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
