Eisenhower the Origins of Ballistic Missile Defense

The BMD Debate I: The Cold War and the Sputnik Crisis (1954-1961)

President Dwight D. Eisenhower visits Cape Canaveral in 1960. Credit: NASA

Although U.S. President Harry Truman stewarded the United States through its earliest, most uncertain period of nuclear competition with the Soviet Union, the shape, game and nature of the Cold War was more determined by his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, was unsurprisingly a far keener military strategist than Truman: he was elected in the midst of the Korean War, after disputes over nuclear strategy between Truman and his Supreme Commander in Korea, Douglas MacArthur, had left US nuclear policy shockingly ill-defined. In his 1952 presidential campaign, Eisenhower and his future Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, championed a “Policy of Boldness” which would eventually become known as the nuclear strategy of “massive retaliation.” Eisenhower would up the ante of nuclear competition with the Soviet Union by threatening Russia with a general nuclear strike if ever the Soviets were to commit any acts aggression which the United States deemed “intolerable.”

To support this bold guarantee, Eisenhower broadened the scope of American nuclear R&D and created the infrastructure necessary to support an exponential evolution of nuclear weapons technology in the United States. Eisenhower’s military industrial policies led to the creation of new power plants, factories, manufacturing facilities, proving grounds, military installations, government agencies, and a national highway system to accomplish the task of arming the United States with a diverse arsenal of nuclear weapons and nuclear delivery systems. The US government contracted various American companies to support the effort, including Western Electric, Boeing, Raytheon, Bell Labs, and Texas Instruments, and would retain their support for future military endeavors as part of a “military industrial complex.”

This complex was initially designed to produce colossal quantities of offensive nuclear weapons to reinforce Eisenhower’s threat of “massive retaliation”, despite its additional capabilities to produce a host of decentralized diverse experimental weapons programs. Initially, it was in Eisenhower’s interest to ignore “defensive” programs and to only prioritize expanding the American nuclear stockpile: any wasted effort in this regard, it was worried, might allow the Soviets to surge ahead. But while Eisenhower assumed power with a sweeping agenda to bring decisiveness to US nuclear strategy, his advisors ultimately discerned limitations in playing the two-dimensional game of ever-expanding US-Soviet offensive nuclear stockpiles. BMD appeared to be a solution which might mitigate Soviet advances in missile technology, but opened up new questions in nuclear strategy which would ultimately fail to be resolved by the end of Eisenhower’s tenure. 

In this first part of my BMD series, I’ll be exploring how Eisenhower’s initiatives throughout his presidency led to the creation of the world’s first BMD system, Nike-Zeus. But it is impossible to tell this story without first explaining the missile race which preceded and led to the creation of BMD. The threat of ballistic missiles in the United States did not begin during the Cold War with the Soviet Union but rather during World War II when America was still fighting Nazi Germany.

The German V-2 Threat

During the final years of World War II, Adolf Hitler unleashed his final bid to turn the European war around with the introduction of experimental “wonder weapons.” The Vengeance-1 and Vengeance-2 rockets were developed by Nazi scientists at their secret research complex in Peenemunde, and used in retributive terror bombings of London, Paris and Antwerp in 1944-5. They far surpassed any comparable technology in the United States, Great Britain, or USSR, and inspired fears in America that the Germans might also be progressing ahead in their nuclear weapons research. As such, the threat of a nuclear ICBM had arguably emerged in US nuclear strategy before the Cold War had even begun. 

In Operation Paperclip, the United States sought to sap postwar Germany of its scientific expertise, and, where possible, to prevent the Soviets from acquiring it. The US recruited over 1,600 German scientists and engineers after World War II, including Werner von Braun, the lead scientist on the V-2 project and future designer of the Saturn V rocket. The Soviet effort to acquire German technological expertise was more expansive but ultimately less successful: they forcibly recruited over 2,500 former German scientists, and raided Berlin’s research laboratories before the arrival of Anglo-American forces. Most German scientists with means elected to defect to the West before they could be captured by Soviet forces, foretelling a brain drain which would later give the United States a decisive edge in the nuclear and BMD arms race. 

Von Braun and the American ICBM Program

Of all the former Nazi scientists brought stateside in Paperclip, von Braun played the most critical role in the United States’ earliest ICBM programs. Between 1946 and 1949, von Braun and his colleagues endeavored to replicate, improve, and adapt German V-2 technology for the US Army at Fort Bliss, Texas. After the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949, the von Braun team was moved to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, to continue to work on more advanced missile projects. Here they produced the Redstone missile, an early model borrowing heavily from the German V-2 which served as the foundation for future American ICBMs. Von Braun’s prototype enabled the United States to begin developing its first nuclear missile, the Atlas ICBM, in 1954. 

