carried out, and how it may change the battlefields of the future.

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2016 by Steven A. Pomeroy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pomeroy, Steven A., author.

Title: An untaken road: strategy, technology, and the hidden history of America’s mobile ICBMs / Steven A. Pomeroy.

Other titles: Strategy, technology, and the hidden history of America’s mobile ICBMs

Description: Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, [2016] | Series: Transforming war | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: ISBN 9781612519920 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Intercontinental ballistic missiles—United States—History. | Intercontinental ballistic missiles—Mobile basing.

Classification: LCC UG1312.I2 P66 2016 (print) | LCC UG1312.I2 (ebook) | DDC

358.1/754—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015033687

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

242322212019181716987654321

First printing

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: Which Road to Take?

CHAPTER 1: Embarking on the Road Untaken

CHAPTER 2: Toward a New Horizon

CHAPTER 3: Divergence

CHAPTER 4: Silos versus Trains

CHAPTER 5: Domination

CHAPTER 6: Old Ideas Never Fade Away

CHAPTER 7: Vulnerability SALTed with Indecision

CHAPTER 8: One If by Air, Two If by Ground

CHAPTER 9: Halting Technological Momentum

CHAPTER 10: The Road Ends, No?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Lt. Gen. Bernard Schriever and his missiles

Mobile Minuteman task force components

Diorama of Hill Air Force Base mobile-Minuteman facilities

Crane lifting Minuteman ICBM from launch car

Mobile Minuteman re-entry vehicle removal

Five launch cars

Mobile Atlas

Mobile Titan

Mobile Minuteman launch consoles

Adm. Arleigh A. Burke, USN, and Rear Adm. William F. Raborn, USN, with model of USS George Washington

Triggered random mobile Minuteman

Superhard deployment

Minuteman I, II, III comparison

MX (Peacekeeper) ICBM

Boeing 747 launching ICBM

Amphibious vehicle, multiple pool basing

Slope-side pool

Tube tunnel

Tunnel-based mobile launch control center

September 1979 baseline Multiple Protective Shelter racetrack

September 1979 baseline transporter-erector launcher

Multiple Protective Shelter Loading Dock grid

Multiple Protective Shelter loading dock cantilever mechanism

Big Bird aircraft

MX launching from silo

ABBREVIATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book concerns the history of a technology, namely the American mobile intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Many people representing avenues within my life contributed to its writing. First, I thank my family. Luke, Sarah, and Marnie supported my intellectual passions for history, technology, and innovation. I love you and thank you.

For eight years while an associate professor at the Air Force Academy (and now at Colorado Technical University), I studied the context, theory, and application of military power. Many colleagues have contributed ideas to this book, and I will mention four. Professor James R. W. Titus was instrumental in my appointment. He convinced the academy to fund my doctoral studies, and he has provided me with years of mentorship and friendship. Professor John Farquhar reviewed many chapters. Lt. Col. (retired) Tom Allison’s mental clarity and expansive intellect linked ideas in ways I had never considered. Col. (Professor) Ed Westermann, now at Texas A&M University, introduced me to the study of innovation, and we cotaught my first course on military innovation. Thank you.

Many colleagues within the operational Air Force recommended Auburn University’s history of technology program. They counseled wisely, particularly Col. (Dr.) David Arnold and Col. (retired) Mike Grieco. Colonel Arnold, a space historian, offered a plan to succeed in a doctoral program that helped immensely. He is now an associate professor at the National War College. Colonel Grieco knows more about the workings of ICBMs than anyone else I know, and he has taught me about them for over a quarter-century. He explains arcane technical details effortlessly. On a 2001 midsummer night, I destroyed one of his rockets (a Peacekeeper ICBM) following an in-flight staging anomaly. Fortunately, he forgave me. Thank you.

