Abstract
Robert C. Sprague was a significant figure in American continental defense efforts during the Eisenhower administration.1 No one, however, including Sprague, probably anticipated the scope and extent of his involvement when he began the assignment. Soon after first considering initiatives to protect the United States from a surprise Soviet bomber attack, the Massachusetts engineer and industrialist learned about the possibility of nuclear antiaircraft weapons, helped to bring them to the attention of senior policy-makers, and assisted in securing a place for these arms in the American arsenal. Robert Sprague was certain that the defense measures he urged were appropriate, necessary, and urgent. Government leaders agreed.
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Notes
Frederick Dalzell, Engineering Invention: Frank J. Sprague and the U.S. Electrical Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), p. 233; “Robert C. Sprague, 91; Began Sprague Electric,” New York Times, October 1, 1991, p. D23. Sprague’s papers are held by the Dwight D. Eisenhower presidential library. As of November 2004, they had not been opened to researchers and no timetable for such existed.
Harold C. Passer, The Electrical Manufacturers, 1875–1900: A Study in Competition, Entrepreneurship, Technical Change, and Economic Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 232–248.
B. Bruce-Biggs, The Shield of Faith: A Chronicle of Strategic Defense from Zepplins to Star Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), pp. 82–83.
Thomas P. Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus (New York: Random House, 1998), pp. 43–44. Similarly, Fairfax County, Virginia, can trace the origins of its substantial computer systems integration and telecommunications industrial base to the establishment there of an East Coast branch of the System Development Corporation, the Rand subsidiary given the responsibility of writing the SAGE software. See Claude Baum, The System Builders: The Story of SDC (Santa Monica, California: System Development Corporation, 1981) and Paul Ceruzzi, Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945–2005 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
John D. Morris, “Senators to Study Atomic Defenses; Industrialist is Named to Head Project as Kefauver Calls for ‘Complete Review,’” New York Times, October 11, 1953, p. 1. The following section is also recounted briefly in David L. Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 52–56.
Robert Cutler, No Time for Rest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966); Jean Hardy, “Eisenhower Aide Robert Cutler Dies,” Washington Post, May 10, 1974, p. B22; “Robert Cutler is Dead at 78; Aided Eisenhower on Security,” New York Times, May 10, 1974, p. 40; and Adams, p. 40.
Darrell Garwood, Washington Post and Times-Herald, March 26, 1954, p. A10.
Richard M. Leighton, Strategy, Money, and the New Look, 1953–1956: History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Vol. III (Washington: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2001), p. 267.
John Prados, The Soviet Estimate: U.S. Intelligence Analysis and Soviet Strategic Forces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 41;
Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954–1974 (Washington: Central Intelligence Agency, 1988), p. 20;
R. Cargill Hall, “The Truth about Overflights,” MHQ; the Quarterly Journal of Military History 9, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 25–39. The Bison was mentioned in a May NSC meeting. See “Discussion at the 197th Meeting of the National Security Council, Thursday, May 13, 1954,” DDRS no. CK3100162222. For a discussion of Ike’s belief in the necessity of the overflights, see Andrew Goodpaster, “Cold War Overflights: A View from the White House,” in Early Cold War Overflights; Symposium Proceedings, Volume I: Memoirs (Washington: National Reconnaissance Office, 2003), pp. 37–46.
James Meikle Eglin, Air Defense in the Nuclear Age; the Post-War Development of American and Soviet Strategic Defense Systems (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), p. 91.
Quoted in Samuel F. Wells, Jr., “The Origins of Massive Retaliation,” Political Science Quarterly 96, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 39.
Adams, pp. 115–116; James R. Killian, Jr., Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), p. 68; Lee A. DuBridge letter to Arthur S. Flemming, May 24, 1954, DDRS no. CK3100268736; and Pedlow and Welzenbach, pp. 26–27. The impetus for the March 27 meeting came from Assistant Air Force Secretary Trevor Gardner, who became alarmed about the vulnerability of the Strategic Air Command to surprise attack after reviewing the RAND study on the topic. He met with the Science Advisory Committee to complain that they were not sufficiently engaged in proposing protective alternatives. The meeting with Eisenhower was an indirect result of this complaint. (See Pedlow and Welzenbach, pp. 26–27.) In addition to works here and below, the Technological Capabilities Panel is treated in Snead, pp. 35–40; and McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Tears (New York: Random House, 1988), pp. 325–328.
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© 2010 Christopher J. Bright
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Bright, C.J. (2010). Robert Sprague’s “Adequate Defense”. In: Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112926_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112926_3
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