The Atlas ICBM proposal demanded mastery of multiple dimensions of technology and science; V-2 technology contributed largely to the missile’s rocket propulsion and guidance systems, but the nuclear weaponry and missile design itself was primarily American, and largely developed at Los Alamos. Another program for intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), Jupiter, was initiated by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) in 1955, and also directed by von Braun. The launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, would infuse new urgency in American ballistic missile research, although the Pentagon would not immediately provide von Braun with the resources necessary to replicate this feat.

The Sputnik Crisis 

Although Eisenhower enlarged the military budget and pushed for an across-the-board modernization of the nation’s nuclear armaments, nuclear R&D remained chronically decentralized until after Sputnik, with each of the Armed Services developing new delivery technologies independently. Following Sputnik’s launch, Eisenhower chose the US Navy’s Vanguard Program over the Army’s Project Orbiter (led by von Braun) as the thrust of American efforts to launch a satellite into space. Vanguard suffered from a highly publicized failure, however, when it exploded on its launching pad on December 6, 1957. Because of Vanguard’s failures, and the inability of independent missile programs to produce reliable results, Eisenhower would later coordinate all space-related research in the United States within a new agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in July 1958. 

Meanwhile, Eisenhower’s calm response to Sputnik, dismissing it as too light to carry a nuclear weapon, evaporated on August 21, 1957, when the Soviets successfully tested their first ICBM, the R-7 Semyorka. Soviet rocket scientist Sergei Korolev, von Braun’s counterpart in the Soviet Union, had overseen the construction of the R-7 missile, benefiting heavily from German technical expertise as much as long-term Soviet rocketry research. The Soviets were determined to reverse the strategic advantage enjoyed by NATO’s nuclear bomber force, and with the R-7, suddenly appeared poised to accomplish this goal. 

In response, ICBM research in the United States reached a fever pitch. Von Braun had been with US Secretary of Defense designate Neil McElroy at the Redstone Arsenal when news of Sputnik broke. He had claimed to McElroy then that his team could launch a satellite within 60 days. But Eisenhower had already chosen the Navy’s program instead. After the successful Soviet test of the R-7, however, McElroy greenlit von Braun’s Jupiter-C program to proceed apace with Vanguard, with satellite launch attempts slated to March 1958, effectively playing second fiddle to the Navy’s project. 

Explorer 1

After the failure of Vanguard, however, von Braun’s project’s timetable was accelerated. ABMA completed the design and construction of the Jupiter-C rocket and the Explorer 1 satellite within 84 days. On January 31, 1958, at 10:48 pm EST, the Jupiter-C rocket successfully launched Explorer 1 into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, marking the United States’ official entry into the nascent space race. Eisenhower had correctly clarified that this competition with the Soviet Union was multidimensional: it marked the beginning of a new “contest of systems” wherein the quality of the technology produced by either civilization was held indicative of that civilization’s historical legitimacy, trajectory, and capability to lead in global affairs. But it remained, first and foremost, a military competition, and one fraught with unprecedented, existential consequences… and one in which the Soviets were ahead. 

The Americans joined them across the missile threshold with the launch of the Atlas ICBM in 1959. The Cold War had now entered a new phase. The potential duration of a nuclear exchange had suddenly shrunk from days or hours to mere minutes. The hawks of the Eisenhower era were determined to prevail in such a conflict, if ever it were to happen. But as nuclear war grew more likely and more dangerous, their imperatives became not only deterrence but survival. And for this, they had but one direction to turn: ballistic missile defense. 

Nike-Ajax, Nike-Hercules, and Nike-Zeus

During the bomber age, defensive technology had not been unimportant, though it had been considered secondary. It played a similar role as BMD technologies later would, but rather than defending against missiles, focused on defending against the threat of Soviet nuclear bombers and formations of nuclear-armed jets. ABMA had coordinated BMD research in tandem with its quest to develop the Atlas ICBM, and by 1959 had already produced two interceptor missiles, the Nike-Ajax and Nike-Hercules.