I tell new faculty members that students remember their best and worst professors. They forget the mundane. I remember many wonderful educators from Auburn University’s history department. Professors William F. Trimble, Guy V. Beckwith, and James R. Hansen guided my initial researches and taught me their craft. The collections staff at the nearby Air Force Historical Research Agency (AFHRA) deserves recognition. Mr. Archangelo Archie DiFante is a dedicated public servant who declassified the documents I needed. He provided me with thousands of pages of declassified sources. Thank you. My editor, Gary Thompson, and the outstanding team representing the Naval Institute Press, including Pelham Boyer and Marlena Montagna, embody the Navy’s spirit of intellectual debate and innovation. Thank you for your dedication and artisanship. Lastly, I thank the individuals who read manuscript versions, including the book’s anonymous reviewers, for their courteous, professional, and relevant critiques.

INTRODUCTION

Which Road to Take?

A trainload of solid action. . . . The mobile missile launcher with a cargo of fighting cars! A guardian of peace . . . on land . . . on sea and in the air! This all fighting train includes . . . a long distance Minuteman Missile Launcher hidden in a car.

THE LIONEL CORPORATION¹

Ilike trains, and I like rockets. When I was young, my grandparents gave me some Lionel electric trains and a copy of the 1961 catalog. On one glorious two-page spread stood the mobile missile launcher, starring a new Minuteman-missile-launching car. Lionel’s stubby boxcar bore the markings of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and a two-piece, blue, hinged roof that ran the car’s length. Inside was a two-stage, spring-fired rocket. It looked nothing like a Minuteman. I did not care. I spent hours slamming the train into sidings. There, I pressed the button. It was orange. The roof opened, the missile elevated, and away blasted a guardian of peace against the Soviet Union. Even then, I knew when it was time to get out of Dodge: the train flew out the siding and down the mainline to hide from Red warheads. It was heady stuff. I did not know my toy had a prototype. ²

Eventually, I grew up, worked with real rockets, including Minuteman, and became a professor. During twenty-five years as an Air Force officer, I performed many roles, most with operational nuclear weapon systems, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and shorter-ranged, mobile, ground-launched cruise missiles. Later, I helped launch forty rockets into space. Their payloads ranged from satellites to a few probes, ICBM test flights, and some antiballistic missile test shots. My duties ranged from operations, training, and evaluation to major command-level planning and programming. I cowrote the technical and operations manuals governing the Western Range’s mission flight control operations.³ My teams and I blew up one erratic rocket and saved two others from in-flight destruction. The distillation of these experiences prepared me to master what historians of technology term the internal elements of a technology. The technology I am interested in is the American mobile ICBM.

I started my doctoral studies in 2003, finished in 2006, and became a historian of technology. This training taught me the value of the external elements and their importance to an overall technological ambient that combines internal and external elements. Synthesizing the internal and external elements illustrated the enormous efforts required to deploy new national-level technologies. As a professor, I teach and publish about the importance of respecting the strategy/technology relationship. My courses apply concepts developed within the history of technology to identify emerging strategic opportunities and problems. With the help of colleagues and students, I have developed a broad perspective about technology, agreeing with Lewis Mumford that language and the organized mind are fundamental technologies.⁴ While an associate professor of military and strategic studies at the United States Air Force Academy and now at Colorado Technical University, I have continued researching technological change, processes of innovation, and emerging technologies capable of defining an era.⁵

The United States never deployed mobile ICBMs, making this history the tale of a road not taken. As I walked this road and its alleys, I realized that the decision not to build a technologically feasible weapon was a reasoned attempt by national leaders (and later the public) to direct technological change. At times, the reasoning was logical. Other times, it was not. Passions intruded. Fog, friction, chance, and uncertainty played roles. National security strategy, technological innovation, foreign policy, domestic politics, economics, engineering, and social concerns, including environmentalism, converged upon the mobile ICBM. In this study, elements internal to technology are crucial, because policy makers debated the feasibility of those weapons technologies. The dividing line between internal and external factors blurred, but it was factors external to technical development that ultimately prevented deployment of American mobile ICBMs. Thus, this study stresses the interplay of internal and external elements.

