Times of Crisis 91 



ATLAS missile around the country. You had to pump up its tanks. The walls 

 were so thin that it took pressure in the tanks to keep the thing from collapsing 

 from its own weight. It was extremely delicate. Not only that, but imagine 

 launching it off a pitching ship in a North Atlantic sea. It's incredible, but the 

 Navy was desperate. 



About the same time, three developments came along that saved the Navy's 

 bacon, and the Navy was smart enough to seize the opportunity. First of all, the 

 Atomic Energy Commission [AEC] came up with miniaturized warheads. That 

 took an enormous load off because as soon as the warhead size went down, the 

 size of the entire missile went down. When the size of the entire missile went 

 down, you could start thinking about the second development, solid propel- 

 lants. You couldn't launch an ATLAS-size missile with solid propellants. No- 

 body had the technology. But now we're talking about the POLARIS size 

 compared with the ATLAS size. Now you could start talking about solid 

 propellants, and that's a whole different ball game. You could carry those 

 things around like rocks. You didn't have to worry about their being mishan- 

 dled. 



Draper * came up, at the same time, with the third development which was his 

 very-high-accuracy gyro. This gave us a chance for the kind of guidance system 

 we wanted. Those developments made it possible for the Navy to start thinking 

 about a POLARIS kind of missile, and it wasn't very long before the submarine 

 launch got tacked onto it. That solved a lot more problems. A merchant ship 

 carrying ballistic missiles around would be about the most vulnerable thing you 

 could possibly think of. You couldn't hide it. You couldn't protect it. It didn't 

 take very much to destroy it. But submarines were and still are notoriously hard 

 to find. That was when the Navy started the POLARIS business in the Special 

 Projects Department with Red Raborn ** in charge — a man for whom I have 

 enormous respect. He did a magnificent job on the POLARIS Program. 



The first connection I remember Dahlgren had with this was when we had a 

 big session down at Redstone when the JUPITER Program was first started, 

 and every Navy activity that went down there put on a pitch, "Why I should be 

 in the new Navy Ballistic Missile Program." 



I learned a lot there. It was, as I recall, one of the first of that kind of 

 presentation that we had to do. I had an opportunity in the morning to watch 

 what everybody else did, and that taught us a great deal about what not to do. 

 For example, there was one Technical Director of a Navy laboratory who came 

 down there and talked at great length about what a fine school he had on his 



*Charles S. Draper is an American aeronautical engineer who did research and development on 

 fire control, flight control, and inertral guidance systems for the Air Force and Navy and was a 

 consulting engineer to many aeronautical companies and instrument manufacturers. 

 **Vice Admiral William F. Raborn held overall responsibility for the FBM Program from its 

 inception through the development of the POLARIS. 