The Nike-Ajax program was initiated by ABMA at the end of World War II and aimed to develop an interceptor missile capable of destroying an incoming bomber armed with a nuclear weapon. Building upon expertise sapped from von Braun and the V-2 program, Bell Labs, a contractor of the US Army, designed the Nike-Ajax missile and radar system to locate, track and intercept a single incoming target. Development was completed by 1946, and testing began at White Sands proving grounds that September. Nike-Ajax made its first successful intercept on November 27th, 1951, and the program completed testing in 1954. The system was first deployed that March at Fort Meade, Maryland, and reached peak deployment in 1958, when nearly 200 Nike Ajax batteries were deployed in the United States. 

The Nike-Hercules program, in contrast, was designed to counter entire formations of smaller, faster nuclear-armed jets, and, unlike Ajax, was to be armed with a live nuclear warhead. Research and testing began on “Nike-B”, later renamed Hercules, while Ajax was still in development. Hercules was first deployed in June 1958, and reached peak deployment in 1963. Ajax was the first surface-to-air missile ever deployed by the United States, and Hercules became the United States’ first nuclear warhead interceptor missile. Both weapon systems were the cutting edge of American missile technology in the mid-1950s, and appeared to Eisenhower as the only natural point of departure to develop a national ballistic missile defense system (NBMDS) capable of shielding Americans from a full Soviet nuclear strike. 

As such, in 1955, the United States contracted the same companies which had developed the Nike-Ajax and Nike-Hercules models to construct a new interceptor missile capable of intercepting an incoming Soviet nuclear warhead. This was a more complicated task than intercepting bombers or even fighter jets, which charted slower, more predictable trajectories than the gravity-assisted nuclear missiles. Nike-Zeus would become the first BMD system with acquisition radar, capable of tracking a moving target’s position in three dimensions and transmitting this information continuously to a computer. The computer would use this continuous intelligence to determine when and where to launch the interceptor missile in an operation measured down to the millisecond. 

The Nike-Zeus system was conceptualized to defend American nuclear missile silos from nuclear attack, thereby ensuring American nuclear retribution in the event of preemptive Soviet counterforce strike. Scientists involved in Nike-Zeus speculated about the system’s potential to provide area defense (defending the civilian populations in American cities from a full or countervalue nuclear strike) but would table plans for a NBMDS to later phases of BMD research. Sputnik infused urgency into the Nike-Zeus program in 1957, prompting new advances in radar, data processing and missile design. But problems would emerge which would prevent the system from being deployed to counter the Soviet ICBM threat. One of these questions would plague BMD beyond Nike-Zeus and throughout its existence: how could a BMD system’s capabilities be estimated, let alone guaranteed, if not in the event of an actual nuclear attack?

Conclusion: The Legacy of Nike-Zeus

These concerns would only grow worse, even as nuclear scientists attempted to pivot to improve BMD designs. The Soviets would attempt to subvert an American BMD system by improving their warheads to splinter upon their reentry into the atmosphere into a volley of smaller nuclear missiles. This complicated BMD in a number of ways; the use of decoys in Soviet ICBMs threatened to oversaturate a BMD system by overwhelming it with too many targets. Further, Soviet ICBMs had to be intercepted before their terminal phase when they split up, complicating many ongoing surface-to-air missile designs. In short, it made Eisenhower’s ambition of an NBMDS next to impossible.

Further, by 1961, the Soviets had begun their own BMD system which threatened to protect them from a nuclear decapitation strike, eroding confidence in even Eisenhower’s initial nuclear guarantee. Since the launch of Sputnik, the American public had grown critical of Eisenhower, viewing him as having been “asleep at the switch” while the Russians gained a technological edge on the West. This is by no means true: the genuine legacy of Russian rocketry research outmatched comparable research in the United States: but American access to V-2 technology and von Braun would had already granted the United States a decisive edge in the developing arms race. Moreover, as the unpublicized military-industrial and technological feats of Eisenhower’s demonstrate, the president was by no means “asleep at the switch”: if anything, he was preparing the United States for victory in the marathon which the Cold War became, rather than listening those who viewed it erroneously as a sprint to the finish line.

Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, would be far more critical of BMD systems, having campaigned to rectify the “missile gap” between America and the USSR (there was one — it was in our favor) by modernizing a triad of American nuclear delivery systems. Eisenhower’s cross-board initiatives enabled Kennedy to go in this direction while remaining lukewarm on BMD. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, would play an influential role across the Kennedy-Johnson administrations, and would become a driving force behind BMD in the final years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency. But the questions and debate surrounding BMD failed to phase out, nor did any new technologies emerge which definitively put longstanding concerns to rest.