One of this book’s purposes is to dispel the myth that nuclear weapons technologies are somehow different, special cases, whose broad evolutions do not follow the pathways of less destructive technical means. They release tremendous energy, yes, but nuclear weapons follow the same patterns of innovation and technological evolution as does any technological family. You can understand their development by using existing models of technical development. Demonstrating this necessitated that the book utilize the history of technology, particularly the discipline’s contextual approach and historian Thomas P. Hughes’ five-phase model of technological system development. The book adopts concepts from studies of military-technological innovation to translate Hughes’ consumer-based model to the realm of strategy, technology, innovation, and military operations. The book expands the historian’s definition of technology to include the mental aspect, what political and military leaders consider doctrine or a theory of warfare. The analytical approach applies historian John M. Staudenmaier’s framework of the road not taken.⁶ A road not taken does not build upon counterfactual argument; the phrase describes instead an alternative course of action the actors considered but declined to travel. In essence, they walked partway down such roads to determine their utility. If they had not done so, the potential alternative would have been only a flight of fancy and unworthy of the historian’s time. Examining the agents’ reasoning as they chose between viable paths of technological development enriches historical understanding of the pathways pursued. These refined analytical techniques help historians and contemporary practitioners understand and practice technological development.

The era studied is the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, and the topics are ICBM mobility as an operational concept and technical means, its effects upon the nuclear triad, and its role within technological innovation. The study argues the mobile ICBM was a feasible technology capable of solving an American strategic problem, namely deploying a secure second-strike force. Three reasons prevented the United States from deploying a mobile ICBM: (1) the Air Force–Navy bureaucratic rivalry enabled a context conducive to developing mobile, sea-based missiles; (2) the Air Force’s successful silo-based Minuteman undermined mobile ICBMs; and (3) dramatic contextual changes, including institutional distrust, environmentalism, and a lack of strategic specificity and consensus eliminated public support for the mobile ICBM.⁷ Each reason’s significance varied over time. A major technological undertaking like the mobile ICBM is particularly instructive for today’s practitioners, whether building weapons systems, power plants, oil pipelines, electric cars, or heavy-lift rockets for space travel.

In their competition for institutionalization into the Air Force, mobile ICBM efforts, particularly the late-fifties mobile Minuteman, shaped the nuclear triad’s final form. Later, the seventies-era Missile Experimental (Missile-X, or MX) multiple protective shelter system (MPSs) revealed deep divides within American society. A 15,000-square-mile, state-sized system, MX MPS was this nation’s most controversial weapons program. Between these two efforts, military technologists never forfeited the hope of building a mobile ICBM. Even when told No! the Air Force wanted the technology. For strategists, technologists, and innovators, the mobile ICBM demonstrates the challenges of delivering new disruptive innovations that displace existing warfighting paradigms or of implementing major sustaining innovations to existing paradigms. The mobile ICBM never overcame the inertia of the sea-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) and silo-based portions of the nuclear triad. In less than ten years, the silo-based ICBM became the dominant paradigm of ICBM operations, and Polaris SLBM submarines provided the dominant paradigm for American mobile long-range ballistic missiles. The analysis of how silos and submarines developed, gained momentum, attained bureaucratic security, and then stability (while mobile ICBMs did not) illuminates the challenges for those seeking dramatic changes in today’s Department of Defense.

ICBM technology’s early years were remarkable (readers unfamiliar with them should consult the works by historians Jacob Neufeld and David N. Spires listed within the bibliography). They are a window into a past America. Opportunistic Air Force innovators, including Gen. Bernard Schriever, began building the national-scale intellectual, industrial, and military foundations of American space and missile power in 1954, long before Sputnik beeped or President John F. Kennedy demanded the Moon. Americans liked and supported these military programs. After the Air Force christened its 1st Missile Division at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, the Santa Barbara News-Press ran a spectacular forty-page special section. On a full-color cover with tones only Kodachrome could reproduce, a Titan I ICBM fired its engines at launch. Red letters declared, Of Missiles and Men. Publisher Thomas M. Storke wrote, Things have changed—and nowhere has the change been more dramatic than in the vicinity of what is now Vandenberg. . . . The most advanced weapons of the modern world point their noses to the sky near the place where Indians used to cast their spears into the water at the mouth of the Santa Ynez River.⁸ The machine was in the garden, the citizenry welcoming missiles into their idyllic backyards.⁹

