Abstract
In order to form a clear picture of the part played by the Truman administration, by omission or commission, in the shaping of the early space policy of the United States, we must assemble a variety of historical evidence. We need to know what kind of advice was available to the administration about the technical feasibility and the military and other applications of both long-range missiles and artificial satellites. It is also helpful to review the development of any wider public awareness of the potential of such technologies. Next, we need to form the best possible estimate of the secret intelligence on Soviet rocketry that was provided to the Truman administration. These matters will be discussed in this and the two following chapters. Only after establishing the facts on the input side of policy can the output side, the policy itself on potential space technologies, be properly assessed. But before beginning with a review of the climate of public awareness and expert advice on missiles under Truman, it is necessary to say something about the early post-war development of science advice in the United States in general.
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Notes and References
Notable amongst these have been: J. R. Killian, Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: a Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977 )
G. B. Kistiakowsky, A Scientist at the White House: the Private Diary of President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Science and Technology ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1976 )
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E. B. Skolnikoff, Science, Technology, and American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967 ). A comprehensive bibliography of the subject is given in the last section of the essay on sources in
D. J. Kevles, The Physicists: the History of a Scientific Community in Modern America ( New York: Vintage, 1979 ), pp. 457–64.
US Department of State, ‘Statement by President Truman at a Meeting at Blair House, Washington, July 14, 1949, 8:15 p. m. ’ Foreign Relations of the United States: 1949 vol. 1 (1976), p. 481.
D. A. Rosenberg, ‘A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours’, International Security vol. 6, no. 3, 1981/82.
US Atomic Energy Commission, Personnel Board, Hearings: In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1954 — hereafter IMJRO) testimony of Luis Alvarez, pp. 773 ff. See also Gilpin, American Scientists (n. 1), pp. 73–111
J. Major, The Oppenheimer Hearing ( London: Batsford, 1971 ), pp. 97–129.
The ONR provided at least part of the funding for more than half of all basic research projects in the physical sciences in the United States between 1945 and 1957, though in the second half of that period the newly created National Science Foundation, headed by former ONR chief scientist Alan Waterman, began to share this role: J. E. Pfeiffer, ‘The Office of Naval Research’, Scientific American, vol. 180, February 1949. Most American participants at the 1953 Oxford conference on upper atmosphere research with rockets, for example, were funded by ONR: R. L. F. Boyd and M. J. Seaton (eds), Rocket Exploration of the Upper Atmosphere, supplement to J. Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics, vol. 1, 1954.
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W. Ley, Rockets: the Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere 3rd edn (New York: Viking, 1945); a revised edition of C. P. Lent, Rocket Research: History and Handbook (New York: Pen-Ink Co., 1944 also appeared in January 1945.
For example: G. E. Pendray, The Coming Age of Rocket Power (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945 ). Like Lent, Pendray was a prominent member of the American Rocket Society, and the book is notable for its refusal to discuss the relevance of rocketry to spaceflight, a ‘hard-headed’ attitude typical of the post-war ARS.
B. Brodie, The Atomic Bomb and American Security, Memorandum No. 18 (New Haven, CT: Yale Institute of International Studies, 1945 ), p. 3.
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P. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age ( New York: Pantheon, 1985 ), pp. 3–26.
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US Congress, House, Appropriations, Hearings: Military Appropriation for 1948 (1947 - ch. 2, n. 9 ), p. 640.
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M. Lehman, This High Man: the Life of Robert H. Goddard (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1963 ), pp. 169–71, 203, 212.
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USAF Scientific Advisory Group, Where We Stand 22 August 1945
USAF Scientific Advisory Group, Toward New Horizons: Science the Key to Air Supremacy (33 vols), 15 December 1945; the author has not been able to consult either of these limited-issue publications directly.
V. Van Dyke, Pride and Power: the Rationale of the Space Program ( London: Pall Mall, 1965 ), p. 10
H. L. Dryden, ‘Toward the New Horizons of Tomorrow’, Astronautics vol. 12, January 1963. Extraordinarily, von Kdrmdn retained his scepticism about ICBMs until at least 1956; in an interview that year he expressed the opinion that ICBMs would not be accurate enough for military purposes, setting the required performance at a 50 per cent probability of striking within five miles of the target: New York Herald Tribune 24 April 1956. But even first-generation ICBMs, deployed only a few years later, either met or came close to that requirement, and within ten years of the interview ICBMs with an accuracy of less than two miles had almost completed their development:
J. M. Collins, US-Soviet Military Balance: concepts and capabilities 1960–1980 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), pp. 443 ff.
US Congress, Senate, Special Committee on Atomic Energy, Hearings: Atomic Energy (79th Congress, 2nd Session, 1946), pp. 179–80. For over thirty years American space writers and historians have been requoting the heavily edited and shortened version of this passage which was published soon after the first sputniks —
US Congress, Senate, Armed Services, Hearings: Inquiry into Satellite and Missile Programs (1958 — ch. 1, n. 11), pp. 822–3. The opportunity has been taken to restore it to the record in its original, slightly less dogmatic, form.
W. A. McDougall,… the Heavens and the Earth (1985 — ch. 1, n. 47 ), p. 98.
J. L. Chapman, Atlas: the Story of a Missile ( New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960 ), p. 56.
F. J. Malina, ‘America’s First Long-Range Missile and Space Exploration Program: the ORDCIT Project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’ in R. C. Hall (ed. ), Essays on the History of Rocketry and Astronautics ( Washington: NASA, 1977 ), p. 375.
US President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Training, Report, A Program for National Security, 29 May 1947, p. 12
B. Brodie and E. M. Galloway, The Atomic Bomb and the Armed Services Public Affairs Bulletin No. 55 (Washington: Library of Congress Legislative Reference Service, 1947 ), pp. 30–1.
V. Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949 ), pp. 84–5.
B. Brodie, ‘A Critique of Army and Navy Thinking on the Atomic Bomb’, Bull. Atomic Scientists, vol. 3, no. 8, August 1947; see also H. H. Arnold, ‘Air Force in the Atomic Age’ in Masters and Way (eds), One World (n. 28 ), p. 29.
See for example US Congress, House, Armed Services, Hearings: Investigation of National Defense Missiles (85th Congress, 2nd Session, 1958 ), p. 3987.
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© 1991 Rip Bulkeley
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Bulkeley, R. (1991). Advice on Missiles for Truman. In: The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy. Studies in Military and Strategic History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11981-3_3
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