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