So, the men built missiles. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a retired Army five-star general who was the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, during World War II, understood the significance of missile technology.¹⁰ He had dealt with the German V-2 and V-1 missiles. In 1954, he made the ICBM a national crash project, and two years later, the Air Force pondered the concept of a land-mobile ICBM. Air Force generals thought nuclear strike via long-range ballistic missiles was quintessentially their mission. After all, legendary Air Force officers, including Gen. Henry H. Hap Arnold thought missiles the bomber of the future (Gen. Curtis E. LeMay agreed), and bombers were the talisman of Air Force independence.¹¹ By 1960, the Air Force had cultivated a forest of missiles.¹² As the technology developed, mobile ICBMs were technically feasible, the Air Force wanted them, and their future was bright.

In late 1961, the Air Force narrowly missed a chance to deploy three hundred Minuteman I ICBMs on a hundred trains that would have roamed 250,000 miles of class-one railroad track. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, a business executive who during World War II had been an operations analyst, had good reasons to cancel mobile Minuteman, and the Air Force had good reasons to accept his decision.¹³ By 1964, the Air Force had deployed 931 ICBMs in seventeen different American states. The technology’s spread certainly says something about America and its citizens. Multiple models came and went, and a truly significant technological system, the Minuteman III, was already on drawing boards. Ten years earlier, the ICBM had languished. Now it was central to American security, and mobility played a significant role in making that happen.

The world and America then changed. By the mid-seventies, a furious argument was raging within strategy and technology circles. Evening newscasts covered it well. In view of the increased quality and quantity of Soviet ICBMs (some of them mobile), were American ICBMs vulnerable to a surprise first strike? The stakes were high. It was a legitimate question of national survival. If ICBMs were vulnerable, they were not viable technical means. How could such a technology support the policy way of possessing a force capable of mutually assured destruction? If that capability had been lost, how could the Americans accomplish their objective of deterrence? Solutions abounded, including arms control and new weapons. The problem was that not everyone agreed ICBMs were vulnerable. By the late 1970s, President James E. Jimmy Carter, a former Navy nuclear-qualified submarine officer who had dealt with the near-disaster at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, decided they were.¹⁴ He approved a devilishly complex but creative mobile ICBM system to solve the problem. Carter’s MX MPS system was on the road to becoming a state-sized, automated doomsday machine. Its two hundred missiles each carried ten or more independently retargetable re-entry vehicles between 4,600 shelters (the number varied, at one time as low as 4,200) in Nevada and Utah. Depending upon how one calculated it, MPS required 12,000 to 15,000 square miles, making it in effect the forty-second-largest state. If the Soviets attacked, Carter reasoned, they would need to dedicate at least 9,200 perfectly working weapons (probably more) to destroy all of these missiles.

Even if the Soviets immolated MPS, President Carter would retain any leftovers from the 1,054 silo-based ICBMs, the SLBMs, and the bombers. In addition, the Soviets had to consider American tactical nuclear weapons and those of allied states. Carter’s considerate designers even helped arms-control treaty verification. They built in viewing ports so Soviet spy satellites could verify whether the Americans were cheating by hiding extra missiles within the deployment area. One version of Carter’s system permitted any missiles that survived a surprise attack automatically to prioritize and assign targets amongst themselves and then launch, all without a single human input. Voters in Nevada and Utah rejected it. Environmentalists were aghast. Where once friendly publishers had welcomed missiles and men, Air Force public affairs specialists encountered angry town-hall sessions where attendees fired Environmental Protection Agency regulations as rhetorical bullets. Things soon got tougher.

Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 election, and his successor, Ronald W. Reagan, cancelled the doomsday machine. Caterwauling prevailed within strategy and technology circles, and the tale of MX MPS illustrates much regarding the interactions of strategy, technology, and context. Reagan deeply loved the American West, and as president he was sensitive to the complaints Utah and Nevada residents made about MX. He personally desired to eliminate nuclear weapons, but he simultaneously sought to improve the nation’s nuclear and conventional warfighting capabilities.¹⁵ These priorities sometimes conflicted. Regardless, President Reagan wanted the MX for its offensive power. He knew silo-based missiles might not survive a Soviet first strike. So did the Air Force, but after years of public argument, President Reagan emplaced MX into silos. Given the vulnerability of its basing mode, no one needed faith’s leap to interpret such a move as a potential first-strike weapon, regardless of American statements. Fifty MX missiles (which Reagan renamed the Peacekeeper) were lowered into former Minuteman silos. These missiles each carried ten warheads, for a total representing a quarter of what the entire force of one thousand Minutemen carried.¹⁶ It was a potent force. Throughout his presidency Reagan courted mobile ICBMs, but only to a point. Over three decades, a conceptual cornucopia of nuclear missiles, each fighting for its share of resources, poured forth, but for all the effort and expense, the Americans ultimately kept their missiles underground, never on trucks, trains, or airplanes. Why?

A multitude of internal and external constituencies influenced nuclear force development and employment. Led by a civilian secretary of defense who answered to the president, the military departments organized, trained, and equipped their forces. The systems builders included politicians, officers, planners, crew members, designers, industrialists, and academic consultants. Their procurement, acquisition, and deployment processes demanded debate, critical and otherwise, along with hundreds of behind-the-scenes studies and briefings; learning this discourse required me to find the hidden action, which declassified sources permitted.¹⁷ The systems’ builders generated many roads, but because resources were finite, leaders eventually decided which forces to deploy and which to decline. Those decisions emerged from a discourse on the potential roads that system builders laid open for examination. In the mobile ICBM’s case, the discourse included citizens from addresses ranging from Main Street to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Only the prepared opportunist survived. As historian David Hounshell explained, The action takes place behind the scenes in board rooms and committees.¹⁸ He was right. Decisions grew from thoughts developed while walking roads not taken. This book investigates the mobile ICBM via the road not taken. Chapter 1, therefore, discusses the conceptual framework applied to develop the historical narrative. It explains the basic terms and frameworks adapted to explain the historical technological innovation of the mobile ICBM and its relation to American nuclear strategy. This chapter expands the historian’s definition of technology and adopts concepts from military-innovation studies to emphasize the role of strategy—that is, the interaction of ends, ways, and means within a context with technological development. It modifies historian Thomas P. Hughes’ model of technological development from five phases to four. Three caveats apply. First, this history of technology illustrates technological innovation and its relationship to strategy. Second, it is not a book on comparative nuclear strategy or the literary arsenal of military innovation. Third, it illuminates the importance of the untaken road to strategy, technology, and innovation.

The remaining nine chapters apply this framework to examine the evolution of mobile ICBM technology. Chapters 2 through 6 cover the first half of mobile ICBM development, from the midfifties to the late sixties. Chapter 2 discusses invention and development. It establishes context, including the political and bureaucratic ambience surrounding early ICBMs. For readers unfamiliar with missile technologies, it overviews ICBM functions; associated technologies, including nuclear weapons, appear only as they pertain to mobility. Chapter 3 covers technological transfer, diffusion, and momentum. Chapter 4 examines system growth, including early attempts at ICBM mobility. Chapter 5 illustrates internal conflict, the closure of technological roads, and influential work accomplished after mobile Minuteman’s 1961 cancellation. By this time, the Air Force had successfully created a major military-technological innovation, the silo-based ICBM force. Chapter 6, therefore, delves into sustaining innovations performed upon the late-sixties-to-early-seventies Minuteman fleet, as well as emerging concepts designed to combat increasingly accurate, powerful, and numerous Soviet missiles. Through this period, Americans defined their objectives with clarity sufficient to create ways and means to fulfill them. The linkages between ends, ways, and means translated to technological innovations respectful of their contexts.

The next three chapters study 1970s-to-1980s attempts to solve a perceived problem of missile vulnerability. ICBMs vulnerable to surprise annihilation undermined American nuclear strategy and policy. Chapter 7 examines the seventies, complete with vulnerability debates, strategic arms treaties, and conflicting strategic objectives, producing a strategic lack of consensus that caused indecision. Chapter 8 reveals the frenetic confusion surrounding President Carter’s approach to ICBM vulnerability. In chapter 9, President Reagan cancelled Carter’s MX MPS, but his solutions to ICBM vulnerability foundered in a hostile domestic context. Given the composition of the American nuclear triad, he finally accepted vulnerability, focused on offensive power rather than defensive survivability, and based fifty MX missiles in Minuteman silos. He wanted more, but Congress prevented further deployments. The lack of consensus and specificity regarding objectives and strategic problems doomed the mobile MX ICBM, despite its technical feasibility. Mobility could not overcome its context, including the technological inertia of the SLBM and silo-based portions of the triad. Chapter 10 concludes the book.

At one point in drafting this study I described it to a fellow scholar. He declared, Who cares? It’s a footnote. He was wrong. Footnotes matter, and today, these same mobile alternatives have re-emerged. Since its fielding, Minuteman III has seen many modifications. The missile is safe and reliable but aged. Contemporary acquisition and procurement processes are ponderous, and if a new ICBM follows the paths of the F-35 Lightning II fighter plane and KC-46 aerial tanker, the Minuteman ICBM may become an octogenarian, remaining on alert while its replacement fluxes in a turbulent context. In 2014, the Research and Development Corporation (RAND) reported that a new ICBM would cost billions of dollars more than sustaining the Minuteman III.¹⁹ Yet, as Air Force general Bernard Schriever understood, cost is a contextual factor, but its importance waxes and wanes. The situation, the context, has something to say, as do the human actors on all sides. American strategists and technologists have previously walked this path.

Over the past four years, the author has received telephone calls and other messages asking about the old mobile ICBM programs. The calling agencies included the Joint Chiefs of Staff Nuclear Operations Division, defense contractor Booz, Allen, Hamilton, and the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. They were working on future ICBM concepts, as was RAND. As they researched alternatives, they decided to walk again down the road of mobility. The Air Force plans to replace Minuteman III by 2030, possibly with a mobile system. This will be the first new American ICBM since Peacekeeper (formerly MX) attained initial capability in 1986. The public and those involved in the coming debate will serve themselves well by studying what happened during mobility’s heyday. Whether a mobile ICBM is a satisfactory technical means consistent with policy ways of achieving strategic objectives in the current American and global context remains an open question. This book contributes to those contemporary and historical debates by revealing a previously unknown discourse within American nuclear strategy and technology, that concerning the mobile ICBM. The lessons and framework apply to any national strategic and technological endeavor.

1

Embarking on the Road Untaken

History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes.

RANDOLPH S. BOURNE¹

This chapter presents a midlevel schema of technological change tailored for a military context. ² With modifications, one may apply it to other contexts. Some might call it a theory, but that goes too far. As physicist Stephen Hawking has explained, a theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations. ³ Herein lays the rub. The presented schema, at best a framework, is not a theory because it does not predict. It is a guideline for understanding. This does not lessen its value. Many social science theories are similarly limited because they lack the verifiability of repeated and controlled scientific experimentation. Predicting from them only makes the user feel better about having made what is ultimately a qualitative or intuitive decision. The framework presented here fulfills a need historian Alex Roland identified: blending the methods of social science and history to promote rigorous and impartial historical investigation informed by concepts of how other similar processes have evolved. ⁴ The schema borrows concepts the author has found usefully generalizable to explain technological change and innovation in a variety of times and contexts.

Important to understanding military technological change is the relationship between strategy and technology; therefore, the discussion first defines strategy and technology. It relates context with technology’s internal and external elements. This establishes a broad framework based upon the history of technology. Next, the argument unifies informal and formal reasoning as they pertain to strategy and technology. This portion of the chapter attunes with the intellectual terrain of Cold War strategists, providing background for understanding the strategic debates that swirled around the mobile ICBM. Lastly, the framework introduces concepts from military innovation studies. This synthesis completes the terminological and conceptual basis used to study the mobile ICBM as an alternative course of action.

Along